Seattle-based photographer Kiliii Yüyan’s new book is a global exploration of traditional ecological knowledge, showing how a selection of Indigenous communities have succeeded in conservation that is necessary for their cultural survival.
Guardians of Life: Indigenous Knowledge, Indigenous Science and Restoring the Planet depicts nine communities from Alaska to Ecuador, Mongolia to Greenland, and more. It includes essays by three other contributors explaining the importance of traditional ecological knowledge and other context behind these Indigenous survival stories.
Yüyan, who has Siberian ancestors, told KNKX he was born and raised away from his community. Yüyan’s interest in reconnecting with his heritage led him to take up Indigenous kayak building, using driftwood frames covered with marine mammal skins or bark. His grandmother’s stories about paddling with her dad to catch giant fish fueled his curiosity.
Finding a way home
Yüyan went to Alaska to learn more about kayak building with the Iñupiat people there. That planted the seed for the first chapter of the book. He said his time there, and being embraced by all the Indigenous cultures featured in the book, was like “finding my way home.”
“I try my best to just listen and learn and try to absorb and be a part of that community. And for me, it fills this place in my psyche and my soul that I really have needed, and it's made me grow in wonderful ways,” he said.
Photography was a natural next step for Yüyan. He said it was “a way to reach out and talk about culture to people in a way that was very real and authentic. And I started to go down that road.”
He said taking photographs is an important way to capture a feeling.
“It needs to grab you and seize you, in a way, by the heart,” he said. “It's really important that people feel something.”
“I'm not ever trying to beat people over the head with, like, ‘Feel this way or think this way.’ But people can't help but look at some of these beautiful landscapes and the people living with them and get the deeper message, which is that humans and the landscape belong together,” he said.
The first chapter depicts how the Iñupiat — faced with international regulations that would have shut down their traditional subsistence hunt of bowhead whales — managed to instead take management into their own hands and triple the bowhead whale population in just 30 years.
Staying put and taking care
That story sparked his curiosity about traditional ecological knowledge and his drive to document how it is playing out in other Indigenous communities around the world. He said what he found was a revelation.
“Most of the world's most beautiful places actually have people living in them, and it wasn't in spite of the people living in them; it was because of the people living in them,” he said.
The driving question in the book asks "why are Indigenous communities so often so good at conservation?”
Yüyan said there is an important through line.
“All of these communities have one thing: They have place-based knowledge, and they have a place-based love,” he said. “They have all of these systems that have evolved over thousands of years, being in a single place that is home. So they take care of it in a way that means they're home. They're not migratory. They're not leaving to other places when the going gets hard, or whatever. This is their home, and they're taking care of it.”
The book
Kiliii Yüyan will present his new book at a panel discussion 3 p.m. on Saturday at Village Books in Bellingham.
He will also be featured on Thursday as part of the BeWild series at The Mountaineers in Seattle.
The book is published by the nonprofit Braided River imprint of Mountaineers Books.
