Importance of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge

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Indigenous Ecological Knowledge (IEK) is a term you might have heard of but not know what it means.

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The Aboriginals lived within the Carrying Capacity of their Ecosystems, thus harmonising and maintaining the Biodiversity of their Ecosystems through the consumption of their Natural Resource Carrying Capacity.

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For thousands of years Aboriginal people survived in the Australian landscape relying on their intricate knowledge of the land and its plants and animals. Tracking and hunting, digging soakages and maintaining surface waters were just some of the ways that people survived the harsh desert environment and in turn developed important knowledge about ecological processes.

Traditional fire management practices stimulate new growth for preferred animal species and increase the abundance of favoured bush medicine and bush tucker plants. These practices are bound up with Aboriginal culture and spirituality and offer critical insights increasingly appreciated to be invaluable to the way we manage the environment now. But this priceless knowledge is under threat for a whole host of reasons and once gone can never be retrieved.

In an effort to preserve some of this environmental knowledge the CLC has given priority to facilitating and documenting these practices and insights so that they can continue to be available to future generations.

As part of a three-year CLC project funded through the Caring for our Country program, Aboriginal people have received training in recording older relatives on visits to traditional country, and the CLC has supported intergenerational country visits which take young and old people back to important cultural sites or traditional harvest areas so that elders can tell stories for places and pass on important IEK. In some of the IEK projects traditional knowledge has been combined with Western scientific methods to develop new approaches to manage some of the more contemporary threats to biodiversity that desert landscapes face today.

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Food

Traditional Indigenous people ate foods that they were able to find on the land, as they did not have shops or supermarkets like we do today. The types of foods available depended greatly on the group's location in Australia (desert or coastal areas) and on the seasons (summer, autumn, winter, spring).

Men and women had different roles when it came to providing food for the tribe. Women and children would often spend their days searching for and gathering food from the local area. They gathered things like fruits, nuts, seeds, roots, yams, witchetty grubs, insects, snakes, lizards, stalks, berries, edible leaves, honey, shellfish, lobster, pipis, crab, mussels and yabbies . The traditional role of the men was to hunt and fish for the meat to feed the tribe. They would spend their days making the necessary tools needed to catch and kill animals and then go out and track and stalk their prey. Traditional prey included kangaroos, ducks, goannas, fish, rabbits, small mammals and occasionally emus.

The changing seasons meant different foods were available. For this reason, many Indigenous tribes would travel to different areas to find different foods. The groups were able to read the land to determine the seasons. Tribes in wetter, coastal areas had a greater variety of foods than those that lived in arid, desert areas.

Most food was prepared by cooking it in a fire, roasting it on coals or steaming it. Most vegetation was eaten raw.

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The extent of Knowledge and the Relationship the Aboriginal Inhabitants have with the Land have been time consumingly woven into the fabric of their Evolutionary Existence for over Thousands of Years. This expanse of Time over Habitation has symbiotically strengthened their Co - Habitation with Biodiversity within their Ecosystems.

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The Valuable Knowledge that the Aboriginal People possess is extremely important in Australia's current situation of Climate Change Crisis. Better Land Management derived from thousands of years of Indigenous habitation can only strengthens Australia's Fragile Biodiversity in the Wake of Climate Change Chaos.