Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

<div> <p>Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed incorrectly as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as indigenous resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.</p> <p>At times indigenous knowledges represented a middle ground of intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized; elsewhere indigenous knowledges were defined through conflict and struggle. The authors demonstrate how people claimed that their hybrid forms of knowledge were communal religious and traditional as opposed to individualist secular and scientific which they associated with European colonialism.</p> <p><i>Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment</i> offers comparative and transnational insights that disturb romantic views of unchanging indigenous knowledges in harmony with the environment. The result is a book that informs and complicates how indigenous knowledges can and should relate to environmental policy-making.</p> <p><b>Contributors:</b> David Bernstein Derick Fay Andrew H. Fisher Karen Flint David M. Gordon Paul Kelton Shepard Krech III Joshua Reid Parker Shipton Lance van Sittert Jacob Tropp James L. A. Webb Jr. Marsha Weisiger</p> </div>