Northern Plains Experience

• Indigenous knowledge is local knowledge, adapted to the culture and the ecology of each population, and matured over a period of time encompassing thousands of years.
• Indigenous people are both the poorest and the holders of the key to the future survival of humanity.

--Clarkson, Morrissette and Régallet, authors of Our Responsibility to the Seventh Generation, 1992

Other Indigenous Experience:

Indigenous Knowledge and Water Management in India's Thar Desert: In the difficult conditions of India's Thar Desert, Indigenous peoples have been able to evolve a sustainable livelihood around a sophisticated surface water collection system. This system involves water storage facilities, medium sized village pools and underground household water tanks, each facility being forested with vegetable species adapted to such arid conditions. Further, water hygiene rules have been so strictly applied that every form of pollution has been averted. The water harvesting has been coupled with the development of dry-farming technology: wheat cropping in the Khadin soils which retained enough moisture from stored monsoon water. The genius of the desert people was nowhere more manifest then in their weather forecast skills. They had successfully evolved a system of monsoon prediction, which was of extreme importance for this drought prone region. Long observance of the natural phenomenon and its classification, tested over a long period of history, helped to define a set of thumb rules for predicting the immediate future in terms of good or bad rains. The people came to possess a great deal of weather lore in the form of pithy sayings and terse verses. These Indigenous indicators of drought prediction, were woven into the rural folk culture used for prediction purposes. Positive correlation is observed through the behavioural changes among the indicators and the nature of the year predicted on the basis of social indicators, rainfall data and the extent of the kharif crop harvested. This data prepares the farmers socially and psychologically to face drought hazards and to help people in evolving adjustment mechanisms.

Key Web sites

• Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor
  
  
• Cultural Survival
  
  
• Survival International
  
  

© 2000 International Institute for Sustainable Development