Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

For K-12 and Community College Educators

Speaker

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’s newest book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (November 2024), is a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

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

Moderator

Kerry Bird is an enrolled citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota and of Lumbee tribal heritage. He was born and raised in Robeson County, North Carolina. He graduated with a BA in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and holds a Masters of Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Mr. Bird is the inaugural director of the North Carolina American Indian Heritage Commission within the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. He is also President of the National Indian Education Association in Washington, DC, the oldest and largest organization that works to advance culturally relevant educational opportunities for American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students. He was recently appointed to the board of the North Carolina Humanities and is the past president of Triangle Native American Society. He is a member of the Dix Park community committee, local advisory board for the Ackland Art Museum, N.C. Botanical Garden Foundation board, and the UNC World View Council of Advisors which equips developing global educators. He currently serves on the UNC Alumni Committee for Racial and Ethnic Diversity (ACRED) and co-chairs the ACRED American Indian subcommittee, and formerly served on the Board of Visitors for UNC Chapel Hill.

Kerry is a former Kellogg Fellow with Americans for Indian Opportunity of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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