From prestonh@home.com Tue Jan 4 14:15:41 2000 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id OAA29628 for ; Tue, 4 Jan 2000 14:15:38 -0800 Received: from mail.rdc1.wa.home.com (imail@ha1.rdc1.wa.home.com [24.0.2.66]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id OAA07473 for ; Tue, 4 Jan 2000 14:15:37 -0800 Received: from C931275-A ([24.0.234.36]) by mail.rdc1.wa.home.com (InterMail v4.01.01.00 201-229-111) with SMTP id <20000104221536.LINA3520.mail.rdc1.wa.home.com@C931275-A> for ; Tue, 4 Jan 2000 14:15:36 -0800 X-Sender: prestonh@mail X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.0 Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2000 13:47:16 -0800 To: indknow@u.washington.edu From: "Preston D. Hardison" Subject: Pub: Paul Cox on IK Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-Id: <20000104221536.LINA3520.mail.rdc1.wa.home.com@C931275-A> The full text of a recent editorial opinion by P.A. Cox is available at: Paul Alan Cox Science 287(5450): 44-45 January 07 2000 ESSAY ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: Will Tribal Knowledge Survive the Millennium? http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/287/5450/44 ------------------ Related article: Tribal Healers Dying Off: Scientist fears Indian wisdom may become lost Sunday, January 2, 2000 BY LEE SIEGEL THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE Tribal healers are perishing and their wisdom vanishing as fast as endangered plants are going extinct -- a crisis that threatens efforts to derive new medicines from the world's vegetation, a Brigham Young University biologist warns. "An increasing number of aged healers are dying with their knowledge left unrecorded," ethnobotanist Paul Alan Cox wrote in an essay in Friday's issue of the journal Science. "Will tribal knowledge survive this millennium? If it doesn't, the world will be far poorer for its loss." During an interview, Cox urged Utah residents to treat American Indians with dignity and to learn from them and from foreigners who live in the state. Cox, a botany professor and former dean at BYU in Provo, is on indefinite, long-term leave while he lives on the Hawaiian island of Kauai and serves as director of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, a system of five tropical gardens and two preserves in Hawaii and Florida. The gardens now preserve 787 endangered species, and more are being collected from the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. Cox said the gardens also try to preserve tribal knowledge by having native healers, weavers, farmers and shipwrights teach classes and grow native plants such as taro, breadfruit, kava and medicinal plants. "While many scientists understand the need to preserve biodiversity, few understand the need to preserve cultural diversity -- particularly indigenous knowledge systems," Cox said in an e-mail message from Hawaii. "Scientists should learn to listen to indigenous people. Many indigenous cultures have remarkable knowledge and insights. We should preserve this knowledge for future generations." Cox also pleaded for people to listen to the Goshute Indians, despite "the current brouhaha" over Goshute efforts to allow construction of a nuclear waste dump on tribal land in Skull Valley. Of several hundred Goshutes living in Utah and Nevada, fewer than 20 are fluent speakers of their native language, and when they die "their language and much of their culture will disappear forever," Cox wrote in Science. "Among the 20 are elders whose experience as little children is extraordinary: they were raised as hunter-gatherers in the high deserts of the Great Basin. The desert life they decsribed from their childhoods is not, however, one of deprivation. ... By tracking a diverse palette of edible roots and tubers, a desert habitat that might otherwise appear foreboding was transformed for them into a moveable feast. Unlike agricultural peoples dependent on a few crops, the Goshutes could rely on many plant and insect species for nourishment." Yet, Cox said a Goshute matriarch told him "her grandchildren would rather watch television than listen to stories of a now forgotten way of life." In his e-mail to the Tribune, Cox noted Goshute knowledge of edible sego lily bulbs "saved the lives of my ancestors and other Mormon colonists in the Great Basin. ... How many people have ever taken the time to go talk to the Goshutes and learn from them? How many people realize what remarkable folks they are and what stores of knowledge they possess? Why can't we treat them with dignity -- as a real treasure for our state?" Cox said Utah "is a treasure chest for ethnobotanical studies" of plant-based foods and medicines because the state "is very rich in indigenous cultures," including the Paiute, Najavo, Ute and Goshute tribes and the nearby Shoshone, Hopi and Apache. He also cited Utah's immigrants from Samoa, Tonga, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador and Tibet. In his essay, Cox said: "Whether the cause is considered to be the touted superiority of Western technology, the introduction of foreign money and goods, or the siren call of a new culture to young people, few indigenous societies have been able to withstand the onslaught of Western culture." Cox recounted his work in Western Samoa, where native healers taught him about herbal medicines, including prostatin, a drug derived from the mamala tree that shows potential for protecting cells from AIDS and other viruses. He noted 119 plant-derived substances now are used worldwide as drugs, while other drugs are synthesized to copy natural molecules in plants. He said drugs from plants used in tribal medicine include reserpine, which combats high blood pressure; digitalis, used to control abnormal heart rhythyms; and vincristine, for treating children with leukemia. Yet one of every eight known plant species is "threatened with immediate extinction," while "numerous undiscovered species pass from the world unrecorded and unmourned," he said. "Even with new technology, it appears that one of the best sources for finding plant species to test is still the healer's pouch because such plants have often been tested by generations of indigenous people," Cox wrote. He praised increasing scientific activism to protect plant species and respect tribal medicinal knowledge. "Indigenous peoples are no longer feared as the savages once portrayed by Hollywood, indigenous religious concepts are no longer reviled as pagan, and indigenous healers -- once denigrated as witch doctors -- are no longer riculed," he wrote. Nevertheless, Cox said he worries "whether these advances will occur fast enough to overtake the current rates of plant extinction and indigenous culture loss." Copyright (c) 2000 by the Salt Lake City Tribune. 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