This is John Bachelor.

Conversation with Professor Lila Philip, or book Beaverland, is a phenomenon because it tells us about an animal that was very badly damaged by early pioneers and settlers who nearly wiped

it out on the East Coast. Beaverland, how one weird road and made America.

Beaverland is working very hard today to clean up and build the rivers.

However, Lala here tells the story of the Great Beaver, the story that the Native Americans

always told about the Beaver's work in North America long before the

Europeans were here. The Great Beaver and his struggle with the Godhead, the boss, and is challenged by the Native Americans, the great beaver.

Here's Lila Philip, more of this later.

People's who have always lived here understood the ecological importance of the beaver to the water web basically and that's why Western science has called them a

Keystone species. I think in indigenous ecological knowledge we might talk about beavers as a

keystone relative which which implies more of a relation but I start beverland

with the Algonquin story, which is a story of here in the east all up and down the eastern seaboard of how the great beaver formed the Connecticut River Valley. So this mischievous beaver takes too much water. the just won't and the creator has to discipline the beaver and chases him all up and down the eastern

seaboard which forms a lot of the topography of not just the Atlantic seaboard but into the Great Lakes.

And you know, there are many Algonquian stories

of the dangers of hoarding resources.

So it's kind of a teaching tale.

It's a really wonderful subversive, I think, very funny story because

woodland peoples had enough beaver and had enough water most of the time so they would

hunt beaver some of the time.