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Author Visit: Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, "Braiding Sweetgrass"

This guide showcases the upcoming visit to Otterbein of Braiding Sweetgrass author Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer.

About

A photo of a woman standing next to a birch tree trunk.  She is wearing a brightly colored and patterned top and has grey hair past her shoulders.

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 Teachings 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. In 2022, Braiding Sweetgrass was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith. This new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us.

Robin 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 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. In 2022 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

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. 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 lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild."

(Biography taken from her website, linked below)

2022 MacArthur Fellow

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a member of the MacArthur Foundation's MacArthur Fellows Program class of 2022.  

Per the MacArthur Foundation website, which can be accessed at this link:

”I’m a Potawatomi scientist and a storyteller, working to create a respectful symbiosis between Indigenous and western ecological knowledges for care of lands and cultures. Biodiversity loss and the climate crisis make it clear that it’s not only the land that is broken, but our relationship to land. Both are in need of healing—and both science and stories can be part of that cultural shift from exploitation to reciprocity. I work in the field of biocultural restoration and am excited by the ideas of re-storyation. I hope that co-creating—or perhaps remembering—a new narrative to guide our relationship with the Earth calls to all of us in these urgent times. I’m really interested in how the tools of Western environmental science can be guided by Indigenous principles of respect, responsibility, and reciprocity to create justice for the land. I honor the ways that my community of thinkers and practitioners are already enacting this cultural change on the ground. Together, we are exploring the ways that the collective, intergenerational brilliance of Indigenous science and wisdom can help us reimagine our relationship with the natural world. I dream of a time when the land will be thankful for us.”

Check Out Braiding Sweetgrass!

Also by Robin Wall Kimmerer

A physical copy of Gathering Moss has been ordered, and once arrived and processed it will be available for checkout.