The Groundhog Autonomous Zone (GAZ) is a non-contiguous confederacy of human people acting as mutualists toward the goal of extracting and resources from the contemporary colonial kyriarchist hegemony for the development of non-kyriarchal assets.
Tag: ethnobotany
“One of the goals of the assignment is to see firsthand how so much of what we know about plants has come from their traditional and cultural use, and the anecdotal evidence passed down from generations.”
See, to me, that’s a really weird goal for an ethnobotanical instructor to set out for its students. First, it’s very… lopsided. A lot of what botanists know has come from ethnobotanical practices, sure, but… it didn’t just come from traditional knowledge, passed down through generations. It also had to survive through displacement, language loss, and then was translated into the language of colonial botanists. That is a long journey between contexts that isn’t captured by “go look at Indigenous knowledge and note how much of it entered colonial botanical understanding.” Frankly, it seems a little… I mean, it doesn’t seem cool to say “be appreciative of how much we’ve learned from Indigenous people” without encouraging an appreciation first of the relationship between “we” and “Indigenous people.”
Second, I would care much more that you learn the journey between contexts, than the information that travels along that journey. The same for an indigenous-approach to plants, in general: it isn’t the specific properties of plants that I think is what makes “ethnobotany” different from botany – I mean, of course not: willow tree is willow tree whether you call it that or waȟpȟópa.
The information, the knowledge, isn’t what matters to any Indigenous person who works with plants. It’s the methodology with which that knowledge is gained. By analogy: Botanical coursework makes it very very clear that you are to adhere to the scientific method during the course of your research. This ethnobotanical course should, in my opinion, make it clear that is just one method of research, and maybe give you a taste of those other methods.
Dang, I was pretty wary about academia’s intentions toward Indigenous people before reading this, and this is disappointingly justifying that wariness. Nothing against you, OP. Does the syllabus really say just, go find an Indigenous person, any indigenous person, and ask them about their cultural knowledge? Is there… compensation for this knowledge? Or any sort of transparency in how it will be used? (Again, OP, I know you’re just trying to fulfill a school assignment; I’m not shooting the messenger here, but I’ve gotta say my piece about the message.)
I’d be really curious to see the questions that you were given, but I probably wouldn’t give my answers. If you feel comfortable, I would be okay with you sharing my sentiment with your instructor: It is a perversion of ethnobotany to approach it as though Indigenous knowledge is a resource, and not a framework with which to understand plants.