Richard Nelson’s work with the Koyukon Athabascans of interior Alaska, published in the 1983 landmark study Make Prayers to the Raven, was a turning point.

Nelson had spent years living with and learning from Koyukon hunters and elders, and what he documented was a knowledge system of extraordinary sophistication — a detailed, empirically grounded understanding of the northern forest ecosystem that Western biology was only beginning to approach with its formal methods.

What Nelson found was not superstition or myth, though those existed alongside the ecological knowledge in Koyukon culture.

What he found, specifically relevant to ecology, was a body of behavioral observation about the animals of the northern forest — ravens, bears, moose, wolves, ptarmigan — that included details about seasonal behavior, habitat use, behavioral variation across individuals, and the relationships between species that were not available in any published scientific literature.