Indigenous Environmental Practices

Indigenous environmental practices can be thought of as a combination of behaviors, knowledge, and beliefs. In other words, indigenous practices are embedded in a larger sociocultural context that includes both the social institutions that regulate and convey knowledge and larger cosmologies. The concept of indigenous environmental practices is itself a nonindigenous construct, arising out of Western interest in those practices. There have been positive and negative consequences of outside recognition of these practices.

Indigenous environmental practices tend to be highly diverse and adapted to local conditions. Transmission can occur through storytelling, taboos, rituals, and underlying values such as respect, humility, and reciprocity. Elders and healers are often charged with the role of maintaining and conveying knowledge. Examples of such practices include the following:

• Monitoring of species numbers based on observed animal behaviors, life histories, movements and migrations, habitat and dietary preferences
• Controlling hunting or fishing of specific species, for instance, through animal totems and the recognition of taboo species
• Protection of specific habitats during various times of the year. Examples include the protection of headwaters because they function as fish spawning grounds or the protection of groves of trees planted by ancestors that function to attract various monkey species for hunting.
• Protection of species’ vulnerable life stages. This may include prohibition of the hunting of pregnant female or young animals.
• Various forms of resource rotation, both with regard to hunting and agricultural cycles. In agriculture, this can take the form of slash-and-burn (i.e., swidden) systems.
• Integrated farming practices such as polyculture. In polycultural approaches, two or more plant (and sometimes animal) species are planted in specific temporal or spatial orders to provide two or more outputs. The species planted together generally exist in mutually enhancing relation (ecologically or economically) to one another.
• The use of fire to shape landscapes. As has been documented in places as diverse as North and South America, Africa, and Australia, indigenous peoples have long used fire to control the movement, prevalence, and spread of wildlife and plant species, thereby creating intricate ecological mosaics, often invisible to outsiders.
• Knowledge and use of medicinal plants, including identification of the respective plants and the knowledge of how to process them. In many cases, indigenous peoples’ knowledge of medicinal plant has drawn the attention of outside scientists and bioprospectors, with little, if any, benefit to the indigenous communities. In the case of the neem tree (Azadirachta indica) in India or the Ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) in the Amazon, indigenous objections to the foreign use and patenting of native plants are both moral and practical. Such action has been termed biopiracy by indigenous leaders.

It should be acknowledged that the characterization of certain behaviors as “indigenous environmental practices” is a nonindigenous construct.

The label “environmental” implies a nature-culture dichotomy that is not necessarily shared in the same way by all indigenous peoples. The idea of “practices” implies the separation of knowledge from practice, when in fact the two often form a cohesive yet nonfixed and dynamic whole. Moreover, many “indigenous” environmental practices are complex hybrids of “modern” and “traditional” techniques.

For many years, colonial officials (and after them, scientists and developers) derided indigenous techniques as inert, unproductive, and archaic. Later research, however, revealed the intricacy of local practices, their high degree of dynamism, and the ability of indigenous practitioners to constantly reassess and adapt to changing circumstances. Whereas colonial authorities had blamed local practices for environmentally detrimental outcomes, scholarship in the later 20th century found that in many cases it was precisely the destruction of local knowledge and practices in favor of maladapted Western resource management methods that resulted in ecological deterioration.

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