Keeping it Living

Book excerpt: Keeping It Living brings together some of the world'smost prominent specialists on Northwest Coast cultures to examinetraditional cultivation practices from Oregon to Southeast Alaska. Itexplores tobacco gardens among the Haida and Tlingit, managed camasplots among the Coast Salish of Puget Sound and the Strait of Georgia,estuarine root gardens along the central coast of British Columbia,wapato maintenance on the Columbia and Fraser Rivers, and tended berryplots up and down the entire coast. With contributions from a host of experts, Native American scholarsand elders, Keeping It Living documents practices ofmanipulating plants and their environments in ways that enhancedculturally preferred plants and plant communities. It describes howindigenous peoples of this region used and cared for over 300 speciesof plants, from the lofty red cedar to diminutive plants of backwaterbogs.