BioOne sees sustainable scholarly publishing as an inherently collaborative enterprise connecting authors, nonprofitpublishers, academic institutions, research libraries, and research funders in the common goal of maximizing access tocritical research.

Ethnoecology: Bridging Disciplines, Cultures and SpeciesAuthor(s): Gary Paul NabhanSource: Journal of Ethnobiology, 29(1):3-7. 2009.Published By: Society of EthnobiologyDOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-29.1.3URL: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.2993/0278-0771-29.1.3

BioOne (www.bioone.org) is a nonprofit, online aggregation of core research in thebiological, ecological, and environmental sciences. BioOne provides a sustainable onlineplatform for over 170 journals and books published by nonprofit societies, associations,museums, institutions, and presses.

Your use of this PDF, the BioOne Web site, and all posted and associated contentindicates your acceptance of BioOne’s Terms of Use, available at www.bioone.org/page/terms_of_use.

Usage of BioOne content is strictly limited to personal, educational, and non-commercialuse. Commercial inquiries or rights and permissions requests should be directed to theindividual publisher as copyright holder.

PERSPECTIVES IN ETHNOBIOLOGY

ETHNOECOLOGY: BRIDGING DISCIPLINES, CULTURESAND SPECIES

GARY PAUL NABHAN^gpnabhan@email.arizona.edu&

Today, the term pack rat may be used generically to refer to any compulsivehoarder—human or otherwise—who collects a miscellany of items, but may havetrouble managing them. However, a more specific kind of pack rat–the wood rator trade rat— has long been of interest to ethnobiologists. I recently accompaniedtwo Seri Indian women into the Sonoran Desert in order to see how their peoplehistorically robbed caches of food gathered by one pack rat (Neotoma albigula) onthe Sonoran Desert coast of the Gulf of California.

As we came up to a mesquite tree situated along a desert wash, AngeliaTorres and Maria Dolores Torres spotted a large mound of sticks and chollacactus joints gathered by pack rats. The sisters assessed which sides of the twofoot mound might have the most accessible entry ways, and then used hoes to liftportions of the midden up in order to expose chambers built below. WhenAngelita exposed one of the chambers, she discovered a skeleton of a coachwhipsnake, which instantly reminded her of the many reptiles (in addition to pack ratsthemselves) which the Seri harvest from these middens to eat (Nabhan 2003). Butthe main harvest from these middens was not the meat of reptiles or mammals,but the edible pods and seeds of legumes and the dried fruit of columnar cacti.These, Angelita explained, could be harvested from the middens long after theywere otherwise unavailable from the natural vegetation of the area, so that theyoffered food to the Seri well into the winter and spring (Felger and Moser 1985).

Each chamber in the middens that they opened had a different assortment ofplant foods in it, or served as a hibernaculum for a different set of animals. It waslike taking cross-sections of structures in a wholesale granary operation in theGreat Plains, where one silo might hold flour corn, another, the grains of wheat,and still another, a heap of Great Northern beans. As I stood watching bit after bitof natural history data reveal itself as the midden chambers were day-lighted, Ithought about another kind of silo—the ones which give academia its reputationas a bunch of unconnected and disjointed ivory towers (Clery 2006).

Over the last three decades, many academic disciplines are ‘‘siloed’’ off in away that keeps their insights from informing or being informed by otherdisciplines, or for that matter, from informing and being informed by humankindin all it diverse manifestations. But ethnobiology has never been stuck in a singlesilo. It has always served as a bridge between disciplines just as it has remindedus of the larger bridges or richer interactions between humans and other species,and those between cultures. As ethnobiologists, we might claim interdiscipli-

Journal of Ethnobiology 29(1): 3–7 Spring/Summer 2009

narity as our ‘‘birthright,’’ for this sensibility was championed soon after the termethnobiology was coined. It seems that the ethnobiologists’ characteristic ways ofcollaboratively working in the field have allowed them to think outside the boxabout larger questions regarding environment, culture and history in a mannerthat has not only inspired other scientists, but has also fascinated society at large.

It may be worth our while to reclaim this birthright by reminding ourcolleagues in universities, museums, gardens, zoos and non-profits just howfundamental insights from ethnobiology have been to the development of theirown fields. Long before there were interdisciplinary environmental studiesdepartments and programs ‘‘for nature and culture,’’ ethnobiologists regularlyplayed pivotal roles in integrating insights from botany, zoology, anthropology,linguistics, geography, history and nutrition to tackle issues that could not beresolved by specialists working in a vacuum. A little-remembered episode fromroughly a century ago brings this point home in a dramatic way.

About the time of the first centennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, theEnglish-speaking world was treated to Hosmer’s (1905) new annotated edition ofthe journals written by Lewis and Clark during their scientific explorations of theWest. In those widely-read journals, two recorded events struck many naturalistsof that era as particularly curious. Hosmer (1905:110) noted that on October 11,1804, when Lewis and Clark were visiting Arikara villages along the UpperMissouri, they were given several foods prepared from cultivated crops, plus ‘‘alarge rich bean which they take from the mice of the prairie, who discover andcollect it.’’ And then, on April 9, 1805, when one of their supply canoes becameinundated, the expedition’s crew had to rely on foodstuffs that had beengathered from the caches of food-hoarding rodents. Captain Lewis and his crewdiscovered that when the canoe took in too much water, they had lost foodstuffsthat were to have lasted them the entire trip.

By that time, the expedition was already four days past Fort Mandan, wherethe Mandan and Hidatsa had provisioned them with their harvests of severaldomesticated crops. Lewis and Clark were unaware of any more agriculturalvillages upstream where they could be re-supplied before entering the NorthernRockies. While deliberating on what to do after losing much of their food supply,Lewis and Clark watched as the Shoshone woman who had come along withthem—the now-famous Sacagawea— returned to their camp carrying a large cacheof wild foodstuffs. While grateful that she had instantly provided their crew with ameal, Lewis and Clark began to wonder how Sacagawea could have gathered aconsiderable quantity of food in such a short period of time in early April, whenmost edible plants were still out of season. Here is what Lewis and Clark(2002:114–115) learned, as recorded in the journal entry written by MeriwetherLewis that night:

When we halted for dinner the squaw busied herself in searching for thewild artichokes which the mice collect and deposit in large hoards. Thisoperation she performed by penetrating the earth with a sharp stickabout some small collections of driftwood. Her labor soon provedsuccessful, and she procured a good quantity of these roots. The flavor ofthis root resembles that of the [Mandan-cultivated] Jerusalem artichoke

4 NABHAN Vol. 29, No. 1

and the stalk of the weed which produces it is also similar, though boththe root and the stalk are much smaller than the Jerusalem artichoke. Theroot is small and of an ovate form, from one to three inches in length andusually about the size of a man’s finger. One stalk produces from two tofour, and sometimes six of these roots.

Soon after Hosmer’s edition of the journals was released, historians began towonder just which wild beans and artichokes were offered as nourishment toLewis and Clark by Sacagawea. Pioneering ethnobiologist Melvin Gilmore (1920,1921, 1925) offered his assistance to these environmental historians, for he hadalready begun recording oral histories of such nest-robbing behavior amongseveral indigenous communities in the Great Plains. He determined that the wildlegume first served to Lewis and Clark was the ground bean or hog peanutknown by botanists of his era as Falcata comosa, and now referred to asAmphicarpea bracteata; the ‘‘artichoke’’ was most likely an unimproved wildJerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) rather than the other commonperennial sunflower of the Northern Plains, Helianthus maximiliani.

But Gilmore did not end his inquiries by passing on these botanical names tothe historians; he also became interested in the traditional knowledge andzoology of the rodents which gathered them. He obtained a specimen of therodent which his Dakota consultants identified as hetunka, and his colleagueVernon Bailey, the Chief Field Naturalist of the USDA Bureau of BiologicalSurvey, described as a new species of Microtus in the very first edition of theJournal of Mammology in 1920. He named it Microtus pennsylvanicus wahema,because among the Dakota, Gilmore had learned that intshunga wahema, meant‘burying or hoarding mouse.’ This may be one of the first examples wheretraditional ecological knowledge of plant-animal interactions distilled from FirstNations peoples of North American became codified in a Western scientific(Linnaean) nomenclature.

While the scientific name for this food-hoarding meadow vole has changedsince Gilmore and Bailey’s attempt to describe it, Bailey (1920:70) also offered anecological insight that has stood the test of time: ‘‘The extent to which these meanshave been used by the Indians as food is evidently greater than has been generallysupposed.’’ Today, we have evidence of indigenous peoples robbing the nests offood-hoarding rodents from Alaska and Canada down through the Rockies, GreatPlains and Great Lakes regions, clear to the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts (seeMoerman 1988 for just a few of the fifteen or so ethnographic documents whichrecord this phenomenon among at least a dozen cultures.).

To be successful cache-robbers, traditional peoples had to learn the seasonsand the micro-habitats in which food caches could be found; how to use signsfrom, but to avoid contact with, other animals (such as bears) that also robbed thecaches; how to sort edible from toxic species in the caches; and how to share aportion of the rodents’ food stockpiles without depriving them of so muchnourishment that they would starve before being able to share any more food.Such cache-robbing phenomena, which energetically function as trophic ‘‘short-circuits,’’ have become of interest to theoretical ecologists (Vander Wall 1990), tonutritionists and public health educators (Jones 1983), to historians of cross-

Spring/Summer 2009 JOURNAL OF ETHNOBIOLOGY 5

cultural trade in wild pinyon nuts (Kelly 1972), and to epidemiologistsdetermining whether hanta virus can be transmitted when pinyon nuts aretaken from rodent caches (Arviso-Alvard and Van Pelt 2000).

It appears that some communities that historically rejected the adoption ofagriculture nevertheless intensified their food yields per unit area and extendedtheir season of harvest by carefully discerning where rodents stockpiled edibleplants. Curiously, several cultures apparently regarded the rodents as mutualists,regularly rewarding the food-hoarders with dried fish, fat, corn meal or other gifts,and fondly referring to them as the ‘‘mice people who work for us’’ (Jones 1983).

I had thought that the traditions of robbing the caches of food-hoardinganimals were largely a thing of the past among indigenous peoples, until I spenttime with Inupiaq scholar James Nagiak in the Arctic Circle during the summerof 2008. James and I canoed out across a lake early one morning to search forHedysaru alpinum, the so-called ‘‘Eskimo potato’’ or masru historically gatheredfrom rodent middens by at least a dozen First Nations communities. On someswampy flats below the lake, James used a combination of bear sign and micro-topography to find where Eskimo potatoes survived from the previous year. Wedid not find a full cache at that time of year, but when we did unearth a fewswollen roots of the masru, James recalled what his people have done wheneverquantities of these roots are harvested from vole or lemming caches: ‘‘We replacethe masru with caribou fat in the lemming’s cache. We try to give them the sameamount so they have something to get them through the winter…’’

Inquiry into the edible plants gathered from rodent caches began around thecentennial celebration of Lewis and Clark, when ethnobiologists bridged theirinterests with those of scholars to establish how Sacagawea’s ethnoecologicalknowledge literally had nourished that scientific exploration. Unfortunately, tworecent ethnobotanies of the Lewis and Clark journey published for thebicentennial of that historic expedition totally failed to mention the food-gathering incidents involving rodent caches that excited scientists and laypersonsalike a century ago (Munger 2003; Phillips 2003).

My point is not that traditional ecological knowledge about food-hoardingmammals is the most important ethnoecological phenomenon, nor the mostpervasive. Instead, it is one for which ethnobiologists effectively served as bridgesbetween disciplines to fully explore the relationships among traditional cultures, aswell as the plants and animals that they historically depended upon. Rather thanerecting specialized silos, or isolating the ivory tower even further from publicinterests, field scientists like Gilmore and Bailey set an early standard for productivecollaboration. We would do well to continue fostering such collaborations, reachingout not only to other disciplines, but to other cultures and species as well, andultimately, to ‘‘other ways of knowing’’ about the diversity of life on earth.

REFERENCES CITED

Arviso-Alvard, L. and E.C. Van Pelt. 2000.The scalpel and the silver bear. RandomHouse, New York.

Bailey, Vernon. 1920. Identity of the beanmouse of Lewis and Clark. Journal ofMammalogy 1:70–72.

6 NABHAN Vol. 29, No. 1

Clery, D. 2006. Infrastructure: can gridcomputing help us work together?Science 313(5784):313–333.

Felger, R.S. and M.B. Moser. 1985. People ofthe desert and sea: Ethnobotany of the Seri.University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Gilmore, M.R. 1920. Correspondence: Foodstored by the bean mouse. Journal ofMammalogy 1(3):157.

———. 1921. The ground bean and thebean mouse and their economic rela-tions. Annals of Iowa 12:606–609.

———. 1925. The ground bean and itsuses. Indian Notes 2(1):178–187.

Hosmer, J.K., ed. 1905. History of theexpedition of Captains Lewis and Clark1804-5-6. Volume 1, A.C. McLurg &Co., Chicago.

Jones, A. 1983. Nauriat niginaqtuat: Plantsthat we eat. Maniilaq Assciation/IndianHealth Service, Kotzebue.

Kelly, D.T. 1972. The buffalo head: A centuryof mercantile pioneering in the Southwest.Vergara Publishing Company, Santa Fe.

Lewis, M. and W. Clark. 2002. The journalsof Lewis and Clark. National GeographicAdventure Classics, Washington.

Moerman, D. 1988. Native American ethno-botany. Timber Press, Portland.

Munger, S.H. 2003. Common to this country:Botanical explorations of Lewis and Clark.Artisan/Workman Publishing, NewYork.

Nabhan, G.P. 2003. Singing the turtles to sea:Seri (Comcaac) art and science of reptiles.University of California Press, Berkeley.

Phillips, H.W. 2003. Plants of the Lewis &Clark expedition. Mountain Press Pub-lishing, Missoula.

Vander Wall, S.B. 1990. Food hoarding inanimals. University of Chicago Press,Chicago.

Spring/Summer 2009 JOURNAL OF ETHNOBIOLOGY 7