Indigenous Peoples in British Columbia Tended 'Forest Gardens' Found near villages, research suggest

[Judi Lynn]

Found near villages, research suggests the Indigenous population intentionally planted and maintained these patches of fruit and nut trees



The Sts’ailes forest garden near Vancouver, British Columbia seen from the air. (Nick Waber)

By Alex Fox
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
APRIL 29, 2021 8:05AM

Along the coast of British Columbia, Canada, former villages of the Ts’msyen and Coast Salish Indigenous peoples are flanked by what researchers have termed “forest gardens.” On lands covered in forests dominated by hemlock and cedar trees, these forest gardens represent abrupt departures from the surrounding ecosystem. The dark, closed canopy of the conifer forest opens up and is replaced by a sunny, orchard-like spread of food-producing trees and shrubs, such as crabapple, hazelnut, cranberry, wild plum and wild cherry.

New research, published last week in the journal Ecology and Society, makes the case that these forest gardens were planted and maintained by Indigenous peoples until roughly 150 years ago when the original inhabitants of these settlements were displaced by colonialist expansion and the smallpox outbreaks the encroaching colonizers brought with them, reports Andrew Curry for Science.

"These plants never grow together in the wild. It seemed obvious that people put them there to grow all in one spot—like a garden," says Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an ethnobiologist at Simon Fraser University and lead author of the study, in a statement. "Elders and knowledge holders talk about perennial management all the time. It's no surprise these forest gardens continue to grow at archeological village sites that haven't yet been too severely disrupted by settler-colonial land-use."

These Indigenous-managed food production sites in the Pacific Northwest are the first forest gardens to be described outside of Central and South America, according to Science.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/indigenous-peoples-british-columbia-tended-forest-gardens-180977617/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Unearthing the Work of Indigenous Master Horticulturalists

CK
By Crawford Kilian The Tyee
Wed., April 28, 2021timer5 min. read



A historical ecologist and her team at Simon Fraser University have made a crucial discovery about B.C.’s ancient forest ecosystems — one that could strengthen the systems of today and tomorrow and equip us to understand our own environment even as it changes with the climate.

Dr. Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an Indigenous Studies assistant professor and the leader of the Historical and Ethnoecological Research Lab recently published a study in the journal Ecology and Society. In it, she documents four sites that are ecologically more diverse than the conifer forests surrounding them. And for good reason: each is on an Indigenous reserve and marks the site of an ancient community of master horticulturalists.

It’s an old settler myth that North America was “undeveloped” by Indigenous peoples, who subsisted as hunter-gatherers and therefore didn’t deserve to claim stakes in any particular land. Never mind that agricultural civilizations flourished all the way from Mexico to the Great Lakes, or that white explorers traversed the continent by following long-established Indigenous trade routes.

Here in B.C., this self-serving cultural ignorance operated even with relatively advanced anthropologists like Franz Boas, who assumed he was studying dying peoples and only wanted to record their folkways before they vanished. In Boas’ case, he additionally focused on Indigenous men and ignored women, so he missed a key element of coastal Indigenous culture — the clam gardens designed and maintained by women, which could sustain a population well over 100,000 in the centuries before contact.

More:
https://www.thestar.com/vancouver/2021/04/28/unearthing-the-work-of-indigenous-master-horticulturalists.html