“Where our women used to get the food”: cumulative effects and loss of ethnobotanical knowledge and practice; case study from coastal British ColumbiaThis paper was submitted for the Special Issue on Ethnobotany, inspired by the Ethnobotany Symposium organized by Alain Cuerrier, Montreal Botanical Garden, and held in Montreal at the 2006 annual meeting of the Canadian Botanical Association.

Knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples relating to local plants used for food, medicine, materials, and other purposes are threatened in many parts of the world. The reasons for declining knowledge and use of traditional resources are complex and multifaceted. We review a series of case examples of culturally valued food plants in British Columbia and identify a suite of interacting social and environmental factors that have resulted in decreased use of and dwindling cultural knowledge about these plants over the past 150 years. Reasons for this loss include compounding influences of changing knowledge systems owing to religious conversion and residential schools, loss of indigenous languages, loss of time and opportunity for traditional practices owing to participation in the wage economy, increasing urbanization of indigenous populations, loss of access to traditional resources, restriction of management practices for sustaining these resources, and most recently, forces of globalization and industrialization. Efforts to renew and restore traditional practices and relationships with plants and environments must recognize the cumulative effects of these factors and find ways to retain and reinforce the knowledge and practices still held by individuals and communities, to reverse some of the negative influences on cultural retention, and to develop new, relevant, and effective ways to revitalize languages, cultures, and ethnobotanical knowledge within contemporary contexts.