User:Riley Sasukawori/Environment of California

In addition to using fire to influence the environment, Aboriginal Californians also used selective horticultural techniques such as harrowing, pruning, and weeding. These practices allowed for certain beneficial characteristics to be passed down through populations of different plant species.

With nicknames such as “active agents of environmental change”, these labels directly contrast those that many Europeans labeled the Aboriginal people as such as “hunter-gatherer” and “forager”. With the influence they had on their surrounding environment from nurturing certain traits in food crops, these practices sustained the Aboriginal people over many centuries into colonialism. By intertwining themselves into the natural environment they live in, this allowed them to gain an immense knowledge of what Europeans called “unpeopled wilderness”. Within this term of “unpeopled wilderness” was this idea that any area that was not discovered yet by Europeans was considered, “unspoiled, raw, [and] uninhabited”. However, when the Aboriginal Californians were discovered living on this land, the Europeans quickly sought to erase the indigenous culture built into the land to bring back the idea of “uninhabited wildlife” to bring back a certain purity they thought was associated with a lack of civilization. The colonial Europeans had a shared belief throughout their population as they believed that the Aboriginal people of California had no place in the history of the place, even though with their efforts they are originally the ones who allowed the environment to flourish and grow like it did.

The knowledge of the native people did not come naturally to them, as many Europeans believed. Instead, this extensive foundation of information was built over hundreds of years spanning multiple generations. Known as traditional ecological knowledge, this history was observed through the eyes of their ancestors and passed onto the next generation. By a certain trial and error, the native people eventually learned which plants and animals contributed to their daily lives and thus created a so called, “long-term relationship” with nature.