Keeping It Living

The European explorers who first visited the Northwest Coast assumed that the entire region was virtually untouched wilderness whose occupants used the land only minimally, hunting and gathering shoots, roots, and berries that were peripheral to a diet and culture focused on salmon. Colonizers who followed the explorers used these claims to justify the displacement of Native groups from their land. Scholars now understand, however, that Northwest Coast people were actively cultivating plants well before they experienced contact with Europeans. "Keeping It Living" tells the story of traditional Northwest Coast cultivation practices, and of how they came to be overlooked by Europeans. Bringing together some of the world's most prominent specialists on Northwest Coast cultures, this book discusses plant management methods found from the Oregon coast to Southeast Alaska. It looks at tobacco gardens among the Haida and Tlingit, managed camas plots among the Coast Salish of Puget Sound and the Strait of Georgia, estuarine root gardens along the central coast of British Columbia, wapato lot maintenance on the Columbia and Fraser Rivers, and tended berry plots up and down the entire coast. With contributions from ethnobotanists, archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, ecologists, and Native American scholars and elders, "Keeping It Living" documents practices, many quite different from those characteristic of European agriculture, that involve manipulating plants as well as their environments in a way that enhanced both the quantity and the quality of plant production.