“I have many of Nancy Turner’s books in my library and have read widely in them over the years. I hosted Nancy at an Ethnobotany Lecture Series I organized at Fairhaven College in Bellingham in the 1990s and we became friends.

Nancy Turner is a scientist with a big heart. We are so happy that Nancy will be the keynote speaker at the 2024 Northwest Herbal Fair.” ~ Michael Pilarski

Plants, People and Places: The Roles of Ethnobotany and Ethnoecology in Indigenous People’s Land Rights in Canada and Beyond. Nancy Turner, Editor, 2020. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 480 pages.

This book should be read across the world by indigenous people and policy-makers. It gives lots of ideas on how indigenous people can get back, or secure, their land rights. There are lots of examples from around the world. The book can teach policy-makers much about indigenous land rights. The book is well referenced. It includes chapters on topics such as:

* Living from the Land: Food Security and Food Sovereignty Today and into the Future.

* Traditional Plant Medicines and the Protection of Traditional Harvesting Sites.

* Ethnoecology and Indigenous Legal Traditions in Environmental Governance.

* Restorying Indigenous Landscapes: Community Regeneration and Resurgence.

Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America

Edited by Douglas E. Deur and Nancy J. Turner. 2005. University of Washington Press 384 pages.

This book is of worldwide significance. It is one of the first books to elucidate how indigenous people’s managed their landscapes, They were not helpless hunter-gatherers eking out an existence. They managed their ecosystems sustainably to make them a treasure trove of food and resources needed by the people who lived there over long periods of time. Socio-ecosystems. These are sometimes called “horticultural societies”. The book sheds light on this topic for the Pacific Northwest, and sets a template for other parts of the world. Of course, indigenous people know these things, but this is a key explanation of the system to the Western public.

The following review of Keeping It Living is from the University of Washington Press website.

The European explorers who first visited the Northwest Coast of North America assumed that the entire region was virtually untouched wilderness whose occupants used the land only minimally, hunting and gathering shoots, roots, and berries that were peripheral to a diet and culture focused on salmon. Colonizers who followed the explorers used these claims to justify the displacement of Native groups from their lands. Scholars now understand, however, that Northwest Coast peoples were actively cultivating plants well before their first contact with Europeans. This book is the first comprehensive overview of how Northwest Coast Native Americans managed the landscape and cared for the plant communities on which they depended.

Bringing together some of the world's most prominent specialists on Northwest Coast cultures, Keeping It Living tells the story of traditional plant cultivation practices found from the Oregon coast to Southeast Alaska. It explores tobacco gardens among the Haida and Tlingit, managed camas plots 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 berry plots up and down the entire coast.

With contributions from ethnobotanists, archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, ecologists, and Native American scholars and elders, Keeping It Living documents practices, many unknown to European peoples, that involve manipulating plants as well as their environments in ways that enhanced culturally preferred plants and plant communities. It describes how indigenous peoples of this region used and cared for over 300 different species of plants, from the lofty red cedar to diminutive plants of backwater bogs.