Tending the Wild
Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources
By M. Kat Anderson, Edited by Eric W. Engles
$22.49 – Paperback
Tending the Wild brought Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to the forefront of ecological restoration, wildland management, and environmental history. It underscores the vital but often overlooked stewardship practices of Native peoples in the forests, grasslands, meadows, and chaparral of California.
This groundbreaking book has been utilized in classrooms, museum exhibits, tribal lands, federal resource agencies, and reading lists to inform management practices for public and tribal lands, support the re-wilding movement, guide private land restoration, and teach permaculture principles.
Professionals from the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service have relied on Tending the Wild as a resource, and it has appeared in television documentaries, influencing environmental thinkers and activists reexamining wilderness and the role of humans as stewards of nature.
For its achievement as an outstanding book in ethnobotany, Tending the Wild was honored with the Mary W. Klinger Award by the Society of Ethnobotany. Celebrated permaculture designer Ben Falk recognized it as one of the most important books for permanently solving food security. The book highlights the interconnectedness of humans, plants, and animals and the vital role Native practices play in shaping California’s rich biodiversity.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART 1. CALIFORNIA AT CONTACT
- Wildlife, Plants, and People
- Gathering, Hunting, and Fishing
- The Collision of Worlds
PART II. INDIGENOUS LAND MANAGEMENT AND ITS ECOLOGICAL BASIS
- Methods of Caring for the Land
- Landscapes of Stewardship
- Basketry: Cultivating Forbs, Sedges, Grasses, and Tules
- From Arrows to Weirs: Cultivating Shrubs and Trees
- California’s Cornucopia: A Calculated Abundance
- Plant Food Aboveground: Seeds, Grains, Leaves, and Fruits
- Plant Food Belowground: Bulbs, Corms, Rhizomes, Taproots, and Tubers
- Contemporary California Indian Harvesting and Management Practices
- Restoring Landscapes with Native Knowledge
Coda: Indigenous Wisdom in the Modern World
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Support Native Communities by purchasing Tending the Wild
Half of the royalties from this book support programs and projects of the California Indian Basketweavers Association and a fund for Native American writers at News from Native California. Your purchase contributes to preserving and honoring the cultural heritage of California’s Indigenous peoples.
Why Tending the Wild Matters
The book challenges long-standing myths about California’s landscapes as untouched wilderness, showcasing how Native Californians actively tended the land using fire, pruning, planting, and other ecological practices. These efforts transformed the environment into a managed, abundant landscape that supported diverse plant and animal life.
Native Practices and Modern Relevance
Through interviews and historical research, M. Kat Anderson illuminates the intricate relationship between California Native communities and the environment. Practices such as controlled burns helped maintain healthy forests and grasslands, reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfires—a lesson that is increasingly relevant today. The book offers a roadmap for integrating these time-tested methods into contemporary conservation efforts.
Stewardship and Sustainability
From cultivating seeds and plants to creating sustainable ecosystems, Native communities demonstrate that humans are integral to the health of the environment. This perspective shifts the narrative from humans as destroyers of nature to active participants in its stewardship. Tending the Wild provides tools and insights for balancing ecological preservation with human needs.
What people are saying about the usefulness and relevance of Tending the Wild
When first published, Tending the Wild unveiled to me a new understanding of indigenous people’s relationship with their natural surroundings. It was an awakening to learn that California landscapes were stewarded by Native Californians who actively nurtured their lands’ resources to provide. Today, as myself and other state and federal fire and resource managers grapple with the impacts of decades of fire suppression policy, climate change, and increased catastrophic fire, Tending the Wild now unveils a “roadmap” for how we should be embracing long-suppressed practices such as cultural burning to become more in tune with fire and our natural environment.
Jim Suero
Supervising Forester, Prescribed Fire Specialist
Calaveras Big Trees State Park
In the book Tending the Wild, I was really struck by how Kat Anderson was able to take what she learned through historical research and interviews with tribal elders about the human relationship to land and place and put it all into a context that is relatable to a broad diversity of people from different backgrounds. These ancient ecologic understandings can help point the way for modern land stewards.
Elena Rios
Xicana/Azteca Chichimeca/Chumash/Scot-Irish
Nature Connection Guide
Cultural Practitioner/Arts
The information in Tending the Wild caused me to fundamentally shift my understanding of how to implement fire on the landscape. Fire became not a fuels-management tool primarily, but rather a restoration tool for our native plants and animals, with fuels treatment being an ancillary outcome. Dr. Anderson highlights the incredible wisdom of California Indians who through their knowledge, customs, and practices were fundamental in generating one of the richest and most biodiverse environments on the planet. It is through this connectivity that I began to understand that we humans are integral partners with our native plants and animals—that they need us as much as we need them. We can become, along with the descendants of the indigenous people, the missing component in regenerating a rich biodiverse legacy. Indigenous management practices and knowledge are perhaps more relevant now than in any time in history.
Chris Paulus
CAL FIRE Battalion Chief, Retired
Prescribed Fire Workshop Instructor
I know of no other California-centered book which is as practically informative and wholly honoring of the time-immemorial wisdom of indigenous science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge as Tending the Wild. In the nearly two decades since it was first published, Kat Anderson’s tome has become indispensable, celebrating the bio-cultural complexity of California’s tribal communities, who are still here, while offering settler-colonist society an unparalleled reframing on how best to be regenerative guests on native lands. As the Land Back movement increasingly grows and thrives, Tending the Wild will continue to be valued as a foundational reference to inform and inspire this rematriation of “memory moving forward.”
Brock DolmanWildlife Biologist, Restoration Ecologist
Occidental Arts & Ecology Center Co-Founder
Miraculous and astonishing. . . M. Kat Anderson’s brilliant and respectful text addresses the region-by-region stewardship of the land by Native peoples prior to contact, the consequences of colonization, and the ongoing practice of traditional ecological knowledge by Native peoples. Her beautiful and meticulous illustrated guide, based on interviews with Native elders and informed by scientific methods, is critical to our institution’s introductory summer bridge program, and is central to teaching undergraduates and graduate students about Native histories, cultures, and modes of land management. Its portrayal of traditional ecological knowledge, including methods of obtaining food, tools, architecture, and other cultural resources, provides an unparalleled window into thousands of years of ecological and cultural history. A masterpiece.
Janet Hess, J.D., Ph.D.,Professor of Art History at Sonoma State University
(Former Chair of Native American Studies & CalNAGPRA Tribal Liaison for SSU)