Learning as You Journey: Anishinaabe Perception of Social-ecological Environments and Adaptive Learning

By I. Davidson-Hunt, Fikret Berkes. 2003

269 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores the linkages between social-ecological resilience and adaptive learning. We refer to adaptive learning as a method to capture the two-way relationship between people and their social- ecological environment. In this paper, we focus on traditional ecological knowledge. Research was undertaken with the Anishinaabe people of Iskatewizaagegan No. 39 Independent First Nation, in northwestern Ontario, Canada. The research was carried out over two field seasons, with verification workshops following each field season. The methodology was based on site visits and transects determined by the elders as appropriate to answer a specific question, find specific plants, or locate plant communities. During site visits and transect walks, research themes such as plant nomenclature, plant use, habitat descriptions, biogeophysical landscape vocabulary, and place names were discussed. Working with elders allowed us to record a rich set of vocabulary to describe the spatial characteristics of the biogeophysical landscape. However, elders also directed our attention to places they knew through personal experiences and journeys and remembered from stories and collective history. We documented elders' perceptions of the temporal dynamics of the landscape through discussion of disturbance events and cycles. Again, elders drew our attention to the ways in which time was marked by cultural references to seasons and moons. The social memory of landscape dynamics was documented as a combination of biogeophysical structures and processes, along with the stories by which Iskatewizaagegan people wrote their histories upon the land. Adaptive learning for social-ecological resilience, as suggested by this research, requires maintaining the web of relationships of people and places. Such relationships allow social memory to frame creativity, while allowing knowledge to evolve in the face of change. Social memory does not actually evolve directly out of ecosystem dynamics. Rather, social memory both frames creativity within, and emerges from, a dynamic social-ecological environment.

Subfields: Education, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/774cf5b55c5a2225691a5fd5b826962babc3e93d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. K. Tidball
2. Fikret Berkes
3. Bradley D. Parrish

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. K. Tidball
2. Christopher M. Raymond
3. Fikret Berkes
4. Lindsay C. Stringer
5. I. Fazey
6. J. Kenter

In Social Psychology

1. K. Tidball
2. Christopher M. Raymond
3. Fikret Berkes

Citations in the corpus

• Coming to Understanding: Developing Conservation through Incremental Learning in the Pacific Northwest (2006, background): “Working with the Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) people of northwestern Ontario, Davidson-Hunt and Berkes (2003) argue that such learning requires maintaining a web of relationships of people and places.”
• What is social learning (2010, background): “Third, despite conceptualizing social learning as a process of social and/or political change, there is often little distinction made between individual and wider social learning (e.g., Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2003).”
• Anticipatory Learning for Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience (2010, background): “For instance, Davidson-Hunt and Berkes (2003) stress learning to live with change and uncertainty and combining different types of knowledge as two key principles for building adaptive capacity in social–ecological systems.”
• Local Knowledge, Subsistence Harvests, and Social–Ecological Complexity in James Bay (2009, background): “Observing and learning follow culturally constructed rules; they are framed by ‘knowledge institutions’ (Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2003; DavidsonHunt 2006).”
• Urgent Biophilia: Human-Nature Interactions and Biological Attractions in Disaster Resilience (2012, background): “…(Barthel et al. 2012) into effective practices, and that such communities of practice serve as urban iterations or analogs of the collaborative and adaptive management practices that play a role in SES resilience in more rural communities (Berkes et al. 2003, Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2003).”