Cultural Foundations for Ecological Restoration on the White Mountain Apache Reservation

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Myths, metaphors, and social norms that facilitate collective action and understanding of restoration dynamics serve as foundations for ecological restoration. The experience of the White Mountain Apache Tribe demonstrates how such cultural foundations can permeate and motivate ecological restoration efforts. Through interviews with tribal cultural advisors and restoration practitioners, we examined how various traditions inform their understanding of restoration processes. Creation stories reveal the time-honored importance and functions of water bodies within the landscape, while place names yield insights into their historical and present conditions. Traditional healing principles and agricultural traditions help guide modern restoration techniques. A metaphor of stability illustrates how restoration practitioners see links among ecological, social, and personal dimensions of health. These views inspire reciprocal relationships focused on caretaking of sites, learning from elders, and passing knowledge on to youths. Woven together, these cultural traditions uphold a system of adaptive management that has withstood the imposition of non-indigenous management schemes in the 20 th century, and now provides hope for restoring health and productivity of ecosystems through individual and collective efforts. Although these traditions are adapted to the particular ecosystems of the Tribe, they demonstrate the value of understanding and promoting the diverse cultural foundations of restoration.

Indigenous Knowledge, Science, and Resilience: What Have We Learned from a Decade of International Literature on "Integration"?

“…Turner et al (2000) and Long et al (2003) stress the importance of wisdom and http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol16/iss4/art6/ "showing respect" as distinctive features of traditional ecological knowledge. Maffie (2009) Such differences do not necessarily impede integration.…”

“…Our manual search identified 14 (30%) papers that discuss the relationship between integration and resilience (Table 4). In the 14 papers that include a substantive discussion of knowledge integration and resilience, we note several questions for further research: 14 (30) 2 (18) 9 (75) 2 (12) 1 (14) Papers are: Berkes et al (2000), Salmón (2000), Becker and Ghimire (2003), Davidson-Hunt and Berkes (2003), Long et al (2003), Milestad and Hadatsch (2003), Donovan and Puri (2004), Folke (2004), Garibaldi and Turner (2004), Roth (2004), Tengö and Belfrage (2004), Boyd (2006), Lebel (2006), andTurnbull (2009).…”

“…Berkes et al (2000), Milestad and Hadatsch (2003), and Tengö and Belfrage (2004) describe how traditional management practices in different societies confer resilience, and other papers discuss how resilience benefits from the complementarity of different knowledge systems (e.g., Berkes et al 2000, Long et al 2003. A question follows as to whether distinct sets of diverse, but complementary, knowledge may be preferable to a single set of integrated knowledge for addressing some natural resource management issues.…”

The White Mountain Recreational Enterprise: Bio-Political Foundations for White Mountain Apache Natural Resource Control, 1945–1960

“…This agreement would also become a model for how many other American Indian nations would handle infringements of tribal sovereignty by the federal government [70]. Endeavors such as this, among many more, led to explicit integration of natural resource management with cultural restoration projects [71,72].…”

Changes in carbon storage with land management promoted by payment for ecosystem services

“…Local and indigenous people can be effective at ecosystem restoration, provided there is sufficient social coordination and mobilization (e.g. Walters 2000; Long et al 2003;Mingyi et al 2003;Stringer et al 2007;Blay et al 2008). However, restoration efforts in rural environments that are heavily managed to meet subsistence needs are often complicated by high levels of disturbance from agriculture, grazing, fire, and biomass harvest (Brown & Lugo 1994;Lamb et al 2005).…”