This book “Faces in the Forest: First Nations Art Created on Living Trees” by Micheal Blackstock. The book is a guide to how First Nations experience the forest and how they create art to honor this sacred space. It also talks about how traditional knowledge can be integrated into forest practices. The book is created by someone who has knowledge and experience on all fronts….Micheal is a professional forester who works for the Ministry of Forests, a Gitxan person and artist and he is one of the first people to graduate from the Masters in First Nation studies at UNBC. Google provides a preview of the book and the image to the right is linked to the site. If the link does not work, the URL is https://books.google.ca/books?id=Att6_vQeQxoC&lpg=PP1&pg=PR16#v=onepage&q&f=false
Tag Archives: indigenous ecology
Module 4 | Post 2 Indigenous medicine
This is one of many posts on indigenous medicine. The different perspective on healing and the alternate view of our connection and relationship to nature offers opportunities for healing and health not available in western medicine. In this article, an M.D. relates his experience and learning during a 6 year study beside indigenous healers in the Amazon and the use of their medicines, specifically Ayahuasca tea to heal a variety of ailments that defy western methods.
http://www.know-thyself.org/using-indigenous-medicinal-knowledge.html
Another interesting book on this topic is called “The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge” by Jeremy Nasby. I read this book several years ago and it is a fascinating account of an anthropologist who spent time in the amazon studying the connections between shamanism and molecular biology and at the end of the book, discusses how his own world view is fundamentally altered by his research and experiences with the people he studied. Whatever the contention with his findings and methods, the impact on his views is very interesting for our course. Jeremy returned a few years later to complete a documentary video called Night of the Iliana available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk9zimhLIGA.