Living with Nature, Cherishing Language Indigenous Knowledges in the Americas Through History

This open access book explores the deep connections between environment, language, and cultural integrity, with a focus on Indigenous peoples from early modern times to the present. It illustrates the close integration of nature and culture through historical processes of environmental change in North, Central, and South America and the nurturing of local knowledge through ancestral languages and oral traditions. This volume fills a unique space by bringing together the issues of environment, language and cultural integrity in Latin American historical and cultural spheres. It explores the reciprocal and necessary relations between language/culture and environment; how they can lead to sustainable practices; how environmental knowledge and sustainable practices toward the environment are reflected in local languages, local sources and local socio-cultural practices. The book combines interdisciplinary methods and initiates a dialogue among scientifically trained scholars and local communities to compare their perspectives on well-being in remote and recent historical periods and it will be of interest to students and scholars in fields including sociolinguistics, (ethno)history, linguistic anthropology, cultural studies and cultural anthropology, environmental studies and Indigenous/minority studies.

1.     Introduction

Justyna Olko & Cynthia Radding

 

2.     Flexible borders, permeable territories and the role of water management in territorial dynamics in Pre-Hispanic and Early Hispanic Peru

Patrycja Przadka-Giersz , Milosz Giersz & Julia M. Chyla

 

3.     Ihuan yehhuan tlacuauh tlamauhtiah in ichcapixqueh. “And the shepherds are inspiring great fear”. Environment, control of resources and collective agency in colonial and modern Tlaxcala.

Justyna Olko

 

4.    Ñudzahui Custom, Contracts, and Territoriality in Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca

Yanna Yannakakis

 

5.    The Yoreme creation of itom ania in northwestern Mexico: histories of cultural landscapes.

Cynthia Radding

 

6.   Gender Disparities in Guaraní Knowledge, Literacy, and Fashion in the Ecological Borderlands of Colonial and Early Nineteenth-Century Paraguay

Barbara A. Ganson

 

7.    Combining Visions of Well-Being through the Generational Gap: The Views of Tlaxcala Old and Young on Environment, Tradition and Language

Gregory Haimovich

 

8.    “Amo kitlapanas tetl!”: Heritage language and the defense against fracking in the Huasteca Potosina, Mexico

Elwira Dexter-Sobkowiak

 

9.     The Interrelation between Language, History and Traditional Ecological Knowledge within the Nahuat-Pipil context of El Salvador

Ebany Dohle

 

10.  Cenotes and placemaking in the Maya world: biocultural landscapes as archival spaces

Khristin N. Montes, Dylan J. Clark, Patricia A. McAnany & Adolfo Iván Batún Alpuche

 

11.  Nakua nukuu ini Ñuu Savi: Nakua jíno, nakua ka’on de nakua sa’on ja kuatyi Koo Yoso. Memory and cultural continuity of the Ñuu Savi People: Ancestral knowledge, language and rituals around Koo Yoso deity

Omar Aguilar Sánchez

 

12.  Tlaneltoquilli tlen mochihua ica cintli ipan tlalli Chicontepec: tlamantli chicahualiztli ipan tochinanco. Ceremonial practices relating to corn in the region of Chicontepec: local aspects of wellbeing

Eduardo de la Cruz