Secwepemc Plant Talk: A view beyond taxonomy

Indigenous plant taxonomies of the North American Northwest, including the Interior of British Columbia, have received attention since the earlier work of Nancy Turner (1974), and at least in passing, through subsequent publications (Turner, Ignace and Ignace 2000, Peacock and Turner 2000), with further work in press or forthcoming (Ignace and Ignace, Ignace, Turner and Ignace). Following up on previous ethnobotanical and ethnobiological work, since the early 2000s, the authors have carried out further refined work on Secwepemc plant and animal terminologies and how people talk(ed) about plants in Secwepemctsin, the Shuswap language. These invite a re-thinking of earlier universal taxonomy-oriented work (e.g. Berlin 1992). In this presentation, we will reconsider how Secwepemc speakers describe plant and animal knowledge  in connection to wider geo-ecological knowledge and systems. As we will show, in the Secwepemc case there are numerous principles at odds with Berlinian folk taxonomy paradigms, the latter privileging either/or categories, or narrowly consititued domains. Instead, we will consider a perspective that entails the notion that Secwepemc ethnobiological knowledge is part of a wider ontological and epistemological system that fuses physiolological knowledge of species with observed knowledge and experience of behaviour, perceived physiological similarities, ecological indicator relations and "sign metonomies", observed human--plant-animal relationships, only part of which are economical. These, in turn are historically constituted and embedded in  spiritual relationships, and, last not least, their poetic expressions in song, prayer and proverb. Of central concern to solving the issue of how people talk of plant and animal "species" as part of environmental discourse is research on not only "taxa" as noun words for plants and animals, but on a wider range of morphological and syntactic ways in which Secwepemc speakers in dialogue and narrative consider environment, plants and animals.  In other words, we make a case for involving linguistic knowledge much beyond the lexicon of species in considering knowledge of environment, including plants and animals. This is what Secwepemc speakers refer to as sucwemúlecwem - knowledge of land as process, where "land" entails geological, geographic and geophysical relations, along with the observation, behaviour and movement of species. Ethnobiological knowledge thus exists as much in verbs and ways of doing and movement as in  what comes across as nouns.  We further briefly discuss how these findings relate to present and future pathways of researching ecological knowledge of indigenous peoples in other parts of the world.