Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants can serve as a guide for forestry and natural resource practitioners to develop deeper understandings of reciprocity, living relations, and the robust nature of Indigenous science.
Join Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, on Friday, March 26th (1pm-2pm PST) for an engaging second talk as part of Forest(Reads). This Faculty of Forestry Initiative aims to incorporate diverse perspectives and teachings into course curricula and foster conversation around complex forestry and conservation topics. This event is hosted by UBC’s Faculty of Forestry, UBC Library, and the Simon K. Y. Lee Global Lounge, with special thanks to Xwi7xwa Library, and AlumniUBC for their contributions. The talk will be followed by a conversation with UBC Professor Daniel Heath Justice (English and First Nations and Indigenous Studies) and a moderated questions and answer session.
About Robin Wall Kimmerer
Dr Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. She tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both Indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability.
As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.
About Daniel Heath Justice
Daniel Heath Justice is a Colorado-born citizen of the Cherokee Nation, appointed as Professor in the Department of English and the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. His work in Indigenous literary studies takes up questions and issues of kinship, belonging, sexuality, personhood, and nationhood, and attends to the intersections between Indigenous literatures, speculative fiction, and the other-than-human. His published and pending books include Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, the animal cultural histories Badger and, in June, Raccoon, the Indigenous epic fantasy trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder, and the co-edited collection (with Ojibwe historian Jean M. O’Brien), Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege, forthcoming this year from the University of Minnesota Press.
