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"For millennia, plants and their habitats have been fundamental to the lives of Indigenous Peoples--as sources of food and nutrition, medicines, and technological materials--and central to ceremonial traditions, spiritual beliefs, narratives, and language. While the First Peoples of Canada and other parts of the world have developed deep cultural understandings of plants and their environments, this knowledge is often underrecognized in debates about land rights and title, reconciliation, treaty negotiations, and traditional territories. Plants, People, and Places argues that the time is long past due to recognize and accommodate Indigenous Peoples' relationships with plants and their ecosystems. Essays in this volume, by leading voices in philosophy, Indigenous law, and environmental sustainability, consider the critical importance of botanical and ecological knowledge to land rights and related legal and government policy, planning, and decision making in Canada, the United States, Sweden, and New Zealand. Analyzing specific cases in which Indigenous Peoples' inherent rights to the environment have been denied or restricted, this collection promotes future prosperity through more effective and just recognition of the historical use of and care for plants in Indigenous cultures. A timely book featuring Indigenous perspectives on reconciliation, environmental sustainability, and pathways toward ethnoecological restoration, Plants, People, and Places reveals how much there is to learn from the history of human relationships with nature."--

The evaluation of the cultural significance of plants in ethnobotanical studies is an essential step in various types of investigations, including research on lexical retention of plant names in diverging languages, on trade and material exchange between groups, on subsistence strategies, and on folk classification. An index of cultural significance was developed, based on ethnobotanical data on Thompson and Lillooet, two Interior Salish groups of British Columbia. For a given plant taxon, the index is a composite of a wide variety of potential applications of a plant, ranked according to the contribution of each separate application to survival in traditional cultures, together with estimates of intensity and exclusivity of use for each. Example calculations of the derivation of the index are provided, as well as a summary of calculations for more than 500 plant species from Thompson and Lillooet territories. The index has some limitations, but overall it seems to provide a meaningful and valid assessment of the relative importance of a plant taxon in Thompson and Lillooet.

This study reports how Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and informal cultural institutions have conserved key varieties of the wildgrowing rice, 'tinni' (red rice, or brownbeard rice, Oriza rufipogon Griff.), within the Bhar community of eastern Uttar Pradesh, India. The study was conducted, using conventional and participatory methods, in 10 purposively selected Bhar villages. Two distinct varieties of tinni ('tinni patali' and 'tinni moti') with differing habitats and phenotypic characters were identified. Seven microecosystems (Kari, Badaila, Chammo, Karmol, Bhainsiki, Bhainsala and Khodailia) were found to support these varieties in differing proportions. Tinni rice can withstand more extreme weather conditions (the highest as well as lowest temperatures and rainfall regimes) than the 'genetically improved' varieties of rice (Oriza sativa L.) grown in the region. Both tinni varieties are important bioresources for the Bhar's subsistence livelihoods, and they use distinctive conservation approaches in their maintenance. Bhar women are the main custodians of tinni rice agrobiodiversity, conserving tinni through an institution called Sajha. Democratic decision-making at meetings organized by village elders determines the market price of the tinni varieties. Overall, the indigenous institutions and women's participation seem to have provided safeguards from excessive exploitation of tinni rice varieties. The maintenance of tinni through cultural knowledge and institutions serves as an example of the importance of locally maintained crop varieties in contributing to people's resilience and food security in times of rapid social and environmental change.

ABSTRACTIn recent years, there has been an increasing recognition of the role humans play in the structure, composition, and function of ecosystems. Ethnoecological documentation of traditional management systems of Indigenous Peoples in northwestern North America has contributed significantly to this rethinking. A less well‐recognized but foundational part of traditional management of this region is the practice of transplanting plants and plant propagules to expand the range and accessibility of culturally valued plants. In part, the lack of recognition of such translocations has to do with difficulties in identifying evidence of such actions from the past. Here, we summarize various lines of evidence, including that from ethnographic and ethnohistoric records, languages, oral traditions, phytogeography, and archaeology, to document the widespread and long‐standing extent of plant translocation practices among Indigenous Peoples of northwestern North America. Furthermore, we demonstrate how such practices have helped shape contemporary native plant communities throughout the region. Recognizing these past contributions to current ecological contexts honors Indigenous heritage and Indigenous Peoples' long‐term relationships with their biological worlds. [translocation, transplanting, ethnobotany, traditional resource management, northwestern North America]

Intro -- RESETTING THE KITCHEN TABLE: FOOD SECURITY, CULTURE, HEALTH AND RESILIENCE IN COASTAL COMMUNITIES -- RESETTING THE KITCHEN TABLE: FOOD SECURITY, CULTURE, HEALTH AND RESILIENCE IN COASTAL COMMUNITIES -- CONTENTS -- FOREWORD -- ABBREVIATIONS -- Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION-FOOD SECURITY IN COASTAL COMMUNITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF RESTRUCTURING: COASTS UNDER STRESS -- ABSTRACT -- INTRODUCTION -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- Chapter 2 A PERSPECTIVE ON NEWFOUNDLAND'S FISHERIES ECOSYSTEM USING SIZE-BASED FOOD-WEB RELATIONSHIPS -- ABSTRACT -- ON THE MATTER OF FISH-FISHERIES INTERACTIONS -- Introduction -- History Repeats Itself in Fisheries -- Uncertainty in the Dynamics of Fish Communities -- The Importance of Size -- Temporal and Spatial Scales -- APPROACHING FISH COMMUNITY DYNAMICS -- The Size-Based Fish Community -- The Nature of the Available Data -- Fishery Landings Data -- Scientific Survey Data -- Approaches in the Study of Fish Community Dynamics -- Expectations from a Model -- To Sum Up -- Chapter 3 AQUACULTURE AND NEARSHORE MARINE FOOD WEBS: IMPLICATIONS FOR SEAFOOD QUALITY AND THE ENVIRONMENT NORTH OF 50 -- ABSTRACT -- INTRODUCTION -- SEAFOOD QUALITY AND SAFETY -- NEARSHORE MARINE FOOD WEBS -- ANTHROPOGENIC THREATS TO COMMUNITIES -- THE ORGANIC FOOTPRINT OF FINFISH FARMS -- CONCLUSION -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- Chapter 4 LIFE IN THE FAST FOOD CHAIN: OU SONT LES POISSONS D'ANTAN? -- ABSTRACT -- INTRODUCTION -- Mining The Provident Sea2 -- Role of Sport Fisheries -- Life in the Fast Food Chain -- Ecological, Economic and Cognitive Drivers of Overfishing -- First Nations and Food Security -- MODELLING FOOD SECURITY AND EXTINCTION RISK -- The Back to the Future Project -- RESULTS -- Current Gear-Protein Maximization Scenario -- Current Gear-Economic Maximization Scenario -- Ecological Limit Scenario -- Lost Valley Scenario.