Customer Reviews

Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources

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Kat Andersons well researched book can be used by conservationists, land managers, ecologists, scientists, historians, and others to better understand historical Native American land use in California. This book helps dispell the myth of passive Native American resource management and provides examples of how Native Americans influenced much of the landscape prior to European contact and how removal of their influence continues to effect the environment today. Anyone who considers themselves and expert or has an interest in California vegetation and issues surrounding its ecology and use should read this book.

This excellent book written about the management of California land by the native people in the past, is also a textbook of what we will need to do in the future to survive. M. Kit Anderson has written a revolutionary book. The wealth of information on how Native peoples managed the California landscape in a sustainable way finally does justice to these people and their way of life - a people who were so cruelly treated by the Spanish and American invaders. The author explores the ecological management skills of California native peoples without romanticizing them or ignoring mistakes that they made.

The modern environmental movement created the myth of the unspoiled wilderness untouched by human hands. Tending the Wild debunks that myth and levels some well earned criticism towards those environmentalists who failed to appreciate how the California native peoples were successfully and actively managing the California landscape, as were other indigenous people around the world.

But the wealth of detail the book provides on how the Native Americans successfully managed the California landscape is also a model of sustainable living that has much to teach all of us. We learn an alternative to the destructive environmental, agricultural and development practices of our time. Practices that are destroying our ability to not only preserve the beauty of the landscape but to use the landscape wisely to provide for our needs in a sustainable way.

Anybody who is interested in sustainable living should also explore books on Permaculture by authors like Bill Mollison, David Holmgren and Toby Hemenway. Permaculture is a modern attempt at designing for sustainable living. Permaculture designers have studied the sustainable methods agriculture, horticulture, building and community of indigenous people from all over the world. As world oil production peaks and as the effects of global warming are felt, we will need all the help we can get to re-learn how to live sustainably on this planet.

This book is covering ground not found elsewhere about the way of Native Americans in California interacted with nature to actually improve the health of forests and wild life. I am thrilled to find it.

In her book Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson has painted a very different picture of indigenous peoples than most civilized people could even begin to fathom. She begins by taking us through the history of California and its Native peoples. Using accounts of explorers, missionaries, pioneers and anthropologists she shows how those of our culture came to California with no understanding or lens with which to understand native land management. Rather, like everywhere else, civilization saw resources to extract, came and conquered California and her people. With California's wildlife & Native cultures now decimated, newer research has shown that Native land management actually contributed to enhancing the biological diversity and abundance of life. Anderson argues that if we wish to restore our mutual relationship with nature, we must learn these ancient management techniques and implement them immediately. Although she uses only California Natives to back her thesis, we can witness these same principles among indigenous cultures the world over. This book works not only as a history of indigenous horticulture in California, but mostly as a beginners manual for those who seek to understand more about sustainable, indigenous land management. This book rocked my world. Don't miss out, buy it now!

In the last three years, I have watched 500,000 acres of San Diego county burn. I came to M. Kat Anderson's book after we nearly lost our home, which is neatly tucked between two pieces of reservation land; I got infinitely more understanding than I thought possible. She has given us a timely, well researched work, that gives homage to the people who came long before us.

This book will sit on my shelf, next to "1491" (another must read, Americas before Columbus). The land nourishes all of us, regardless of race, color or creed. We need to learn from the past practices, to better care for the land. Many environmentalists use "pristine" when describing wilderness, and it is a misnomer. Without fire, there are no sprouting redwoods. Controlled burns are necessary. But try and tell your local political leaders that.
Buy this book, read it and understand.

This book should become required reading for all High School and University students, teachers, and researchers with an interest in North American anthropology, ethnobotany, botany, biology, historical ecology, fire history, forest management, and history. It will be of particular value to readers with an interest in cultural and natural resources management, agricultural sustainability, and federal Wilderness policy, among other topics.

The book is excellently written, organized, and indexed, for both general reading and specific reference uses. It is a wonderful addition to Anderson's other major contribution to science, Forgotten Fires.

This is an extraordinarily comprehensive and insightful book on a subject not well known and even less appreciated by the general public and many natural resource managers ---viz. the careful management and use of a diversity of plants by Native Americans necessary for their subsistence and daily life. It is based not only on historical records and collections, but on many interviews with tribal elders,extensive field observations and skillfully-designed field experiments that replicate and confirm specific traditional agricultural/horticultural practices.It makes for very absorbing and enlightening reading.

The book is a well thought out and interesting book. One interesting point is that the Yosemite Indian people or Natives of Yosemite were primarily Mono Paiutes.

The proof about the Paiutes being the ones who did the fire cleaning practice in the Sierra Nevada foothills was an article written: Leopold, A. 1920. "Piute Forestry" vs. forest fire prevention. Southwestern Magazine 2:12-13.

Aldo Leopold wrote an argument against certain practices but that was before we had more information concerning the Piute Forestry (Paiute) practice was re-thought.

All of the earliest Indian photos show the titles "Piute" and not Miwuk in Yosemite. So hopefully in the next re-reprint the book will have a correction to the real early Native Americans of Yosemite, the Paiutes, instead of the incorrect title of Miwok.

Besides this, the book is very interesting.

"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, the rocks and streams, the sacred land which is their ancient home. It's an essential book for pilgrims who strive to envision the long and rugged path back home to wildness, freedom, and sustainability.

In medieval Europe, hungry dirty peasant farmers succeeded in painstakingly perfecting a miserable, laborious, backbreaking form of agriculture that depleted the soil, and produced minimal yields with erratic inconsistency. They were malnourished, unhealthy, and most of them died young -- whilst the lords and ladies, who claimed to own the land, wallowed in a rich sludge of glitter and gluttony.

When European explorers arrived in California, they discovered half-naked heathen barbarians who were exceedingly healthy, and enjoyed an abundance of nourishing wild foods that they acquired without sweat or toil. Clearly, these savages were people who suffered from a lack of civilization's elevated refinements: agriculture, smallpox, uncomfortable ugly clothing, brutal enslavement, and religious enlightenment from priests who preached the virtues of love, but practiced exploitive racist cruelty.

In 1868, Titus Fey Cronise wrote that when whites arrived, the land of California was "filled with elk, deer, hares, rabbits, quail, and other animals fit for food; the rivers and lakes swarming with salmon, trout, and other fish, their beds and banks covered with mussels, clams, and other edible mollusca; the rocks on its sea shores crowded with seal and otter; and its forests full of trees and plants, bearing acorns, nuts, seeds, and berries."

The greed-crazed Europeans went absolutely berserk, rapidly destroying whatever could be converted into money: forests, waterfowl, whales, deer, elk, salmon, gold nuggets. Grizzly bear meat was offered at most restaurants. There were fortunes to be made, the supply of valuable resources was "inexhaustible," and the foolish Indians were so lazy that they let all of this wealth go to waste.

There were 500 to 600 different tribes in California, speaking many different languages. In North America, the population density of California Indians was second only to the Aztec capitol of Mexico City. They lived quite successfully by hunting, fishing, and foraging -- without domesticated plants or animals, without plowing or herding, without fortified cities, authoritarian rulers, perpetual warfare, horrid sanitation, or epidemics of contagious disease. The Indians found the Europeans to be incredibly peculiar. The Pit River people called them enellaaduwi -- wanderers -- homeless people with no attachment to the land or its creatures.

The bulk of Tending the Wild describes how the California Indians tended the land. They did not merely wander across the countryside in hopes of randomly discovering plant and animal foods. They had an intimate, sacred relationship with the land, and they tended it in order to encourage the health of their closest relatives -- the plant and animal communities upon which they depended.

Fires were periodically set to clear away brush, promote the growth of grasses and herbs, and increase the numbers of larger game animals. Burning significantly altered the ecosystem on a massive scale, but it didn't lead to the creation of barren wastelands over time, like agriculture continues to do, at an ever-accelerating rate. California has a long dry season, and wildfires sparked by lightening are a normal occurrence in this ecosystem.

Nuts, grains, and seeds are a very useful source of food. They're rich in oils, calories, and protein. They can be stored for long periods, enabling survival through lean seasons and lean years. The quantity of acorns foraged each year was not regular and dependable, but many were gathered in years of abundance. A diverse variety of wildflowers and grasses can provide a dependable supply of seeds and grains.

The Indians tended the growth of important plants in a number of ways -- pruning, weeding, burning, watering, replanting bulbs, sowing seeds. Communities of cherished plants were deliberately expanded the size. The Indians were blessed with a complete lack of advanced Old World technology. They luckily had no draft animals or plows, so their soil-disturbing activities were mostly limited to small tobacco gardens, prepared with digging sticks.

Today, countless ecosystems are being ravaged by agriculture. A few visionaries, like Wes Jackson at the Land Institute, are working to develop a far less destructive mode of farming, based on mechanically harvesting the grain from perennial plants. This research is a slow process, and success is not expected any time soon.

California Indians developed a brilliant, time-proven, sustainable system for producing seeds and grain without degrading the ecosystem. So did the wild rice gatherers of the Great Lakes region. They built no cities, and they did not suffer from the misery and monotony of civilization. They had no powerful leaders, ruling classes, or legions of exploited slaves. They were not warlike societies. Their ecosystems were clean and healthy. They lived like real human beings -- wild, free, and happy.

Tending the Wild is an important book. It presents us with stories of a way of life that worked, and worked remarkably well. This is precious knowledge for us to contemplate, as our own society is rapidly circling the drain, and our need for remembering healthy old ideas has never been greater.

Richard Adrian Reese
Author of What Is Sustainable

Blown away by the 360+ pages of "Tending the Wild' by Anderson.
It is an amazingly detailed and researched book.

The book squashes firmly the idea of innocent, unsophisticated savages roaming
carefree in a garden prepared by nature in a balance that included not affecting
it in any significant way. Instead the book shows how better science, including
anthropology, paints a picture of Native Americans in California carefully and
industriously tending and improving their patch of "nature" to keep it
productive for the human harvest of plants, animals, and fungi. What we see now
as nature is the untended, weed-filled, stunted, and overgrown remnants of what
were essentially Native American gardens.

I also like very much the details, from tending to production of usefule
articles to cooking and eating. I am learning many new things! Right now I am
particularly struck by the various things used to season food for salt, sweet,
sour, etc.

Definitely will re-read and add some notes about things
that did not make the index. Over 100 pages of footnotes referencing
documentation! A huge amount of detailed how-they-did-it and why-they-did-it
information readily adapted to current "primitive" practices. Highly
recommended.