The European explorers who first visited the Northwest Coast ofNorth America assumed that the entire region was virtually untouchedwilderness whose occupants used the land only minimally, hunting andgathering shoots, roots, and berries that were peripheral to a diet andculture focused on salmon. Colonizers who followed the explorers usedthese claims to justify the displacement of Native groups from theirlands. Scholars now understand, however, that Northwest Coast peopleswere actively cultivating plants well before their first contact withEuropeans. This book is the first comprehensive overview of howNorthwest Coast Native Americans managed the landscape and cared forthe plant communities on which they depended. Bringing together some of the world's most prominent specialistson Northwest Coast cultures, Keeping It Living tells the storyof traditional plant cultivation practices found from the Oregon coastto Southeast Alaska. It explores tobacco gardens among the Haida andTlingit, managed camas plots among the Coast Salish of Puget Sound andthe Strait of Georgia, estuarine root gardens along the central coastof British Columbia, wapato maintenance on the Columbia and FraserRivers, and tended berry plots up and down the entire coast. With contributions from ethnobotanists, archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, ecologists, and Native American scholarsand elders, Keeping It Living documents practices, manyunknown to European peoples, that involve manipulating plants as wellas their environments in ways that enhanced culturally preferred plantsand plant communities. It describes how indigenous peoples of thisregion used and cared for over 300 different species of plants, fromthe lofty red cedar to diminutive plants of backwater bogs. | Keeping It Living by Douglas Deur, Paperback | Indigo Chapters