Decolonizing Ethnobiology Resources
This page is a collection of materials consolidated by members of the Society of Ethnobiology with the purpose of sharing ideas for moving toward an ethnobiology which prioritizes (1) power equity, (2) receptiveness to diverse ways of knowing, and (3) social justice.
Many of the contributors are active in social justice and environmental work and are dedicated to unravelling the colonial nature of "doing" work/research in settler nations and Indigenous communities. As a disicipline, ethnobiology is not without it's own history of transcolonial legacies. As noted by one of our Distinguished Ethnobiologists, Gary Nabhan: "We would be remiss to ignore the blatantly colonial or imperialistic tone of some early ethnobotanical studies. They were explicitly undertaken to either a) learn what value could be extracted from another culture's natural resource base as crops, or b) learn how immigrants could take cues from native residents on how to make a living on their shared home ground, even as some of those immigrants usurped water and harvested native plants and wildlife from the homelands of the people that they were studying."
Our purpose here is to reduce any erasure of our colonial past while engaging with the tools and methods in relationship-building and decolonizing academia. Please send any questions/comments and resource suggestions to Chelsey Geralda Armstrong (firstname.lastname@example.org) and Alex McAlvay (email@example.com).