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Tribes
- the Culture of Extreme Landscapes
Extreme landscapes ultimately shape the people who inhabit them. A
landscape’s severity, conditions and climate all contribute to
traditions, languages and survival skills unique to each
individual area. The cultural diversity of extreme environments is
priceless.
From the Inuit of Greenland to the Andean
Incas, from Tibetan nomads to Japanese Yamabushi monks, extreme
landscapes have inspired rich cultural traditions. How are these
cultures shaped by the wild and savage places in which they live,
and what impact do they, in turn, have on these landscapes?
Chief John Snow Sr. is a respected Nakoda Elder, traditional
storyteller, poet, and author. Award-winning author Gretel Ehrlich has spent much of
the last nine years with the Inuit in northern Greenland, absorbed
in their lives as well as in the starkness of the long night of
winter and the long day of an Arctic summer. Chris Rainier’s
well-known cultural photographs have placed him in the unusual
position of being an interface between remote, sometimes secretive
societies and the widespread dissemination of imagery. Rob Torkildson has participated in the Yamabushi tradition of
multi-day mountain enchainments by modern-day Japanese monks. In all cases,
these practitioners bring a solid knowledge of the past and a
practical perspective of the present; they have seen the threads
that connect generations and those that have been broken forever.
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