Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson
Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson
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Tending the Wild
Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources

Author: M. Kat Anderson

Narrator: Leslie Howard

Unabridged: 16 hr 28 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/14/2023

Synopsis

John Muir was an early proponent of a view we still hold today—that much of California was pristine, untouched wilderness before the arrival of Europeans. But as this book demonstrates, what Muir was really seeing when he admired the grand vistas of Yosemite and the gold and purple flowers carpeting the Central Valley were the fertile gardens of the Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts Indians, modified and made productive by centuries of harvesting, tilling, sowing, pruning, and burning. Tending the Wild is an unparalleled examination of Native American knowledge and uses of California's natural resources that reshapes our understanding of native cultures and shows how we might begin to use their knowledge in our own conservation efforts.

M. Kat Anderson presents a wealth of information on native land management practices gleaned in part from interviews and correspondence with Native Americans. The complex picture that emerges from this and other historical source material dispels the hunter-gatherer stereotype long perpetuated in anthropological and historical literature. We come to see California's indigenous people as active agents of environmental change and stewardship. Tending the Wild persuasively argues that this traditional ecological knowledge is essential if we are to successfully meet the challenge of living sustainably.

About M. Kat Anderson

M. Kat Anderson is a lecturer in the department of plant sciences at the University of California, Davis; associate ecologist at the Agricultural Experimental Station at the University of California, Davis; and a faculty member in the graduate group in ecology at the University of California, Davis. She is coeditor, with T. C. Blackburn, of Before the Wilderness: Native Californians as Environmental Managers and coeditor, with Henry T. Lewis, of Forgotten Fires: Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness by Omer C. Stewart.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Fleece

LITERALLY AMAZING. destroys both anthropological and ecologic assumptions about native californians and their role in the landscape, that is, CA was NOT a pristine wilderness (and as much as i like muir: SUCK IT, muir), much of the abundance and beautiful structure of the plant communities resulted......more

Goodreads review by Richard

“Nature really misses us,” laments M. Kat Anderson. “We no longer have a relationship with plants and animals, and that’s the reason why they’re going away.” Anderson is the author of Tending the Wild, in which she describes the relationships that California Indians have with the plants and animals,......more

Goodreads review by Tom

I live in coastal central California, in a relatively rural environment. I often like to imagine what it was like before the arrival of Europeans. The usual history tells of small nomadic primitive savages living off the land, basically as scavengers. Sure, they could make a mean waterproof basket,......more

Goodreads review by Tao

-"...the foundation of this book—indigenous people's stewardship of the land carries important lessons for us in the modern world..." -"There were no clear-cut distinction between hunter-gatherers—the category into which most California Indians had been tossed—and the more "advanced" agricultural peo......more

Goodreads review by Hatuxka

This book just blew me away. That the breathtaking landscape seen and commented on by such luminaries as John Muir was not, as he and many others thought, a pristinely untouched place, but a managed ecosystem (by the native peoples) is a one the exciting discoveries of my life. It weaves in with the......more

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