Sovereignty and Sustainability in Mohegan Ethnobotanical Literature

Abstract

This commentary contends that sustainability can be most useful if understood not as an endpoint or condition, but as an epistemology that attends to continually evolving interactions among ecological and human systems. My case study is a carefully delimited Native American literary tradition: the writing of medicine people from the Mohegan tribal nation, located in what is now Connecticut. I present this body of work neither to romanticize “ecological Indians,” nor to explicate the texts’ ethnobotanical content. Rather, I observe that Mohegan medicine people have used, extended and subverted the conventions of post-Enlightenment ethnobotany. They have used writing to preserve their traditional ecological knowledge, but not in ways that simply document that knowledge, which would render it vulnerable to theft and misuse. Instead, these texts emphasize relations of reciprocity—between text and orality, between Mohegans and non-Mohegans, between humans and plants.