Provides Specific Information
Traditional Knowledge of an area, ecosystem, or species can be very
valuable. The indigenous people's intricate webs of knowledge form a ".
. . vast intellectual legacy, born of intimacy with the natural world"
(Nelson 1993). Berkes, Folke, and Gadgil (1994) and Merculieff (ND) give
many good examples. In many critical natural resource management
situations we don't have time to wait for research. We recognize that
science does not provide direction for decisions. Traditional Knowledge
can help provide understanding now. There are many situations where
results of "western" scientific studies were already well known
by indigenous people and where community-based Traditional Knowledge can
make a great difference. Local knowledge of Hudson Bay eider abundance,
distribution, behavior, and sustainability held by the Inuit provided
managers with baseline information and strategies for conserving and
developing a commercial harvest of eiderdown (McDonald and Fleming 1993;
Nakashima 1993). The Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC) was created
after the International Whaling Commission imposed a total ban on bowhead
whaling. The AEWC first mounted a court challenge to prevent the ban from
taking effect, then concentrated on filling the information gap between
the Western Science understanding of bowhead whale population levels and
the knowledge already held by Native whalers. The AEWC did this through
fostering scientific research which independently corroborated the
whalers' observations and understandings (Brelsford and McFarland 1996).
In 1991, scientific documentation showed an 83% decline in four key
seabird species in the Pribilof Islands of Alaska. The Pribilof Aleuts had
made those determinations more than a decade earlier, but managers chose
not to lend credence to Aleut Traditional Knowledge (Merculieff ND). A
major University spent $300,000 to determine if halibut forage off the sea
bottom in the Alaskan Aluetians. Resident Aluets already knew halibut do
this and specifically when and under what conditions - something not
addressed by the university study (Merculieff ND).
It is well written how Traditional Knowledge provides information on
ethnomedicine and medicinal resources of forests, particularly tropical
forests as well as agricultural knowledge and biological diversity. The
Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council recognized the importance of
Traditional Knowledge (Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council (1996): "As
astute observers of the natural world and its repositories of knowledge on
the long term changes in their biophysical environment, practitioners of
traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) can provide western biologists and
ecologists with systematic and analytical observations that cover many
years."