This book is the first comprehensive examination of how the first people to inhabit what is now the Pacific Northwest managed the land on which they lived.

Rarely does a collection of essays provide a cohesive and convincing argument, but Keeping it Living accomplishes this admirably. …Undoubtedly, this fine collection can be used by other scholars to consider later developments.

[O]f all the ways that B.C.’s aboriginal people have been imagined, represented, described, and understood, the one characterization that has persisted is the idea that they just weren’t the sort of people who transformed landscapes the way Europeans did. They didn’t cultivate plants or tend crops… That last and most persistent misapprehension was already entrenched as a tenet of academic faith in the earliest days of Northwest Coast anthropology but is only now being thoroughly reconsidered, thanks largely to Nancy J. Turner, a U.Vic ethnobotanist of boundless energy and curiosity. For her efforts, Turner is beloved among dozens of British Columbia’s aboriginal communities. With Keeping It Living, Turner and co-editor Douglas Deur of the University of Washington have mustered a broad body of evidence that is a full-on assault upon the hunter-gatherer orthodoxy. Joined by a dozen other academics whose contributions enliven this book, Turner and Deur present a picture of aboriginal life that is utterly different from the sort found in the conventional literature.