Many native North American cultures have origins that predate Confucius, who lived five hundred years before the birth of Christ. For generations the people of these traditions have thrived under conditions that many view as harsh if not hostile. Through their close association with nature, members of native communities have created complex systems for cooperating with one another and living within their environments.

Learning Native Wisdom: What Traditional Cultures Teach Us about Subsistence, Sustainability, and Spirituality explains how to nurture a society by closely observing the traditions of various native cultures. Author Gary Holthaus explores the need to live sustainably, in harmony with the land, in order to preserve our cultures, communities, and humankind itself. Holthaus asserts that all cultures are subsistence cultures: urban or rural, all humans depend on the land and its provisions for survival.

Humankind is facing a convergence of environmental forces: climate change, oil depletion, loss of water, loss of topsoil, and species die-off of proportions that exceed those of the past 65 million years. Learning Native Wisdom shows that any path to a feasible future includes elements of both subsistence and spirituality. The book offers a way to confront our imperiled future and find our way toward a place where we can create a future.

Gary Holthaus is the author of several books, including From the Farm to the Table: What All Americans Need to Know about Agriculture and Wide Skies: Finding a Home in the West.

Reviews:

"Holthaus presents . . . a work enriched by the more than 25 years he lived among Native peoples in Alaska. He illuminates the sharp distinctions between the long-term view taken by Native peoples regarding the connection between nature and humans, and the 'immediate return' goals of the U.S. economy, exemplified by our 'frantic hunt for the last barrel of oil'."--Booklist

"Holthaus shows us with infinite care how our desire for sustainability in many dimensions--agriculture, environment, economy, to name a few--can never be achieved without the support of a sustainable culture. Drawing on age-old wisdom, he argues that subsistence, sustainability and spirituality must go hand in hand if we are to make our lives and our world healthy and whole. Without romanticizing traditional cultures, he uses their experiences to demonstrate that we humans at one time lived in this world in more sustainable ways and that, knowing this, we have the possibility to do so again."--David D. Chrislip

"Learning Native Wisdom teaches that we are all 'native' to this earth. The wisdom embedded in that is not exotic, primitive, or 'other' but is embedded in the ancient, practical daily lifeways passed down for millennia by all our ancestors, functional, sustainable (ethical), and broadly spiritual. Developed world societies are also subsistence cultures, at the moment locked into hunting and gathering the shrinking resource oil. With wisdom comes gratitude, manners, and care for creation. Holthaus quotes his farmer friend who says 'no use talking about sustainable agriculture if you don't have a sustainable culture.' This book is just what we need. It is deeply informed by Gary Holthaus's many years teaching and working in the Alaskan bush."--Gary Snyder

"Learning Native Wisdom is perhaps the most profound and right-on-dead-center narrative I have read in a decade. These musings are uncannily brilliant in the way they refresh our sense of the already-hackneyed term sustainability . This book engages readers as if they are in active dialogue with a great mind and are being asked to think as deeply and passionately as the writer."--Gary Paul Nabhan

"This is story-telling as learned from [Holthaus's] Indian and Eskimo friends and mentors in Alaska, with a brilliance that is refreshing because it is rooted in experience. Anyone interested in sustainability will find this book engaging and different."-Craig Gerlach, Agricultural History