Tzeltal folk zoology: The classification of discontinuities in nature (Language, thought, and culture)

Hunn, Eugene S.

Academic Press

The mighty Columbia River cuts a deep gash through the Miocene basalts of the Columbia Plateau, coursing as well through the lives of the Indians who live along its banks. Known to these people as Nch’i-Wana (the Big River), it forms the spine of their land, the core of their habitat. At the turn of the century, the Sahaptin speakers of the mid-Columbia lived in an area between Celilo Falls and Priest Rapids in eastern Oregon and Washington. They were hunters and gatherers who survived by virtue of a detailed, encyclopedic knowledge of their environment. Eugene Hunn’s authoritative study focuses on Sahaptin ethnobiology and the role of the natural environment in the lives and beliefs of their descendants who live on or near the Yakima, Umatilla, and Warm Springs reservations.

Nch'i-Wána, "The Big River": Mid-Columbia Indians and Their Land

History

Selam, James

Americas

University of Washington

Cáw Pawá Láakni / They Are Not Forgotten is a book like none other. This ethnogeographic atlas of Native place names presents a compelling account of interactions between a homeland and its people. A project of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute at the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation - composed of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla Tribes in eastern Oregon - Cáw Pawá Láakni documents and describes more than four hundred place names. The full-color, detailed maps and the narrative that introduces and supports them paint a picture of a way of life. This meticulous assemblage of memory and meaning echoes cultural and geographical information that has all but disappeared from common knowledge. To create this historical and cultural atlas of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla homeland, which spans the Columbia River and its tributaries from southeastern Washington to northeastern Oregon, ethnographic, traditional, and institutional knowledge was gathered together and incorporated into a GIS database to produce customized maps that present this knowledge. Many of the accounts are from the individuals who traveled on horseback, lived in and saw these places, and possessed knowledge that can no longer be replicated. In presenting these place-names, the Tribes strive to ensure the vitality of this communal knowledge into the future. In Cáw Pawá Láakni, places named in Indian languages are juxtaposed with sites that are central to the colonial period in the West, such as those described by the Lewis and Clark Expedition and those given to fur-trading posts, missions, and places on the Oregon Trail. The atlas adds a needed and vivid Native perspective to the written history and geography of Oregon and the West.

Cáw Pawá Láakni / They Are Not Forgotten: Sahaptian Place Names Atlas of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Tamastslikt Cultural Institute

Resource Managers: North American And Australian Huntergatherers

As environmental management becomes of increasing concern to both industrial and developing societies, it is instructive to look at the fundamental relationship between man and environment as exemplified by the hunter-gatherer cultures, in which resource management was and is vital to the very existence of human life. The authors of this book look at hunting and gathering societies in Australia and North America, searching for the essential, as distinct from local, manifestations of human-environment relations. They examine the availability of resources in relation to the requirements of stable and expanding human populations, explore the ontological and structural principles of ecological relations in these societies, and describe the rationale of geographic boundaries and control of access to resources within and across boundaries. A number of current theoretical issues are addressed: the use of fire as a tool for environmental management; the ecological consequences of seasonal mobility patterns; the functional basis for differing forms of control over resources; the social organization of production, including the symbolism of the sexual division of labor; the tactical exercise of jural rights in the use of resources; and the ecological consequences of religious beliefs. The book concludes with a summary of the case materials in terms of what they contribute to the understanding of hunting/gathering as an "economic" category and to the conflict over management of natural resources where societies of hunter-gatherers are encapsulated within industrial societies.

Williams, Nancy M

Routledge

A Zapotec Natural History is an extraordinary book and accompanying CD (also available on the web here!) that describe the people of a small town in Mexico and their remarkable knowledge of the natural world in which they live. San Juan Gbëë is a Zapotec Indian community located in the state of Oaxaca, a region of surprising biological diversity. Eugene S. Hunn is a well-known anthropologist and ethnobiologist who has spent many years working in San Juan Gbëë, studying its residents and their knowledge of the local environment. Here Hunn writes sensitively and respectfully about the rich understanding of local flora and fauna that village inhabitants have acquired and transmitted over many centuries. In this village everyone, young children included, can identify and name hundreds of local plants, animals, and fungi, together with the details of their life cycles, habitat preferences, and functions in the economic, aesthetic, and spiritual lives of the town. Part 1 of this two-part work describes the community, the subsistence farming practices of its residents, the nomenclature and classification of the local biological taxonomy, the use of plants for treating illnesses, and the ritual and decorative roles of flowers. Part 2 is on a CD-ROM and includes detailed inventories of all plant, animal, and fungal categories recognized by San Juan’s people, a series of indexes, and a library of more than 1,200 images illustrating the town’s plants, people, landscapes, and daily activities. Also included on the CD-ROM are files containing sounds of village life. The contents of Part 2 (the CD-ROM) are also available online.

A Zapotec Natural History: Trees, Herbs, and Flowers, Birds, Beasts, and Bugs in the Life of San Juan Gbëë

University of Arizona Press

A Zapotec Natural History is an extraordinary book that describe the people of a small town in Mexico and their remarkable knowledge of the natural world in which they live. San Juan Gbëë is a Zapotec Indian community located in the state of Oaxaca, a region of great biological diversity. Eugene S. Hunn is a well-known anthropologist and ethnobiologist who has spent many years working in San Juan Gbëë, studying its residents and their knowledge of the local environment. Here Hunn writes sensitively and respectfully about the rich understanding of local flora and fauna that village inhabitants have acquired and transmitted over many centuries. In this village everyone, young children included, can identify and name hundreds of local plants, animals, and fungi, together with the details of their life cycles, habitat preferences, and functions in the economic, aesthetic, and spiritual lives of the town. Part 1 of this two-part work describes the community, the subsistence farming practices of its residents, the nomenclature and classification of the local biological taxonomy, the use of plants for treating illnesses, and the ritual and decorative roles of flowers. Part 2 is available online, and includes detailed inventories of all plant, animal, and fungal categories recognized by San Juan’s people; a series of indexes; a library of more than 1,200 images illustrating the town’s plants, people, landscapes, and daily activities; and sounds of village life.  

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Alternative Medicine

Birding in Seattle and King County: Site Guide and Annotated List (Trailside Series)

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

Seattle Audubon Society

A great guide for help in identifying birds in the Seattle area.

Birding in Seattle and King County: Site Guide and Annotated List (Trailside)

The Aztec empire was established in the Valley of Mexico in the 14th century, eventually dominating a vast region from a base on their island capital city, Tenochtitlán. Hernán Cortés sacked Tenochtitlán for Spain in 1521. Missionary friars arrived soon after to begin the Christianization of the Mesoamerican population. To facilitate their conversion, Franciscan scholars trained the descendants of the Aztec nobility in alphabetic writing. Indigenous students/colleagues soon mastered written Latin and learned to write their native Náhuatl. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún organized a complex ethnographic enterprise employing Indigenous colleagues to compile an encyclopedia of Indigenous Aztec knowledge. This work survived in Spanish translation as the Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España and was subsequently published with parallel Náhuatl and English texts as the Florentine Codex. Book 11 of the Codex is devoted to “Earthly Things” of which the “Second Chapter,…telleth of all the different kinds of birds.” Over 130 are named and described and illustrated in varying detail. However, establishing the correspondence of these birds with our contemporary ornithological inventory of Mexican birds has been a challenge. The Mexican biologist Martín del Campo published an analysis based on the Spanish version in 1940, and his suggested identifications have been treated as definitive. I have reviewed the evidence in light of contemporary knowledge and offer here a refined analysis of the probable identities of the birds named in the Codex with a detailed rationale. This material offers rich insights into a Mesoamerican traditional natural history.

The Aztec Fascination with Birds: Deciphering 16th-Century Sources in Náhuatl (Contributions in Ethnobiology)

Anthropology

Society of Ethnobiology, The

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