Douglas Deur

Discovering North American Rock Art. Edited by Lawrence L. Loendorf, Christopher Chippindale, and David S. Whitley. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005. Pp. xii + 334, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, maps, tables, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth) Throughout the world, rock art-whether painted pictograph or incised petroglyph-appears to have been a universal medium of cultural expression. In North America it has been the focus of a prolonged and sometimes fraught conversation among archaeologists, anthropologists, folklorists and, less commonly, Native Americans. Rock art research has typically been the domain of archaeologists, but many professionals in that field deride it as bereft of substance, prone to speculation on symbolic content despite the long passage of time and the cultural gulf separating rock art creators from rock art interpreters. Indeed, with the exception of certain descriptive accounts that seek to define styles of particular regions or periods, treatments of rock art do tend to struggle with symbolic interpretation. The results often seem party to particular intellectual or ideological agendas. Some studies claim celestial imagery; others purport to identify images associated with hallucinations; others seek to identify hints of rituals known ethnographically today. A few researchers go so far as to create dictionaries of rock art symbols-but symbolic interpretation becomes meaningless when thus divorced from expressive context. A rock art dictionary might, for example, assert that a stick-figure quadruped with curled horns denotes a bighorn sheep. But we must ask why long-ago artists would sequester themselves in a remote corner of a scorching desert and-sometimes using their own blood as fixative for the ochre-laboriously create an image merely to proclaim to the world, "bighorn sheep!" Aren't there easier ways to convey that idea? My own admittedly limited research with Native American traditionalists suggests a more complex set of expressive relationships. Even within the same tribe, one might find some rock art that was used to convey environmental information interpersonally, some that was used to convey needs and intentions to incorporeal beings associated with particular localities, some that recorded personal spiritual experiences or revelations, and some that was not meant to be expressive at all but to serve as a religious specialist's tool for manipulating spiritual powers, personal or cosmological states, and earthly phenomena. We may never understand exactly what the bighorn sheep signifies, but we would be well advised to take the bighorn sheep seriously. Rock art thus eminently deserves focused academic attention, but the field of rock art study will require a more-critical introspection before it can approach its potential. Within this context, Discovering North American Rock Art editors Loendorf, Chippindale, and Whitley have performed an especially valuable service, compiling a standout collection of essays that help us to navigate the complex and diffuse literatures addressing rock art by means of a historically contextualized, continent-wide overview of rock art studies. …

Conventional wisdom suggests that the peoples of the Northwest Coast did not cultivate plants prior to European contact. Considerable evidence suggests the contrary, however, particularly the well-documented practice of estuarine root gardening among the Kwakwaka'wakw and other indigenous peoples of the region. These gardens were maintained through transplanting, weeding, selective harvesting, soil modifications, and the production of mounds or low terrace-like structures within individually demarcated root plots. The scholarly oversight of these practices can be attributed to a number of biases rooted in the colonial and academic agendas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In turn, scholarly legitimation of the region's “nonagricultural” label has served to undermine indigenous land claims on estuarine sites into the present day.

Contemporary geographical research concerning North America’s native peoples is most conspicuous for its remarkably diverse set of subjects, methods, and epistemological stances. Indeed, it would be hard to find another AAG specialty group whose members do research in as many corners of the natural and social sciences and humanities. Some perspectives developed quite recently, while others emanate from a century of prior research by geographers, especially Carl Sauer and his students. We think these observations important enough to require opening our review with a description, albeit a painfully brief one, of the historical context for the current scene. In the early twentieth century, as now, there was a great deal of cross-fertilization between anthropology and geography. Deterministic thinking associated with environmentalist theory (e.g. Hans 1925; Huntington 1919; Semple 1903) elicited many critical responses from both fields. For example, the geographer-turned-anthropologist Franz Boas and his students sought to illuminate the full complexity of Native American life, producing a vast corpus of empirical studies. Many addressed geographical topics, including Native North American place-names, environmental knowledge, and resource use. These works were frequently termed “ethnogeographies” (e.g. Barrett 1908; Boas 1934; Harrington 1916). Others attempted sweeping continental studies of regional variation based on historical and cultural processes (Kroeber 1939; Wissler 1926). The historicist critique of environmentalist theory resonated with a young geographer, Carl Sauer. Sauer (1920) long had interests in American Indian land-use practices, or “land management” in current parlance. Regular interaction with Boas’s students, especially Kroeber and Lowie, coupled with independent development of their own geographical ideas, led Sauer and his students to expand their research on North American Indian cultural geography, including such subjects as settlement patterns (e.g. Sauer and Brand 1930), plant use (e.g. Carter 1945), and resources and material and oral culture (e.g. Kniffen 1939). Sauer, his large number of Ph.D. students, and his student’s students, continued to define this research agenda throughout the twentieth century (e.g. Kniffen et al. 1987; Sauer 1971). The continued relevance of this work was signaled recently by the reissue of two classic texts in new editions (Denevan 1992a; Waterman 1993).

Citation Details Published as: Deur, D., Recalma-Clutesi, K., & White, W. (2020). BENEDICTION: The Teachings of Chief Kwaxsistalla Adam Dick and the Atla’gimma (“Spirits of the Forest”) Dance. In Turner N. (Ed.), Plants, People, and Places: The Roles of Ethnobotany and Ethnoecology in Indigenous Peoples' Land Rights in Canada and Beyond (pp. Xvii-Xxiv). Montreal; Kingston; London; Chicago: McGill-Queen's University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv153k6x6.4

The otter played a starring role in the clash between empires seeking to claim the Pacific Northwest, from the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth centuries. In time, the sea otter was nearly hunted to extinction. To day, the only places in Oregon to see otters are the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport and the Oregon Zoo in Portland. Wild populations live along the Olympic coast of Washington and the central California coast, occupying a small percentage of their original range. The sea otter diet generally consists of energy-rich shellfish and they are especially fond of sea urchins, which graze on the kelp and other marine algae that form the basis of nearshore ecosystems. Thus, sea otters are crucial to maintaining the health of the rich marine environments of the Pacific coast. Partly because of the absence of sea otters, Oregon\u27s kelp forests are in jeopardy. Simply put, sea otters eat enough of the sea urchin population to prevent them from overgrazing the kelp forests. Elakha...