| Summary: | I attended the Society of Ethnobiology Annual Conference, held this year in the Denver Botanic Gardens in Denver Colorado. The session I presented in was entitled “Pursuing a ‘Good Life’ within Contested Landscapes: Ethnoecologies of Practice in Contemporary Perspective.” This session was co-organized with Dr. Iain Davidson-Hunt of the Natural Resource Institute of the University of Winnipeg. The general theme of the session deals with the relationship of mental and physical health and well being to activities on the land, and the difficulties in adapting to environmental change in continuing to seek a satisfying and healthy way of life. The papers in our session featured three Canadian First Nation groups, and one group from Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). My paper was co-authored with my Kaska collaborator and was entitled “Challenges to Connection: Changes in the land in ways of life in Kaska Dena Territory. Our paper spoke to changes in the Kaska Dena homeland in the southern Yukon, and the challenges faced by people attempting to continue to life a healthy life there. It was based in part on our 2010 Athabasca Research Grant to investigate Kaska Elders’ knowledge of environmental change. One of the challenges to connection for contemporary Kaska is loss of language, and other challenges include environmental impacts of resource development, and basic changes in the way of life because of school attendance and the wage economy. Kaska people are resilient, and are seeking to find ways forward which enable continuation of core values in the land, and maintenance of health. The paper following mine was co-presented by AU tutor Janelle Baker and her student Andrew Paul, entitled “Wehea Dayak Forest Guardians: Becoming men and practicing health.” This joint presentation described an ethnoecology project with Wehea Dayak. Mr. Paul is an undergraduate student who plans to major in anthropology, and he gave an impressive conference presentation. While at the congress I was able to hear a number of papers that dealt ...
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