Indigenous ecological knowledge is not mythology with footnotes — it is the result of thousands of years of careful, multigenerational observation tested against the hardest criterion available: survival in a particular place over a very long time. Western science has been slowly discovering that it was preceded, and sometimes surpassed, in its conclusions by people who had no laboratories but had everything else. Nasreddin would have noted that being the last to know something you should have known first is its own kind of education.
Each step builds on the last.