ABSTRACT
Indigenous people’s cultural traditions challenge Western notions of ecological restoration. When Europeans arrived on the North American continent, they saw “wilderness”—a landscape free of systematic human interventions. At the same time, however, indigenous North Americans perceived themselves as living in a managed, cultural landscape. Collectively, Native Americans had created a variety of “semi-natural” agro-ecosystems: what Sprague and Iwasaki describe in their chapter on traditional Japanese rice paddies as being situated “conceptually between the totally artifi cial and the wilderness.” Although the position along the artifi cial/natural continuum may be different for Native Americans, confl icting perspectives on the extent to which pre-European landscape was wilderness, nonetheless complicate Euro-American restorationist aspirations for “rewilding;” that is, restoring wild conditions. Indeed, many indigenous restoration efforts take on the characteristics of regardening projects commonly found in Europe and Japan. This chapter focuses on American Indian visions of ecological restoration while emphasizing how their practice contests, complicates, and enriches Western defi nitions of restoration. Furthermore, the interaction between indigenous restorationists and Western science embodies a continuation of the Native American historical struggle against the expansion of Western civilization. A primary result of this struggle is the creation of eco-culturally hybrid landscapes that integrate features from both the past and present, and Western and native traditions.1
