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Narrating Indigenous Histories of Climate Change in the Americas and Pacific

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The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History

Abstract

This chapter examines the kinds of stories that scholars have been telling about climate history and indigenous societies in the Americas and Pacific islands. Climate historians structure information into narratives, interpreting a range of oral traditions, pictorial representations, written documents, archaeological findings, and proxy data. As scholars have begun to analyze smaller-scale indigenous responses to climate over the past five centuries, their stories have featured themes of continuous change, survival, and adaptation. If earlier studies focused on collapse, newer works have uncovered evidence of resilience and ongoing struggles for power and livelihood.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For exemplary recent books reviewed below, authored respectively by an anthropologist, geographer, and three historians, see Cruikshank, 2005; Endfield, 2008; Carey, 2010; Cushman, 2013; Zappia, 2014.

  2. 2.

    On Mayan society, see Demarest, 2004; Gill, 2000; Webster, 2002; Haug et al., 2003; Peterson and Haug, 2005; Pringle, 2009. On Cahokia, see Benson et al., 2009; Calloway, 2003, 99, 103. On ancestral Puebloans, see Benson et al., 2007. On the MCA, see also Fagan, 2008; Foster, 2012; Richter, 2011; Anderson, 2001; Jones et al., 1999; Stine, 1998. On the “convergence” and “complementarity” of archaeology and oral tradition, in addition to those cited below, see Crowell and Howell, 2013, 3.

  3. 3.

    Zappia, 2014, 18–40; Cruikshank, 2005.

  4. 4.

    Carey, 2012, 239. For big history, see Brooke, 2014. On narrative, see Endfield and Daniels, 2009; Cronon, 1992.

  5. 5.

    For relevant surveys of global climate history, see Carey, 2012, 2014; White, 2012. For North American climate history, see White et al., 2015. For Latin American climate history, see Prieto and García-Herrera, 2009; Diaz and Stahle, 2007; Cushman, forthcoming. For Pacific climate history, see Nunn, 2007. For a review of historical geography, see Offen, 2014.

  6. 6.

    On cultural diversity, see especially Salick and Ross, 2009. On indigenous knowledge and climate, see especially Green and Raygorodetsky, 2010.

  7. 7.

    For the Caribbean, not covered here, see Cushman, forthcoming. For limited attention to sixteenth-century indigenous knowledge of hurricanes and climatic phenomena in the Caribbean, see Schwartz, 2015, 5–9, 23–4, 36–7; Mulcahy, 2006, 14–16, 21, 34–35, 37, 40, 51.

  8. 8.

    On indigenous activists and tribal members responding to global warming, and the consequences for climate history, see especially Carey, 2012, 239. On traditional peoples and climate change, see Salick and Ross, 2009. For African climate history, see McCann, 1999; Webb, 1995. For Australia, see Anderson, 2016.

  9. 9.

    Cruikshank, 2005, 8, 31, 39. See also Cruikshank, 2001.

  10. 10.

    Aporta, 2011, 9, 10, 16; Kaplan and Woollett, 2000; Crowell and Howell, 2013.

  11. 11.

    Aporta, 2011, 12; Wright, 2014; Bravo, 2009; Wilson and Smith, 2011; Watt-Cloutier, 2015.

  12. 12.

    Fitzgerald, 2012, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 46.

  13. 13.

    Rice, 2009, 12, 30–31, 45, 48–49; Halttunen, 2011, 520–21. See also Richter, 1992.

  14. 14.

    Hall, 2015.

  15. 15.

    Zappia, 2014, 32, 36, 38, 42; Carter, 2009, 52, 69–74.

  16. 16.

    Zappia, 2014, 28–29, 35–36; Carter, 2009, 40.

  17. 17.

    White, 2014; Van West et al., 2013; Blackhawk, 2006. See also White, 2015; Spicer, 1962.

  18. 18.

    Paar, 2009; Blanton, 2013; White, 2017.

  19. 19.

    Mancall, 2009, 2013; Kupperman, 2007; Bilodeau, 2014; Stahle et al., 1998; Blanton, 2000, 2004; Grandjean, 2011; Piper and Sandlos, 2007; Parker, 2013; White, 2017.

  20. 20.

    Anderson, 1999, 16–17, 24, 59–61; Carter, 2009, 184–87; Knaut, 1995, 61, 161–62, 183; Ivey, 1994; Blackhawk, 2006; Wickman, 2015; Morrissey, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c.

  21. 21.

    On the way LIA conditions attracted human migration onto the Plains, see Hämäläinen, 2008, 22, 2010, 177; Calloway, 2003, 272. On Comanches’ evolving ecological strategy and migration patterns, see Hämäläinen, 2010, 176, 177, 183, 187, 194, 196. On the winter vulnerability of horses, see Hämäläinen, 2008, 240, 2010, 193–95.

  22. 22.

    Binnema, 2001, 19, 21, 24, 32, 47, 48, 49, 50, 141, 142, 143, 153.

  23. 23.

    Hodge, 2012, 366, 368, 374, 376–77, 382–83, 386–87. On winter counts, see also Gallo and Wood, 2015; Fenn, 2014; Therrell and Trotter, 2011; Greene and Thornton, 2007. For a study of Northwest Alaska around the same period, see Jacoby et al., 1999.

  24. 24.

    Hämäläinen, 2008, 296, 297, 361; Jacoby, 2013.

  25. 25.

    Weisiger, 2009, 43–7, 131, 138–40, 163, 239.

  26. 26.

    Stahle et al., 2000; Acuña-Soto et al., 2002, 2004.

  27. 27.

    Endfield, 2008, 96, 127, 154.

  28. 28.

    Endfield, 2008, 8, 13, 112, 126.

  29. 29.

    Endfield, 2008, 15, 66–69, 82–84, 87.

  30. 30.

    Skopyk, 2010, iv, v, 5, 6, 10, 16, 18, 19, 26, 46.

  31. 31.

    Fagan, 2008; Binford et al., 1997; Cushman, 2015, 40–41, 57–63, 66–78; Carey, 2012, 236; Chepstow-Lusty et al., 2009; Miller, 2007, 41–2; Carey, 2010, 35; Gregory Cushman, personal communication, 28 September 2015; Cushman, forthcoming. See also Young and Lipton, 2006.

  32. 32.

    Cushman, 2013, 70; Aceituno et al., 2009; Caviedes, 2001, 100–08. On the 1877–79 crises around the world, see Davis, 2001. On ENSO, see also Fagan, 2008; Sandweiss and Quilter, 2008; Davis, 2001; Glantz, 2001.

  33. 33.

    Carey, 2010, 5, 24.

  34. 34.

    Carey, 2010, 15, 47, 48, 50.

  35. 35.

    Carey, 2010, 36, 42, 50–1, 54–5.

  36. 36.

    Carey, 2010, 4, 5, 15, 40, 44, 177.

  37. 37.

    Nunn, 2007, 121, 136, 140; Goodwin et al., 2014. See also Nunn and Britton, 2001; Jones, 2014b, 126.

  38. 38.

    Nunn, 2007, 137–38, 142, 149. On the northern Pacific, see Jones, 2014a, 2014b, 126, 130.

  39. 39.

    Cushman, 2013, 21, 85–6, 96, 109, 112, 114, 116–17, 230–31.

  40. 40.

    McNamara and Gibson, 2009; Farbotko and Lazrus, 2012.

  41. 41.

    Lewis and Maslin, 2015; Steffen et al., 2007; Ruddiman, 2005.

  42. 42.

    Chakrabarty, 2009.

  43. 43.

    Carey, 2012, 239; Green and Raygorodetsky, 2010.

  44. 44.

    Needham, 2014; Carey, 2010, 5. See also Aijazi and David, 2015; Chamberlain, 2000; Sabin, 1998; Santiago, 1998.

  45. 45.

    Maldonado et al., 2013; Klein, 2014; Grossman and Parker, 2012; Turner and Clifton, 2009.

  46. 46.

    Cruikshank, 2005; Skopyk, 2010.

  47. 47.

    Carey, 2012; 2014.

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Wickman, T. (2018). Narrating Indigenous Histories of Climate Change in the Americas and Pacific. In: White, S., Pfister, C., Mauelshagen, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43020-5_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43020-5_30

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