ABSTRACT
As I have argued in previous chapters, Indigenous peoples in North America have relatively sophisticated concepts with regard to the functioning of ecological systems, and these concepts also differ in some important ways from those of Europeans (Minta et al. 1992; Anderson 1996; Barsh 1997, 2000; Huntington and Myrmin 1996; Pierotti and Wildcat 1999b, 2000). These concepts were often presented in a metaphoric fashion, which has allowed some Europeans to try to dismiss them as mere “stories” or “legends” (Deloria 1992; Pierotti and Wildcat 2000).
