History of the Term TEK

Question

One of the themes we're exploring in our independent study is the history of the term "traditional ecological knowledge" or TEK and the various ways it has been used.

• When did you first hear the term TEK? Where did you hear it or from whom?
• What term do prefer and why? Do you use the term TEK or another term?
• What do you know about the history of the term TEK and its use?

Again, don't feel obligated to answer these particular questions. Feel free to pose your own questions to the group.

 - Jamie and Kathy

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Responses

From: Gene Anderson

At 01:24 PM 10/19/98 -0700, you wrote:

One of the themes we're exploring in our independent study is the history of the term "traditional ecological knowledge" or TEK and the various ways it has been used.

• When did you first hear the term TEK? Where did you hear it or from whom?

  Darned if I remember. I was using it informally long before it got to be a "real term" with an acronym.

• What term do prefer and why? Do you use the term TEK or another term?

  This is the one I use.

• What do you know about the history of the term TEK and its use?

  Nothing. It's an obvious enough term; I guess a lot of us were using it just automatically, without thinking, 15 or 20 years ago. I know it was getting into the "official" literature by 10-15 years ago.

Gene Anderson

From: Ilarion Merculieff

My generation was the last generation in my community to have a fully intact traditional upbringing, involving the entire village. I had an "Aachaa" who is a kind of spiritual/cultural mentor. I have been a hunter and fisher for over thirty years, and I worked in some of the highest levels of western patriarchy. As I shared with Jamie in the near past, TEK is a western term connoting a very limited framework with which to understand the knowledge, wisdom, and information which make up a traditional worldview of peoples who have had sustained and intimate contact with Mother Earth for perhaps hundreds of generations. TEK, and other similar western terms is an attempt to box in, define, delimit a very complex and intricate way of understanding mystery in creation. The very act of defining diminishes the essence of what this relationship to Creation is. The term traditional ecological knowledge is even more confined and, to me, indicates the ignorance of those who use it to characterize this way of knowing. The elders and Wisdomkeepers say that knowledge without wisdom is useless. One only has to contemplate this small truth in the context of the hydrogen bomb. We have the knowledge to use it, but not the wisdom. Knowledge is brain centered as is all information passed along and learned by memory. Wisdom comes from an intuitive source and thus is spiritual in character. I have found in all the scientific forums I have made presentations (and there have been many) that no western scientist will agree to use of the word "wisdom" when talking about this way of knowing. In fact, I have perceived tremendous resistance. This is understandable given that the Cartesian paradigms they are working from does not validate use of intuition or spiritual sources of information. Having lived this life using traditional knowledge and wisdom for about forty years, I can say they have missed the central character of this way of knowing by excluding this dimension, and thus may never understand what it is all about.

By the same token, to "box in" this way of knowing as applying only to ecology (traditional ecological knowledge) is equally ignorant. In the traditional worldview and understanding of Creation (for those cultures with an intimate and sustained contact with their environment for millenias) everything is connected and everything is "seen" in connections. One cannot separate ecological knowledge from one's personal connection to Mother Earth (for example), or from family relationships, or from community cultural frameworks, or from language, or from the spiritual, or from stories, or from traditional ethics and values. A narrow definition takes the very essence of this way of knowing completely out of context. To elders, this is simply silly. It cannot be done and still maintain the integrity of truth. And truth is what science is supposed to be about-at least one truth out of many equally valid truths.

Be well. Larry Merculieff (aka Shantam)

From: Patricia Cochran

I first heard the term "TEK" used by researchers associated with the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It has become a prevalent term used by researchers in today's society.

In my work with indigenous communities, I have had the opportunity to discuss TK with hundreds, if not thousands, of Native people. At a meeting of Native scientists and indigenous people from across the Arctic, we made a decision to use the term "traditional knowledge" in all our work and publications. We made this decision because we did not want other people defining what is ours. We made this decision based on what was meaningful to our communities. In all of our villages - Alaskan, Canadian, Russian, Greenlandic, Nordic - our people use and understand the term "traditional knowledge". Not TEK, LTK, TKW, IS, or the myriad other names given to OUR traditional knowledge. WE, the Native communities, call it traditional knowledge - that's what it is.

The Board of Commissioners of the Alaska Native Science Commission have directed me, as Executive Director, to include local knowledge as well as traditional knowledge in our scientific and research projects. They wish to include the knowledge of the local area as well as traditional knowledge of the communities.

In my own view, I see the use of terms like TEK as short sighted - putting things into a box, when they belong in a circle. The Native worldview holds that all things are connected and equal. Calling "traditional knowledge" traditional ecological knowledge, denigrates the balance of our worldview and limits the vision of our traditional knowledge and ways of knowing.

From: John Bradley

I first heard of the term TEK after attending a conference in Canberra (Australia) which was convened by Eugene Hunn and Nancy Williams, as with many terms such as TEK I had already been working with the concept for many years though in my own research I had been calling it Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, it a term which I still prefer to use primarily because the term Traditional is quite problematic. Firstly in definition, the literature in Anthropology alone on the nature of tradition is immense, secondly it is used by people outside anthropology in quite constrictive terms. In particular, from my own experience research biologists, who may have an interest in the knowledge of the environment as perceived by indigenous people. From my own experience working with marine biologists they have attempted to use the term tradition as a way of obviating any positive knowledge that indigenous people may know. The establish a zone of contestation by which indigenous knowledge is continually measured against the western body of scientific knowledge. I feel that the term indigenous ecological knowledge allows us to free up this argument and contestation somewhat, it allows for the incorporation of new knowledge into the body of indigenous knowledge and to be worked through by indigenous people, these may be fine lined arguments know, but part of the issue is that the contestation of indigenous knowledge by western science on the basis of what is traditional is old and in some need of renewal and new truth, has meant that many indigenous people in parts of Australia have devalued their own rich knowledge of the environment. As a part of my Ph.D dissertation I explored the history of this area of study and was drawn away from the more cognitive approaches to this study such as Berlin to the works such as Ellan and Hunn who seek to see how indigenous knowledge is embedded within the constraints of the culture to which is belongs, this I believe is where the valuable convergence of anthropology and indigenous ecological knowledge occurs.

Cheers John Bradley

From: Henry Huntington

• When did you first hear the term TEK? Where did you hear it or from whom?

  Not sure-probably in the early '90s, when doing a literature review while preparing a proposal on hunters' knowledge of bowhead whales.

• What term do prefer and why? Do you use the term TEK or another term?

  TEK works fine for me, mainly because it is widely used and therefore recognizable. Other terms I'm aware of are: indigenous knowledge, indigenous science, local and traditional knowledge, traditional knowledge, traditional knowledge and wisdom, etc. All have problems in some way or another (including TEK). "Traditional" to some implies that it is static and not evolving today; "indigenous" implies to some (including some indigenous elders) that this knowledge is held by anyone who happens to be indigenous when in fact it is the product of a lifetime of paying attention and being out on the land and sea; "knowledge" without "wisdom" implies to some an arbitrary and inappropriate separation between facts and values; "science" implies to some an attempt at paralleling "western science" and fitting into that mode of thinking rather than respecting the differences, "ecological" implies to some a limitation of the knowledge that omits crucial facets, etc. The debate can go on endlessly, and any of the terms can be justified or attacked in a variety of ways. Since the holders of this form of knowledge/wisdom/expertise are also divided on what to call it, I don't think there is a simple solution that works for everyone, and I don't think a prolonged terminological debate is very helpful.

• What do you know about the history of the term TEK and its use?

  Not too sure about the history, but see above for the use.

From: Eugene Hunn

Thanks. Interesting. (I've just perused the first installment of comments.) I'll have to put my thoughts down on this. I started out doing "ethnoscience," which I believe was in some respects a precursor, but that term got put to diverse uses, many not particularly to the point.

Those who object to the term because it rules out this, that, or the other thing, boxing us in, may not appreciate the fact that unless you can name something you can't think about or talk about it coherently. Naming a subject matter TEK does not preclude arguing vigorously that it must be understood in terms of complex interconnections with everything else. So, for example, I like to argue the TEK demonstrates that we are all scientists, which is not to say we are all lab rats as the denigrated stereotype of the Western academic scientist implies, but that we should expand our view of science to encompass many ways of knowing about the world, recognizing that most "traditional" science is part and parcel with "religion," "daily survival," "community," etc. That's the point. It's "Traditional" not because it's unchanging, without dynamism, but because it is an integral aspect of the life of an ongoing community, of people and their land. It's "Ecological/Environmental" in that it deals with the WHOLE of what surrounds the community. That's what "ecology" means to me. It's "knowledge," as opposed to opinion, for example, or "belief," because it is grounded in real-life experience. That wisdom is important is undeniable, but wisdom and knowledge are quite different things, as Merculieff notes. One can know all sorts of stuff and use that knowledge to blow the place up or pollute it beyond recognition. No, wisdom is something quite different. However, I believe one cannot have wisdom without knowledge, though the obverse appears to be common enough. Us academics, students of TEK, clearly have agendas distinct from those of the Indigenous peoples we are trying to learn about and learn with. That shouldn't invalidate our goals, which are, for my part at least, to educate the world to have greater appreciation for and hence tolerance of multiple cultural paths. Surely that goal does not harm the "traditional peoples" who are the ultimate authors of TEK. On the contrary.

I first heard the acronym from Graham Baines via Nancy Williams. Baines was chair of a special IUCN/UNESCO committee on TEK back in the early to mid 1980s. I have found that the acronym slips suavely off my tongue (unlike IK, for example) and provides an excellent educational platform. Though I have no objection to the various alternatives other than force of habit.

Gene Hunn

From: Darrell Posey

One of the themes we're exploring in our independent study is the history of the term "traditional ecological knowledge" or TEK and the various ways it has been used.

• When did you first hear the term TEK? Where did you hear it or from whom?

  THE TERMS COMES FROM THE ETHNOSYSTEMATICS GROUP BEGINNING IN THE 60´2 WITH WARREN, BROKENSHAW AND SLIKKERVEER.

• What term do prefer and why? Do you use the term TEK or another term?

  IT IS AS GOOD AS ANY, BUT IS NOT THE SAME AS TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE (A LARGER CONCEPT OF WHICH ECOLOGICLA KNOWLEDGE IS A PART)...I USE WHAT THE BIODIVERSITY CONVENTION USES: "KNOWLEDGE, INNOVATIONS AND PRACTICES OF INDIGENOUS AND LOCAL COMMUNITIES" THIS LONG TERM CAN BE REDUCED TO TEK OR LEK (TRADITIONAL OR LOCAL ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE).

• What do you know about the history of the term TEK and its use?

  SE E ABOVE

From: Alan White

October 26

Dear Jamie and Kathy,

I was on a trip last week so did not send any comments to your questions. I have since received the responses of the other discussants. I don't think I can add much but have several comments below.

One of the themes we're exploring in our independent study is the history of the term "traditional ecological knowledge" or TEK and the various ways it has been used.

• ·When did you first hear the term TEK? Where did you hear it or from whom?

  I first used it in 1978 when researching traditional tenure practices in the Philippines but I am not sure where I first read it-probably from one of Bob Johannes's papers.

• What term do prefer and why? Do you use the term TEK or another term?
• What do you know about the history of the term TEK and its use?