When Nancy Turner, PhD, began studying the
traditional knowledge systems of the indigenous peoples (First Nations) of
western Canada, it was common for people to tell her, “You better document
everything you can, because [the knowledge] will all be gone in 10 years.”
Fortunately, that didn’t happen, and Turner’s work likely played a part in
helping prevent that cultural erosion. Turner, who describes herself as “a
person who loves plants and people,” has been a member of the American
Botanical Council’s (ABC’s) Advisory Board since ABC first established the
board in 1996.
She is a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellow and the Hakai Professor of Ethnoecology
at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Ethnoecology is broader than
ethnobotany, because while ethnobotany is the study of people’s relationships
with plants, ethnoecology includes the ecosystems in which those plants are
found. “It’s a little bit fragmentary to just separate out the plants, because they
really are in the context of the whole habitat, and people’s use of them is
very holistic,” Turner said.
Her work focuses not just on medicinal and food uses of native and introduced
plant species but also on ceremonial uses as well as the intersection of botany
with linguistics, anthropology, geography, and history. She has worked closely
with many First Nations communities. “There are a lot of different people —
some of them are in related language groups, like the Salish, or Athabaskan.
And some are just totally unrelated to others, like the Haida, and the Ktunaxa.
But I’ve worked with many different communities throughout this area,” she
said.
Turner has authored many books. “I would say the different ethnobotanies that
I’ve done have been significant to the people themselves,” she said, listing Plants of Haida Gwaii (Sono Nis Press,
2005) as an example. “Haida Gwaii” is now the official name for the islands
formerly called the Queen Charlottes. These islands have been inhabited by the
Haida for thousands of years and lie off the coast of British Columbia to the
northwest of Vancouver Island. The book describes more than 150 species of
plants native to the islands, all significant to the Haida.
“One of the general books that I think people have really appreciated and are
still using and talking about is my book called The Earth’s Blanket [Douglas & McIntyre, 2005] that was
published 10 years ago,” she said. The book is about the worldviews of First
Nations. The title is taken from the notes of ethnographer James Teit, who
documented the Nlaka’pamux concept of plants as the blanket of the Earth. “The
whole book is essentially about the philosophies of kincentricity, which is the
idea that everything around us is our relatives,” Turner said. This thinking
promotes respect of nature and prevents misuse of other species and their
habitats.
Her most recent published work, the two-volume, 14-chapter Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge (McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2014), earned her ABC’s 2014 James A. Duke Excellence in Botanical
Literature Award. “It was my effort to bring together as much as possible, and
make some kind of sense out of the huge base of knowledge that I’ve been
learning and recording since the 1960s,” she said. Turner noticed the similarities,
even across different language groups, in people’s knowledge and uses of
different edible and medicinal plants. For example, she realized medicinal
plants, like qexmin (Lomatium nudicaule, Apiaceae), devil’s
club (Oplopanax horridus, Araliaceae),
and false hellebore (Veratrum viride,
Melanthiaceae), were being used
in similar ways across almost all 30 British Columbia language groups. “I
started to see these patterns and realized that people were, long ago,
exchanging knowledge and details of use, and that was reflected in their names
for the plants, too,” she said.
Turner started the project by creating two databases of plant names (one for
native species and one for introduced species) in about 50 different languages
spoken from an area ranging from central Alaska south to the Columbia River and
east to the Rocky Mountains. She ultimately included plants that have names in
at least three languages, since plants that are important in a culture will
almost always have a name. This resulted in about 270 native species and about
40 introduced species being included. “It’s quite remarkable how widespread
some of these names are,” she said, deducing that the borrowing of plant names,
even sometimes for plants that weren’t the same but were used similarly, meant
that a lot of cultural exchange happened.
“So, I started thinking, ‘Well, how far back does this go, and how did people
learn all of this to begin with? What did they have when they first came over
to the New World from Asia? What did they know before they came? What did they
learn when they got here? How did they exchange that knowledge across different
groups, and how did they adapt the knowledge?’” she said.
One example that illustrates this idea is
the word ts’ik’. “That term is used
in different Salish languages, in some cases for hazelnut [Corylus cornuta, Betulaceae], in some cases for acorn [Quercus garryana, Fagaceae], in some
cases for conifer seeds [Pinaceae], and then in the quite far north, along the
Skeena River, the Gitxsan and Nisga’a, who are Tsimshianic
groups, also use a similar word for hazelnut; they’re not related to the
Salish, but they have that word in their vocabulary. And then, if you move east
towards the Rockies, the Secwepemc use that word for whitebark pine seed [Pinus albicaulis, Pinaceae], and so do
the Tsilhqot’in, who are an Athabaskan group,” Turner said. These kinds of
observations were the starting point for Ancient
Pathways.
Turner has other projects in progress. With colleagues, she is working on two
volumes involving the Secwepemc, or Shuswap, people, with whom she has worked
since the 90s, and who live in the interior of British Columbia.
For her many years of exemplary work, Turner was recognized by her peers with
the Society for Economic Botany’s Distinguished Economic Botanist Award in
2011. Additionally, Turner co-wrote the cover story titled “Devil’s Club (Oplopanax horridus): An Ethnobotanical
Review” for HerbalGram issue 62 in
2004.
In July of this year, Turner will retire from the university, which will be
bittersweet for her. “I’m not quite sure how it’s going to be,” she said.
Turner hopes she has taught her students to appreciate the knowledge of
indigenous peoples. “Scientific knowledge…is very important to us, but so is
the knowledge of people who have lived in one place for a long period of time,”
she said. She also hopes her students have learned the importance of
experiential learning and getting out in nature. “If we don’t develop an
empathy towards other species and towards the natural world, we won’t look
after them properly, and that will be detrimental to all of us,” she said.
Turner recently received a three-year
Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation fellowship, which she will continue with for
two years after her retirement from the university. The fellowship involves
organizing a symposium to look at how ethnobotany and ethnoecology can support
First Nations’ land rights, title, and resource deliberations in western
Canada. The meeting, which will happen in the spring of 2017, will bring together
legal experts, First Nations leaders, people in Turner’s field, and policy
makers. Symposium participants will put together a reference book that Turner
hopes will be relevant and useful to the Canadian provincial and federal
governments. “I hope that a lot of other people will find it useful as well,
but it’s still a long ways from being finalized, or even characterized,” Turner
said.
She is encouraged by the resurgence, within the last couple decades, of First
Nations peoples who are revitalizing their cultures. “There are a lot of
younger people now who are relearning their languages, and relearning their
plant traditions, and generally becoming more knowledgeable and involved in
their indigenous cultures than they were, say, in the 1960s and 1970s when I
first started,” she said. “I feel quite optimistic about it.”
Turner said she doesn’t have any complaints
at all about her career. “I feel so fortunate, so lucky, to have been able to
do what I’ve done, and I’ve enjoyed it. I know it’s a privilege to be able to
do work for a lifetime in an area that is just so fascinating and so much fun,”
she said.
Turner has a vacation house on a little
island off Nanaimo, BC, and, in her spare time, she enjoys rowing her rowboat, Calypso, around the island. In addition,
she enjoys picking wild berries every summer, usually on Vancouver Island. She
also likes reading and gardening, and spends a lot of time with her golden
retriever, Annie. She has been married to her husband, Bob, a transportation
historian, since 1969. They have three daughters, Kate, Sarah, and Molly.
—Connor Yearsley
|