videos

this is an area of interest to me and scholarship exists but is thin, because pan-indigenous studies is... not a thing? I am a reader and not a watcher, so I haven't watched the video and a earlier comment gives the impression that this is addressed: indigenous peoples are not a monolith. I think being in a settler culture confuses this simple statement, because the settler culture lacks cultural memory of place and traditional ecological knowledge so we see commonalities or patterns among indigenous peoples in their land use ethics that we lack... probably by virtue of the fact that we're all dislocated bozos who just showed up and don't know what the fuck happened here 500+ years ago.

maybe in a thousand years we will have traditions of "don't dig there" or "don't fuck with those mountains" or "these forests should be burned seasonally" or "don't live year round in that valley" too.

anyway, a cool book that tries to be comprehensive in its gaze into pre-columbian exchange land management and use of the Americas is 1491. it's dated now, but it was really impressive for its time. it very much contradicts the notion of a "pristine nature" inhabited by indigenous, rather one they managed intensely and to such a profound degree, European explorers and other first contact descriptions could not conceive it. another environmental history book that isn't so much focused on the indigenous is "Where The Sky Began" about the tall grass prairie. I think 1491 opened my mind up to notions of humans as a keystone species acting deliberately, and that now colors descriptions of places and land use patterns where people lived prior to their "settling" by whites.