An Evening with the Author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

About This Event

Speaker: Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, PhD, Citizen Potawatomi Nation

Join us for a memorable evening with the award-winning author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is about alternative forms of Indigenous knowledge outside of traditional scientific methodologies. The book reframes the relationship between land and humans by exploring themes of reciprocity. Braiding Sweetgrass focuses on plants and botany as seen through Native American traditions and Western scientific traditions. The book received largely positive reviews, appearing on several bestseller lists. Professor Kimmerer is known for her scholarship on traditional ecological knowledge, ethnobotany, and moss ecology.

This event is co-hosted by the Gonzaga Center for Climate, Society, and the Environment, the Gonzaga School of Leadership Studies, and the Gonzaga Native American Studies Department.

About Robin Wall Kimmerer

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. 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.

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.