Kinship Talking Points

This section primarily spoke of relationships, both people to people relationships and those between people, plants, animals, and the Earth.  In the times of old, it is said that people and animals could talk together, and they formed contracts of behavior based on mutual respect.  Certain Indigenous peoples believe that the world is crashing because these contracts are being ignored as the Western tendency to "other" natural things spreads.  These contracts allowed humans to harvest animals and plants for food and other goods, but in turn humans did good to the animals and plants.  Humans are presented as a keystone species, one that controls part of their environment due to the role they play.  Many examples of this are given, including the clam beds of California, the Chinook salmon runs, the Oregon forests, and the hunting of elk (91-92).  Indigenous people showed respect to the creatures they took, putting all parts of a dead animal or plant to use.

Ownership of the land is discussed, as is the need for a sense of responsibility to the land on which you live.  In one section, the fight for good water quality on a pueblo in New Mexico is chronicled.  It is amazing how much the city of Albuquerque fought Islata pueblo on water quality standards.  The pueblo needed clean water for food, for water, and for religious ceremonies, yet the city of Albuquerque was more concerned with how the new standards would affect businesses and costs than people's health.  The connection between people has been severed, and the sense of responsibility to each other lost.  

Again the importance of language was brought up, in quotes like, "You can always read the science in the literature, but you're not going to get much of what Indigenous Peoples have to offer about their unique perspectives unless you hear it from them directly" (89), and "When we preserve and pickle, or do what some ethnoecologists or anthropologists do (take this knowledge), they have to translate it.  They have to transform the knowledge and they take it out of its context" (100).  To gather the knowledge of the Indigenous peoples, we need to learn their languages, or at the very least learn how to understand their metaphors.  Otherwise, we will not be able to adopt their practices.