People and Plants online workshop, by Inbal Livne.

 Part of the 'People and Plants: Reactivating Ethnobotanical Collections as Material Archives of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge' AHRC networking project, this workshop (July 14 2022) bridged the gap between the first two in-person sessions, in March at the Powell-Cotton Museum, and in November at National Museums Scotland. While the in-person meetings are focused on collections particular to each museum, the online session was an opportunity to talk across geographies and institutions, thinking about the connectedness of ecologies and people and plant relations in Australia, Canada and the African continent.

Short talks by each of the invited speakers were made available via the project’s YouTube channel prior to the event. Due to illness speaker Naima Hassan was unable to attend and so the workshop was based on the talks by Nancy Turner and James Tylor.

Nancy Turner, an ethnobotanist who has worked with First Nations elders and cultural specialists in northwest North America for over 50 years, reflected on ethnobotany’s application to contemporary environmental issues. Visual artist, researcher and writer James Tylor discussed the process of reviving, practicing and continuing Kaurna cultural plant knowledge and care of the environment in South Australia, as a living museum collection. 

The discussion began with James expanding on the issues of land management and fragile eco-systems, and the specific impacts of colonisation and European land management frameworks on Indigenous landscapes. Using kangaroo grass as an example, James discussed the nuanced and complex systems of land management by Kaurna people that had allowed the grass to flourish, in contrast to the impact of European agricultural practices (plants and animals) on Indigenous plant health today. A repeating theme of the workshop was this balance of co-existence between species, and the way in which colonial understandings of land use ignored, and continue to ignore, the importance of site-specific ecology. As James noted, today kangaroo grass can mostly be found growing between the roads and farmland, not on the farmland itself, and only at a fraction of its former height.

Nancy responded by noting the parallels between land practices in Australia and Canada, and the similar impacts of colonial land management. She noted the physical changes in the landscape that have come about today, because of the different – European – plants that were introduced by colonisers. Using the example of a species of clover, Nancy spoke about how, much like the kangaroo grass, clover could be found all around Victoria and was a common food source. These changes to the plant-scape over time, as the city changed and grew, are reflected in herbarium collections, forming a historical record. Therefore, she notes, we must continue to document and collect, to keep those records going for future generations.

As Ali Clark, session chair, noted, these institutional specimens become markers of change, and as those people who care for such specimens in museums, we need to better understand their role as a record of the holistic nature of ecosystems.

The conversation then moved on more specifically to land management, and James began with a fascinating and detailed explanation of the importance of Indigenous land management in Australia. Focusing on the area around Adelaide, he described how the land has been damaged by colonisation and the building of the city. Colonisers were wealthy and wanted a British feel to the city, determined to build European landscapes in environmental conditions that were inappropriate. James noted that South Australia has one of the highest rates of plant extinction in Australia, largely due to land mismanagement by colonisers. Burning, James noted, was a particular area in which European land management continued to be hugely detrimental to the landscape. Catastrophic bushfires come from the continued Euro-centric attitude of the Australian government to fire – a position in which fire is a bad thing. Where the fire departments do burn, it is done at the time of year to best remove fuel load, not when is best for the environment and plants. By contrast, Indigenous fire management is about doing it at the right time, in the right part of the cycle of the plants. The optimal time to burn for plants, is late summer/autumn, which goes against European cultural norms. It has taken recent catastrophic fires, which have led to the deaths of millions of animals, for the Australian government to see the advantage of low-temperature, controlled, Indigenous burning techniques.

James passionately talked about how fire has a beautiful cycle. When Aboriginal people arrived in Australia, they realised they could manage the land through burning in a way that was optimal for all ecosystems. It a system that Aboriginal people have been refining through observations of nature for tens of thousands of years.

In response, Nancy reflected on land management systems in Canada, and the impact of Euro-centric systems. She noted that colonisers carved up the land in line with their agricultural traditions and plants in European ways. In Western Canada, colonisers were blind to the nuanced land management systems that already existed. Indigenous communities weren’t growing annual, seeded crops, but were managing perennials that needed year on year cultivation in different ways. These developments are documented in herbarium specimens and ethnographic accounts.

The discussion turned to knowledge systems and the value we place – now and historically – on different forms of knowledge. In the case of Australia, James noted, the British Empire invaded at the height of its powers. At the same time, ‘science’ was carving up the various academic disciplines, breaking down and categorising the world in a very individualised way. For a culture (European) where an understanding of the world was broken down in this way, the complex way in which Aboriginal communities understood the interrelationships of plants, people and animals in ecosystems, was just too advanced for European thinking. And James notes that how we value Aboriginal knowledge continues to be influenced by historic European scientific thinking but ‘there are 3000 generations of observations of the land in Indigenous communities, but only 300 years of European scientific understanding’. Adding to this, Nancy noted that it is not just eco-systems, but biocultural systems of accumulated knowledge across the generations.

For the last part of the workshop, the floor was opened to questions. The first asked whether indigenous knowledge was, and could be, retained down the generations, or whether there was a risk of loss in the present day. Both James and Nancy felt positive about the future. James also reflected on the fact that living culture is something continuous and active, that would continue to grow and expand. By collecting plants or cultural objects from indigenous peoples, museums have removed these from use. James argued that museums run the risk of becoming stagnant and that it is important for museums to reflect this living culture to avoid presenting cultures as static

The next question was for James, asking what the role of his artistic practice is within the concept of the ‘living museum’. James responded by noting that Aboriginal people practice culture in the broadest sense, not as ‘art’, rather, taking a holistic view.

The final question looked to the future, and asked if the speakers thought, given the discussion on complex and fragile local-ecosystems, museum collecting practices could be adapted to better reflect that holistic view, to make them more relevant and useful outside of the museum, particularly to indigenous communities. Nancy responded by sharing an example of a digging implement, which she had to hand and could share on screen. She discussed the contextualisation of the crop it was associated with and the importance of tools, recordings, photographs and references to writing that pointed people to where they could see these cultural activities in action.

To finish the event, James set us – as museum professionals – a challenge. He noted that living cultures continue to evolve and that museums contain static collections that could become less and less relevant to the communities they represent. He challenged museums to work more with communities, to provide that context and keep that relevance going forward.

For more information on the People and Plants project please visit:

People and Plants: investigating natural history and ethnography collections in museums (nms.ac.uk)

The project is supported by the Museum Ethnographers Group and the Natural Sciences Collections Association.

Inbal Livne

Curator, Diversifying Collections

John Rylands Library, University of Manchester