Congratulations to Dr. Sharon Fuller for her article “Indigenous Ontologies: Gullah Geechee Traditions and Cultural Practices of Abundance,” published in Human Ecology (2021). Dr. Fuller presents ethnographic data and argues that stewardship, sharing, and cooperative practices among the Gullah Geechee of South Carolina, descendants of enslaved West Africans, manifest and produce both abundance and autonomy. “Their intimate knowledge of local ecology and available resources yields abundances not available to others. Their cultural practices exemplify the power of giving fundamental to their indigenous ontology of communal wellbeing and the cultural values of reciprocity, sharing, and cooperation. They do not regard themselves and either powerless or poor: ‘As long as we have access to the land, abundance is possible.’ The Gullah understandings of natural resource use, accumulated over centuries of relative remoteness, ingenuity, autonomy, and interconnectedness with the land, sea, community, and lineage, suggests that indigenous ontologies offer alternate ways to conceptualize indignity in the Americas.”
