Lowell Lecture
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Date & Time
Dec. 1, 2021 at 7 p.m.
Location
Virtual
, MA
Driving Directions
Speaker(s)
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Presenting Organization
Topics
Contact
Chandler Shaw (shawcp@bc.edu, (617) 552-2203)
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. 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. 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 College of Environmental Science and Forestry, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of 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.
Robin Wall Kimmerer will give a lecture based on Braiding Sweetgrass, followed by a moderated conversation and audience Q&A. Of Braiding Sweetgrass, Milkweed Editions writes: “Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.”
Cosponsored by the Environmental Studies Program and the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department.
Please note this is a virtual event. Registration will open on 11/17/2021