Interdisciplinarity, Native Resilience, and How the Riddles Can Teach Wildlife Law in an Era of Rapid Climate Change

Abstract

Among Athabascans, the traditional ways of grandfathers and grandmothers are expressed in riddles so that these ways are retained in longterm memory and oral tradition. Riddles often make little sense to the Western natural scientist; sometimes they take other narrative forms like parables, sometimes they are stories cloaked as rebukes, and sometimes they express what scientists might term “paranormal” realities. Common to all is that these riddles are composed to make the listener think, but they seem intangible to those disciplines based on Enlightenment humanist thought, founded on the Cartesian logic that assumes “I think, therefore I am.” Riddles are intangible in a world where only humans can think, know, and act, an assumption that perpetuates only one kind of logic about how the world works. Yet when Chief Isaac spoke of luck and stories of tricks with our medicine, it interdisciplinarity, native resilience, and How the riddles Can teach wildlife law in an era of rapid Climate Change