Great Plains Anywhere: Rosalyn LaPier

Center for Great Plains Studies Author

10/17/2023 Added

30 Plays

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Rosalyn LaPier is an award winning Indigenous writer, environmental historian, ethnobotanist, and professor at the University of Illinois. She works within Indigenous communities to revitalize traditional ecological knowledge, to address the growing climate crisis, and to strengthen public policy around Indigenous languages. LaPier is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis.

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[00:00:00.150]Welcome to Great Plains Anywhere,
[00:00:02.040]a Paul A. Olson lecture
[00:00:03.750]from the Center for Great Plains Studies
[00:00:05.400]at the University of Nebraska.
[00:00:08.520]Rosalyn LaPier is an award-winning Indigenous writer,
[00:00:11.460]environmental historian, ethnobotanist, and professor
[00:00:14.790]at the University of Illinois.
[00:00:16.740]She works within Indigenous communities
[00:00:18.630]to revitalize traditional ecological knowledge
[00:00:21.690]to address the growing climate crisis
[00:00:24.150]and to strengthen public policy around Indigenous languages.
[00:00:27.600]LaPier is an enrolled member
[00:00:29.010]of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Metis.
[00:00:32.940]The University of Nebraska is a land grant institution
[00:00:36.030]with campuses and programs on the past, present,
[00:00:39.000]and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria,
[00:00:43.710]Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Caw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples,
[00:00:48.930]as well as those
[00:00:49.920]of the relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.
[00:00:54.600]Thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:00:56.490]My name is Katie Nieland.
[00:00:57.570]I'm the associate director here
[00:00:59.160]at the Center for Great Plains Studies.
[00:01:01.650]Hi, I'm Rosalyn LaPier.
[00:01:03.270]I'm a professor at the University of Illinois.
[00:01:06.000]Okay, well thanks again for joining us today.
[00:01:08.130]We really appreciate it,
[00:01:09.420]and I think we'll just start out with just asking,
[00:01:13.200]what is ethnobotany?
[00:01:14.690]People might not know that word.
[00:01:16.650]What does it mean and what does it mean to you?
[00:01:20.490]So first of all, ethnobotany is an academic word.
[00:01:24.210]It's been around for, I guess about 130 years.
[00:01:28.770]It was created in about the 1890s
[00:01:32.070]in an effort to describe what,
[00:01:36.240]at that time, scholars were seeing
[00:01:38.370]and what they were studying,
[00:01:40.500]and so ethnobotany is kind of the, you know,
[00:01:43.050]convergence of two words, you know, ethno and botany,
[00:01:46.620]so the study, it's the scientific study
[00:01:49.650]of the relationship between humans and plants.
[00:01:53.310]And so ethnobotany, as I said, is an academic term,
[00:01:57.960]so it's not often a term that people use, for example,
[00:02:01.050]in tribal communities.
[00:02:02.730]They're gonna use other words
[00:02:04.260]to describe what ethnobotany is.
[00:02:06.600]But ethnobotany is really, again,
[00:02:08.400]kind of this relationship between humans and plants.
[00:02:11.730]And so it's not the study of all plants.
[00:02:14.490]So people who are ethnobotanists,
[00:02:17.700]they don't study all of the plants or even know all
[00:02:22.380]of the plants within a particular community
[00:02:24.810]or area because they are looking
[00:02:30.240]at those particular plants that humans use
[00:02:35.250]or that humans have a relationship with.
[00:02:39.540]Right, yeah, so like the,
[00:02:41.190]I mean, the other sort of word that pops out
[00:02:43.560]at me is the traditional ecological knowledge word,
[00:02:47.250]so is that sort of related or how do those two interact?
[00:02:53.850]Right, so traditional ecological knowledge
[00:02:56.220]is a different Western academic phrase as well.
[00:03:01.110]That one was actually created
[00:03:02.910]probably about 100 years after ethnobotany,
[00:03:06.510]so traditional ecological knowledge is a term
[00:03:09.630]that's really been used since about maybe the 1990s,
[00:03:13.170]maybe a little bit earlier than that,
[00:03:15.780]and traditional ecological knowledge
[00:03:18.270]includes three different things.
[00:03:21.210]One is people's knowledge about something
[00:03:27.090]in the natural world or within an ecosystem, people's,
[00:03:32.742]how people use that particular knowledge,
[00:03:37.620]so oftentimes the definition is knowledge,
[00:03:40.200]practice, and belief.
[00:03:41.970]So knowledge about something in the natural world, you know,
[00:03:45.360]it could be animals, it could be plants,
[00:03:46.890]it could be the ecosystem itself, how that knowledge is used
[00:03:50.970]or utilized by a particular, for example,
[00:03:53.310]tribal community or a local community,
[00:03:56.850]and then third part
[00:03:58.590]of traditional ecological knowledge is belief.
[00:04:01.230]So what type of kind of religion or religious practice
[00:04:05.010]or belief system is part of that knowledge
[00:04:09.480]or that practice of that particular thing?
[00:04:11.820]Again, whether it is about an animal
[00:04:14.520]or about a plant or about the natural world itself.
[00:04:17.700]So what's different
[00:04:19.170]about traditional ecological knowledge in terms
[00:04:23.490]of a definition than other definitions,
[00:04:26.430]including ethnobotany, is the addition of belief.
[00:04:33.090]So when we talk about TEK
[00:04:35.190]or traditional ecological knowledge,
[00:04:37.050]you always have to remember that we're also talking
[00:04:39.570]about religion and religious practice.
[00:04:42.000]That is a main kind of part of the definition of TEK.
[00:04:46.650]And it's different than ethnobotany
[00:04:47.640]'cause ethnobotany, we could be talking
[00:04:50.370]about how Indigenous people use a particular plant
[00:04:54.330]for medicine, for example,
[00:04:56.340]and that does not include kind of religion
[00:04:59.250]or religious practice.
[00:05:00.812]So anyway, so those are kind of the differences
[00:05:03.150]between those definitions.
[00:05:05.130]Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you were drawn
[00:05:07.980]to your work originally and sort of your story,
[00:05:12.210]you know, getting to this point.
[00:05:15.930]So yeah, I'm a traditionally trained ethnobotanist,
[00:05:19.470]and what I mean by that
[00:05:20.790]is that I learned ethnobotany primarily from my grandmother
[00:05:25.050]and my oldest aunt.
[00:05:27.030]I was, as the phrase is, I was voluntold. (chuckles)
[00:05:31.710]I was asked by first my aunt to learn about this
[00:05:36.300]because our family is knowledgeable.
[00:05:39.480]My grandmother herself was a very knowledgeable,
[00:05:43.680]she was considered a doctor
[00:05:45.570]on the Blackfeet Reservation because of her knowledge
[00:05:48.720]of plants, she learned from her grandparents,
[00:05:52.470]grandmothers who learned from their grandmothers,
[00:05:55.230]so it's something that has been passed down in our family
[00:05:57.510]for many generations, and because of that,
[00:06:00.660]when I became a young adult, my aunt asked me to learn
[00:06:06.420]about plants with her and with my grandmother.
[00:06:09.750]And so I apprenticed with both of them
[00:06:14.040]where we worked pretty much every summer
[00:06:16.890]for more than a decade, learning about the different plants
[00:06:22.950]that the Blackfeet used
[00:06:25.980]for many different purposes, for food, for medicine,
[00:06:30.420]as material for creating different types of objects,
[00:06:35.610]but then also, added onto that was learning about the myths
[00:06:40.170]and the mythology of particular plants
[00:06:43.710]and then how those plants then may have been used
[00:06:48.090]for religion and religious practice.
[00:06:50.850]So I learned a lot of different things
[00:06:53.130]from my grandmother and from my oldest aunt.
[00:06:56.880]And because I was apprenticing with them
[00:07:00.210]in the Blackfeet method of learning knowledge
[00:07:05.730]and what we often call transferring knowledge
[00:07:08.460]from one person to another, I also paid them.
[00:07:11.820]So I paid them each and every time I talked with them
[00:07:15.210]about plants when we sat down kind of as a,
[00:07:19.110]in a learning session, and then eventually I graduated.
[00:07:23.730]Eventually my grandmother finally told me
[00:07:25.890]that I was an old woman, and by that she meant
[00:07:29.130]that I had sort of graduated and now I knew about this
[00:07:33.120]and I could share this with other people,
[00:07:36.930]but it was a very long process
[00:07:39.810]that took a very long time from the beginning
[00:07:43.140]to me finally, quote unquote, graduating
[00:07:46.860]from their apprenticeship.
[00:07:49.800]So it's kind of interesting that when I first was tapped
[00:07:54.000]to learn about Blackfeet plant knowledge,
[00:07:57.900]I actually was living in Chicago
[00:08:00.450]and hanging out at places like the Newberry Library.
[00:08:05.070]And like I said, my aunt was like, you know,
[00:08:07.807]"We would like you to learn about this,"
[00:08:10.110]and I was like, "Well, how's that gonna happen?
[00:08:12.637]"'Cause I live in Chicago and, you know,
[00:08:15.727]"you guys are in Montana."
[00:08:17.610]But I went back home, and I still do,
[00:08:19.950]I go back home every summer,
[00:08:21.600]and so that just became then part
[00:08:23.280]of what I did every single summer
[00:08:24.960]when I returned back to the reservation,
[00:08:27.330]and then it just sort of,
[00:08:28.710]I would just say it gave me a much more, sort of,
[00:08:32.220]purposeful reason to return to the reservation every summer.
[00:08:36.660]I learned a lot about plants, not just on the reservation
[00:08:40.800]but within all of Blackfeet territory,
[00:08:43.410]so when we were going around to,
[00:08:47.490]when they were going around to teach me about plants,
[00:08:49.860]it was not always on the Blackfeet Reservation.
[00:08:51.960]It could have been up in Canada,
[00:08:53.340]we were in Blackfeet territory,
[00:08:55.320]but understanding the land and the various ecosystems
[00:09:02.130]that plants came from was very much part of the teaching
[00:09:06.900]that happened in my particular case.
[00:09:10.050]So land and landscape, understanding the ecosystem,
[00:09:15.360]'cause there's multiple ecosystems that are,
[00:09:19.290]where these plants are are extremely important, of course,
[00:09:23.430]to learning about particular plants within particular,
[00:09:27.870]again, tribal communities or local communities.
[00:09:30.870]It's easy to see then
[00:09:32.010]how this work would sort of like lead straight
[00:09:36.060]to your sort of environmental
[00:09:38.550]and science activism work that you've been doing.
[00:09:41.340]Can you talk a little bit
[00:09:42.173]about how you became involved in that?
[00:09:45.150]Yeah, so I mean I'll just say,
[00:09:46.680]so when I first started learning about plants,
[00:09:49.770]and I have written about this,
[00:09:51.540]I wrote a book called "Invisible Reality"
[00:09:54.900]that is about the religion and religious practice
[00:09:58.920]of the Blackfeet,
[00:10:01.470]in that book, I wrote a little bit
[00:10:03.210]about how initially, I was not that interested in plants,
[00:10:06.840]even though I came from a family
[00:10:08.730]where plant knowledge was very much part of,
[00:10:11.550]you know, our life growing up,
[00:10:15.450]so it wasn't until after I started apprenticing
[00:10:18.420]with my grandmother and my aunt
[00:10:20.250]that then I went to the library
[00:10:23.250]and to the archives and started reading about plants.
[00:10:26.430]So then I started looking at like the ethnohistory,
[00:10:29.850]histories that had already been written,
[00:10:32.100]I started looking at the ethnobotany,
[00:10:34.648]the scientific research that had already been done
[00:10:37.830]on certain plants,
[00:10:39.030]I started reading, you know,
[00:10:40.740]just a lot about what has been written
[00:10:44.310]in the field of botany itself,
[00:10:47.790]so I've done a lot of sort of the Western academic research
[00:10:51.540]as well to look at the story, the multiple stories,
[00:11:00.060]of plants, especially in the Northern Great Plains.
[00:11:03.960]Because of that, then, I also became really interested
[00:11:08.790]in environmental issues,
[00:11:11.790]issues that were occurring especially
[00:11:14.280]on the Northern Great Plains,
[00:11:15.840]and I became much more active in environmental activism,
[00:11:22.350]environmental justice, and addressing environmental racism
[00:11:27.030]in, again, kind of the Northern Great Plains region
[00:11:31.319]of North America.
[00:11:35.220]So also, I wanted to ask about the advocacy work
[00:11:40.380]for Indigenous languages
[00:11:42.660]and talking about why that might be a focus for you.
[00:11:47.910]Yeah, so I worked for about 12 years
[00:11:51.030]on the Blackfeet Reservation
[00:11:53.190]with a nonprofit organization called Piegan Institute.
[00:11:57.251]And Piegan Institute did several things,
[00:11:58.860]but one of the things it did
[00:12:00.660]was it did language documentation
[00:12:03.780]and it ran a Blackfeet language immersion school,
[00:12:08.010]and it was through my work primarily
[00:12:11.700]with helping document the language,
[00:12:13.680]I worked with a lot of different elders
[00:12:16.350]that I became really interested in how knowledge,
[00:12:23.910]Indigenous knowledge is really embedded in languages,
[00:12:27.900]and in my particular case,
[00:12:30.390]because I was learning both about, again,
[00:12:33.986]the ethnobotany of the Blackfeet, but also working
[00:12:37.140]with elders as we were documenting the language,
[00:12:40.500]learning a lot more about the natural world,
[00:12:43.350]how it was really almost impossible to understand,
[00:12:48.360]have an understanding of what the Blackfeet thought
[00:12:52.650]about the natural world
[00:12:54.210]without also being able to know the language.
[00:13:00.630]Because of that, I thought then it was really important
[00:13:03.510]for us to continue to document the language,
[00:13:07.140]for us to continue to create, for example,
[00:13:12.540]lexicons and materials
[00:13:16.950]that then people could utilize to learn the language
[00:13:21.810]or even just use it for academic purposes.
[00:13:26.130]Because of that,
[00:13:27.270]then I became involved nationally and internationally
[00:13:31.350]with revitalizing Indigenous languages
[00:13:35.580]kind of across North America
[00:13:39.000]and in other places around the world.
[00:13:43.650]I think it is absolutely sort of necessary
[00:13:46.620]for people to be able to turn to Indigenous languages,
[00:13:54.060]to be able to understand how Indigenous people, again,
[00:13:57.840]thought about the world that they are living in
[00:14:01.020]and understand their relationship
[00:14:02.910]to the natural world, again, because embedded
[00:14:06.360]in those languages are this rich information
[00:14:12.420]about how Indigenous people have understood
[00:14:17.040]and continue to understand the natural world.
[00:14:19.740]So because of that, I've been really actively involved
[00:14:23.040]in strengthening the public policy
[00:14:28.710]that we have around Indigenous languages,
[00:14:31.650]so I work, for example,
[00:14:32.820]with a national organization called the National Coalition
[00:14:36.030]of Native American Language Schools and Programs,
[00:14:39.180]and one of the things we do is we work
[00:14:41.820]to strengthen public policy
[00:14:43.200]at the national level and sometimes at state levels
[00:14:46.080]but mostly at the national level, so that tribes
[00:14:49.410]and communities can work to revitalize their own languages.
[00:14:57.720]Yeah, you can definitely see a through line
[00:15:00.360]with all of your work, like each part needs the other part
[00:15:03.900]to like create this whole, I think that's really cool.
[00:15:08.040]Maybe you could talk a little bit about,
[00:15:10.560]what is your favorite part
[00:15:11.910]of this work that you're doing?
[00:15:15.210]Wow, that's a good question.
[00:15:16.684](both laugh)
[00:15:17.517]I always ask people also like,
[00:15:18.960]what's your favorite part about the Great Plains?
[00:15:20.730]But for you I was like,
[00:15:21.563]well, this is like so encompassing that maybe either a story
[00:15:26.220]or something that highlights something about your work
[00:15:30.930]that people could connect with.
[00:15:33.450]Well, I was gonna say, so it's,
[00:15:35.760]I'll answer this in different parts.
[00:15:40.560]So again, I grew up in a family
[00:15:43.860]that had a lot of plant knowledge,
[00:15:46.980]so as a child when I was growing up,
[00:15:49.380]we went out a lot to gather plants and I,
[00:15:52.837]for the most part, I didn't know what I was picking.
[00:15:57.930]Didn't know how you would use it, why you would use it.
[00:16:00.810]I would just go out with my grandparents
[00:16:03.210]and my grandmother and she would be like,
[00:16:06.097]"Climb down that cliff and grab that plant."
[00:16:09.780]So as a child, (chuckles) I always thought
[00:16:12.390]of myself as free labor, right,
[00:16:15.000]that would go help my grandparents go collect plants.
[00:16:18.480]Okay, fast forward to when I was (chuckles) learning
[00:16:22.020]about plants, I just thought it was really,
[00:16:23.730]really fascinating.
[00:16:24.660]I got really interested in sort of,
[00:16:27.270]especially the connection between how the Blackfeet
[00:16:33.837]but also how other Indigenous people think about plants,
[00:16:38.940]both on the sort of ecological level
[00:16:41.730]but then also on the religion and religious practice level,
[00:16:45.090]and so I just thought it was really interesting
[00:16:46.920]and really fascinating
[00:16:48.330]how connected certain plants are sort of to the divine,
[00:16:53.850]and that you really can't understand
[00:16:55.500]why certain plants are being used
[00:16:57.480]or how they're being used without understanding religion.
[00:17:00.390]So I just thought how interesting it is
[00:17:02.070]that religion is interconnected with plants
[00:17:06.600]in such a close way.
[00:17:09.720]So fast forward to today, one of my favorite things
[00:17:14.010]to do is actually still to go out and collect plants.
[00:17:17.220]Even early this morning, I was out literally
[00:17:21.330]at the crack of dawn
[00:17:22.650]and I was out collecting some sweet grass,
[00:17:26.790]primarily 'cause it's getting really dry here
[00:17:28.680]and the sweet grass is kind of heading towards that tail end
[00:17:31.830]of its, because it's been a kind of a dry,
[00:17:38.430]really hot summer time here,
[00:17:41.130]so anyway, I was out collecting sweet grass.
[00:17:43.290]I love being outdoors as much as possible,
[00:17:47.365]and I love being able to go out
[00:17:50.551]and gather plants themselves.
[00:17:53.460]Okay, but I also, to end this,
[00:17:57.030]I still love going to the archives.
[00:17:59.190]I still love going to the archives,
[00:18:00.870]I still love going to the library
[00:18:03.540]and reading what people have written about plants,
[00:18:07.500]how people have thought about plants,
[00:18:09.930]and seeing what kind of commonalities
[00:18:12.690]and similarities there are between other Indigenous groups
[00:18:16.260]and what the Blackfeet think,
[00:18:18.570]and just learning what I can about ethnobotany,
[00:18:25.770]sort of across the academy.
[00:18:30.600]However, I'll just say this, people often,
[00:18:34.110]I mean I do think of myself as an ethnobotanist,
[00:18:36.780]I am a trained ethnobotanist and I do, like I said,
[00:18:39.060]a lot of academic readings around ethnobotany
[00:18:41.970]and a lot of research around ethnobotany,
[00:18:45.090]but I haven't written that much actually about plants.
[00:18:49.260]I've written a little bit.
[00:18:51.180]I have written about other things.
[00:18:53.220]I am interested in activism,
[00:18:55.380]so I've written about activism.
[00:18:57.060]I am interested in religion and religious practice,
[00:18:59.610]so I've written a lot about religion and religious practice.
[00:19:03.480]That's a little bit different than ethnobotany.
[00:19:06.390]In the next year,
[00:19:07.800]I'm actually going to be spending this next academic year
[00:19:12.180]at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.
[00:19:15.360]which is a research center of Harvard University,
[00:19:19.170]and I'm gonna have a fellowship
[00:19:20.430]in garden and landscape studies,
[00:19:22.590]and I will actually be spending this next year
[00:19:25.260]focusing a lot more on talking and looking about,
[00:19:29.220]I should say, not talking,
[00:19:30.450]writing about plants and their relationship
[00:19:35.760]with the Blackfeet and with other Indigenous peoples.
[00:19:39.090]So I'm finally getting to that point in my career
[00:19:41.670]where I'm gonna spend a little bit more time writing
[00:19:44.700]about plants and researching plants
[00:19:48.270]in addition to actually doing it in the field.
[00:19:51.404](calm acoustic music) We'd like to thank Rosalyn
[00:19:52.620]for speaking with us today.
[00:19:54.000]Find all of our short Great Plains talks and interviews
[00:19:56.880]as videos and podcasts at go.unl.edu/gpanywhere.

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Great Plains Anywhere: Rosalyn LaPier

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