Thomas Thornton (University of Oxford) | Thursday, November 29th 5:30 PM | 85 Waterman Room 015

Flood narratives are common in oral traditions of Northwest Coast and other Indigenous Peoples. Unlike Biblical floods, however, these floods are often linked to rising sea-levels, the same threat humans face today with global climate change in the Anthropocene. In Tlingit tradition, Southeast Alaska was consumed by an epic flood which is linked to the activities of Raven, the Trickster-Demiurge, who also became a catalyst for adaptation to the novel environments wrought by the Flood. Humans were forced to seek refuge in “stone nests” on high mountains which are said to have “saved the people” from the deluge. Tom Thornton suggests that these narratives, still invoked as encapsulations of resilience and adaptation, hold continuing relevance today in the face of anthropogenic climate change.

Tom Thornton is an Environmental Anthropologist with 30 years of research and teaching experience, most recently as Director of the Environmental Change and Management program at the Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK .  His research interests are in human ecology, climate change, adaptation, local and traditional ecological knowledge, conservation, coastal and marine environments, conceptualizations of space and place, and the political ecology of resource management among Indigenous peoples of the North Pacific. His most popular books are Being and Place among the Tlingit (2008) and Haa Léelk’w Has Aaní Saax’u / Our Grandparents’ Names on the Land (2012).

Supported by generous donors to the Shepard Krech III Lecture fund. Reception to follow.