Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge

Nancy Turner has studied Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of plants and environments in northwestern North America for over forty years. In Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge, she integrates her research into a two-volume ethnobotanical tour-de-force. The following is an excerpt. More images are available on our Tumblr.

These two volumes began literally decades ago when, after working with and learning from elders in a few different Indigenous communities, I started noticing similarities in their use and knowledge of plants and in the beliefs and values that people associated with plants across geographic and cultural space. How did these similarities arise? Were they the result of coincidence, common origin, independent development of knowledge, or some type of exchange across communities, territories, and linguistic boundaries? The more I learned and compared peoples’ knowledge of plants and environments, the more intrigued I became. This fuelled my research for the next forty years.

In the spring of 2009 I travelled with my husband, Bob, from Victoria on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, to Dawson City in Yukon Territory, at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike Rivers. We drove to Port Hardy on the northeastern coast of the island and then took a ferry through the Inland Passage, past the coastal communities of Bella Bella (Heiltsuk Nation) and Hartley Bay (Gitga’at Nation), to Prince Rupert on the northern coast of British Columbia. From there, we drove along the Skeena River to Hazelton and northward along the shores of Dease Lake and Good Hope Lake to Whitehorse and finally to Dawson. Bob had been awarded a writer’s fellowship in Dawson, and we stayed there for nearly three months in the little house where Canadian author Pierre Berton had lived as a boy.

Our trip from Victoria to Dawson took us first along the coastal plains and low hills of Vancouver Island’s east coast, through groves of big leaf maple, arbutus, and Garry oak, tall forests of Douglas-fir and grand fir, and dense second growth alder woods, all with a mirrored backdrop of island and mainland mountain ranges. By sea we travelled through multitudes of islands and channels edged with steep headlands, rocky bluffs with myriad waterfalls and long sandy beaches, countless estuaries of rivers and creeks, and shorelines flanked with dark patches of kelp paralleling the shore just beyond the surf. All along, rugged snow-covered mountains accompanied us, clothed on their lower reaches by seemingly endless forests of dark spruces, hemlocks, and drooping-boughed cedars.

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Within the span of five days and four nights on our northbound trip, we passed through nine major vegetation zones, counting the intertidal, each with its own unique complement of hundreds of species of plants and animals. Having begun writing this book, I was ever mindful during our travels of just how important these species, in each and every place, have been to generations of humans, starting perhaps as early as 14,000 or more years ago. I couldn’t help but imagine, as I gazed on the beaches, the mountains, the river valleys and lake shores, the muskegs and forested hills, how those people who had been there before us must have viewed these places as they searched for food, shelter, and a life for their families. Even the most seemingly remote places, if they were the least bit sheltered and had water nearby, had likely served at some time as a campsite or place in which to take refuge. Some locations – especially at the confluence of creeks or places where streams entered a lake or flowed out into the ocean – served as habitual camping places, and a few eventually became the sites of more permanent settlements, villages, and towns, many of which we passed through.

The peoples of ancient times shared not only the same places but also some of the same types of experiences of the natural world. People dozens of generations before us witnessed, as we did, the abrupt seasonal transition of the north – from cold, icy winter, with frozen rivers, biting winds, conifers covered with mounds of snow, and the bare, stark trunks of the deciduous trees, to warm spring, with its tender lime-green leaves, drooping catkins releasing clouds of pollen in the slightest breeze, blooming prairie crocuses with their soft mauve-coloured petals, and the brilliant array of wild roses under the trees. For thousands of years, people of the northern regions have watched the dramatic breakup of ice on the river and experienced the summer solstice.

Yukon River after the spring breakup, Dawson City, YT, May 2010.

On this trip, we met members of several communities of Dene (Athabaskan) speakers, as well as Tlingit and Haida from Alaska, and stopped to visit Indigenous elder friends – my teachers in ethnobotany – at Tagish, Iskut, Prince Rupert, and Qualicum. In all, we traversed the territories and visited communities of at least seventeen distinct First Nations language groups, each with its own history of origin and occupancy, its own names for the places, plants, animals, and features of the landscapes of its home place, and its own complex knowledge of these entities – a reflection of the dynamics and diversity of the geography, culture, and human-environment relationships of this entire region. Our trip north reinforced the ideas that I had been developing and around which this book was shaped, looking back to a time at the end of the Pleistocene glaciation when the landscape was probably similar to the way it appears in parts of the Yukon.

Over many years of working with and learning from Indigenous botanical and environmental experts in British Columbia and beyond, I have come to see patterns in the knowledge and botanical information we were documenting. Commonalities – some obvious, some more veiled – have emerged in the names and applications of plants, in processes of harvesting, preparing, manipulating, and applying plants and their products, in stories and beliefs about plants and environments, and in ways of tending and managing plant resources and habitats. However, thinking about these various similarities and differences was sometimes like looking into a maelstrom. The linkages are so intricate and complex, diverse and numerous. They present (or, more often, obscure) themselves through multiscalar lenses of time and geographic space, reflecting not only linguistic and cultural diversity but also geographical, ecological, and botanical variation. How can one find and sort out such patterns, much less understand the reasons for them, how they developed, and what the implications are? The challenge of such a task is daunting. Yet the “big picture,” the meta-analysis, and the discernment of such patterns are significant.

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