Trail of Story, Traveller's Path

This volume is a sensitive examination of meanings of landscape, drawing on the author's rich experience with diverse environments and peoples: the Gitksan and Witsuwit'en of northwestern British Columbia, the Kaska Dena of the southern Yukon, and the Gwich'in of the Mackenzie Delta. Johnson maintains that the ways people understand and act upon land have wide implications, shaping cultures and ways of life, determining identity and polity, and creating and maintaining environmental relationships and economies. Johnson uses visual data to research and document the landscape, bringing together two usually separate areas of study. Her emphasis on landscape and ways of knowing the land provides a particular take on ecological relationships of First Peoples to land, in contrast to those of non-indigenous scientists. Trail of Story integrates detailed delineation of local knowledge of place with a broader exploration of local meanings of land

Leslie Main Johnson is Associate Professor in the Centre for Work and Community Studies and the Centre for Integrated Studies, Athabasca University. Her research interests include ethnoecology, traditional knowledge, ethnobiology, subsistence, and concepts of health and healing among northwestern Canadian First Nations. She is a co-editor of Landscape Ethnoecology, Concepts of Physical and Biotic Space, with Eugene S. Hunn.