-: Welcome, I'm so pleased to have you here
for the fourth annual Hubbard Lecture,
First Peoples of the Plains.
I am Susan Weller Director at
the University of Nebraska State Museum.
And it's just so wonderful to welcome
all of you here tonight.
We are so very grateful to Dr. Anne Hubbard
and to the Claire M. Hubbard Foundation
for the generous endowment given to the State Museum
that supports this lecture series.
And the purpose of this lecture is to help advance
the understanding and appreciation of the cultural
heritage of the first peoples of the plains.
I would now like to ask Anne to step forward
and receive a small token of our appreciation and thanks,
Anne.
You're here good.
I have to have an assistant.
And there we go.
(audience applause)
Would you like to say a few words?
Anne, if you'd like to say a few words.
-: Oops, somewhere, well anyway I know where it was,
but anyway I developed a deep interest
and curiosity of indigenous peoples
really when I was in college here
at the University of Nebraska.
When I moved back here it was about the time
they were getting ready to remodel the
first peoples of the plains exhibit,
so I wanted to be involved in that because
it had meant so much to me in the way
in what has been interesting to me.
I wanted to have this lectureship to go along with it
so that people knew that Native Americans
were alive and doing really interesting things
and lots of different things.
So, as a philanthropist, I think the best thing
I get out of it is I've gotten to meet
incredible people in the Native American community.
Like I said doing many things, and the people
that have been the lecturers, some of them
have become friends so it's that circle of life
that what you give, you get back way more.
I had a chance to be with Robin here today,
and as in my part time I'm an environmentalist
in my spare time.
So what she's going to speak to,
what I heard her speak about today
really spoke to my heart, so I look forward
to hearing what she's saying today.
(audience applause)
-: Oh, and thank you, Anne.
You know this lecture series would not be
successful without our community partners,
and I wish to thank Judy Gaiashkibos the Executive Director
of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs
and Charlie Foster the Director of the Office
of Academic Success and Intercultural Services
for co-sponsoring some associated events
with Robin Kimmerer's visit to us.
I also wish to give a special thanks to our hosts tonight
the Center for the Great Plains and Great Plains Art Museum
we sincerely thank them for offering this beautiful venue
for our lecture and reception.
Thank you, Rick, for having us come to your house.
(audience applause)
You know each year the Hubbard Committee,
Lecture Committee, consists of many people
from across Lincoln to select the annual speaker,
and I ask the committee members now rise
and be recognized, so please, committee members,
Shirley, Judy, others, thank you.
(audience applause)
And our State Museum benefits from the wisdom and support
of its friends board, I'd like to ask our museum board
chair Art Zygielbaum to rise, our president,
and remain standing while other members
of the museum board now join him, please.
Friends of the museum board thank you so much
for all you do for us.
(audience applause)
It's now my pleasure to ask Rick Edwards
to step forward to the podium and make a few remarks, Rick.
-: Thank you, Susan, and welcome to all of you.
We're delighted to have you here in the
Center for Great Plains Studies.
I want to start by thanking Susan
and the State Museum, the friends,
and the other folks who have been involved
in helping us establish this partnership.
This is a great combination.
Our interest here in the center meshed nicely
with what the State Museum's doing and especially
with this lecture, and of course thank you
to Anne Hubbard and the Hubbard Foundation,
and to our other partners Judy Gaiashkibos
and others who have worked on this.
I might just say a couple of words about the center.
First of all we're glad that you moved over here
after doing your rehearsals in the Sheldon.
Moved to the main stage here at the
Center for Great Plains Studies.
The center if you don't know about the center,
is in this building but we have fellows
on all four of the Nebraska campuses and have
programs and activities and
relate to all four of the campuses.
Our mission is to promote understanding of
and appreciation for the people, cultures,
and natural environment of the Great Plains.
Two of the priorities that we currently stress
right now in our own work have to do with
the past, present, and future
of Native Americans in the Great Plains.
And preserving the biodiversity of the Great Plains.
So you could see that the first time
you come to the Center with this speaker
is a wonderful match for us.
I want to thank the staffs of the museum
and of the center for working together
to bring this event to its realization.
The first time you partner with somebody
and they have their way of doing things
and we have our ways, you never quite know
how it's gonna go, but this in fact has been
a wonderful partnership and we really appreciate
working with you.
I hope you've had a chance to look around at the art
in this room, and in the lower level.
On this level we have as the slides said,
our third contemporary indigeneity exhibition.
And we do this on a biennial basis,
and we feel like this is our best exhibition yet,
so I hope you have a chance to enjoy the art.
Again, welcome to the Center for Great Plains Studies
we're delighted to have you here.
Thanks, Susan.
(audience applause)
-: I'm now pleased to introduce our
featured speaker Dr. Robin Kimmerer.
She is a Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology
at the State University of New York
College of Environmental Science and Forestry,
the Director of the Center for Native Peoples
and the Environment at SUNY,
and her part of her work is to provide
greater access for Native Peoples
to study environmental science.
Robin is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation
and she combines her heritage with her
scientific and environmental passions.
She will be talking tonight about
traditional ecological knowledge, TEK,
and I don't want to steal her thunder, but I do want to say
that TEK is receiving more and more recognition
across the greater scientific community.
Robin is a pioneer in the best sense.
She crosses disciplines and she moves gracefully
from erudite articles on mosses to inspiring
books like Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural
History of Mosses, which won the John Burroughs Medal.
And I know she has just recently published
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,
Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.
She's received many awards and recognition
for impactful teachings and writings.
As a fellow biologist I feel truly honored
to have her here tonight and I'm so
looking forward to learning more about
how we can bring our own personal, cultural traditions,
our humanity into our work as scientists.
So Robin, thank you so much the podium is yours.
And I want to remind everyone cellphones silenced please.
(audience applause)
-: Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Gettin' organized here.
Meegwetch, thank you so much for that really warm welcome.
Thank you Dr. Hubbard for your support of this
important, important series of making visible
and honoring these ways and scholars
who are often overlooked, so thank you very much for that.
And thank you all for being here I'm really honored,
it's been a wonderful visit, a very warm welcome.
Getting to visit with students, getting to see the prairie,
getting to see a bit of your beautiful city, so thank you.
And I want more, oh I best I better stay right here, huh?
Can't move too much, let me do that.
Put everything away here, there we go.
I want especially as we always do,
to begin with gratitude.
Gratitude that when we all woke this morning,
and put our feet upon Mother Earth,
there was sweet morning air to breathe,
there was food to eat, there was water,
there was companionship of birds, and clouds, and wind.
How blessed we are.
Gratitude for our companionship of one another
and for attention that you have chosen
to spend your time together this evening
thinking about these very important issues.
And gratitude for the first people of this place,
I'm honored to be here in the country
of the Omaha, or the Ponka, the Santee, and the Winnebago.
So in our way meegwetch, meegwetch,
for the care that you have given to this land,
and it shows.
Let me also bring you greetings in my language,
I'm just a beginner in my language.
But our teachers tell us because it is
an endangered species that we should speak it
whenever we have the chance to breathe life
into that language.
Our greeting in Potawatomi is bozho, bozho.
(speaks foreign language)
In our language I told you that I'm a Potawatomi woman
a member of the Anishinabe as well.
A member of the Bear Clan,
and then adopted into the Eagles as well.
I'm very grateful to be here and I come to you
from my home which is in the ancestral territory
of Onondaga Nation up in Haudenosaunee Territory,
and I'm very grateful for the teachings
and friendship of my friends there.
The language that you just heard a little snippet of
was the language of the Great Lakes, Anishinaabemowin.
And what you see here in red is the historic territory
of our Potawatomi people.
We are part of the great confederacy
of the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi.
And this beautiful language just rippled
along the shores of Lake Michigan.
Including in the name of that signal city,
of Southern Lake Michigan, shikaakwa,
maybe you've heard of it (laughs).
It means the big field of wild onions
(audience laughs).
Now you might think that having invited
a plant ecologist here to speak to you tonight,
an ESF scientist, that you would hear a science talk today
filled with P-values and data.
And gosh I love data and P-values as much
as the next scientist but the kind of values
that we're gonna talk about tonight are different.
We're talking about cultural values tonight.
And one of the things that I treasure about
being a scientist is the power of the tools
that science gives us.
But we also know that by its very nature,
as a reductionist purely rational mode
of knowledge generation, that we privileged
the mind and the body, right?
In the way that we generate knowledge and science.
Powerful tools, but we're told by our elders
and by our teachings of the medicine wheel.
That every person has these four gifts.
We have the gift of mind and body,
but also emotion and spirit.
In science it intrinsically leaves two of those out, right?
We don't bring in our emotion or spirit
to our scientific research.
But you know when we look at the sustainability
issues that we face today, are they primarily
issues of not enough information, not enough data?
Not so much, you know, they're really at the nexus
of culture and land.
And it is at that's where we find values, right?
And so because science by its very nature excludes values
it can't be the only tool that we use
in an environmental problem solving.
And traditional ecological knowledge is,
as was mentioned earlier, explicitly incorporates
all of these ways of knowing.
And what I'd like to share with you tonight
is some perspectives on bringing
traditional ecological knowledge
into the picture for environmental work.
For our shared concerns for Mother Earth.
And so instead of talking about data and P-Values,
not a single graph I promise you.
What we really need is the technology of story.
So we're going to tonight talk about story.
Once upon a time, this skies over our Potawatomi
homelands would carry flocks of birds so vast,
that the skies were darkened by their numbers.
Flocks that as you know could take days to pass
over the Onondaga homelands, over the Huron,
the Lenape, and perhaps over the homelands
of your grandparents as well.
Did you know that the flocks were so large
that the collective weight of these birds
would cause tree branches to fall to the forest floor?
Huge flocks of these wonderful birds.
And it was 102 years ago this fall in September
of 1914 that the last passenger pigeon
passed from the Earth and her name was Martha.
And she lived in the Cincinnati Zoo, alone.
And in this time of accelerating species loss,
you know that conservation biologists tell us
that we are now in the age of the sixth extinction.
And that the rate of species loss estimated today,
is 200 species every day,
every day.
And so against that backdrop the passage of Martha
weighed heavily on my shoulders.
And one of the things that I found is that I knew
a lot more about how she became extinct
than I did about how they lived.
So I began reading, doing some research,
consulting with my ornithology colleagues.
And so I read about their vast numbers,
their communal nesting, all wing-to-wing in those trees,
and how they cherished a single egg in the nest.
How they shaped the forests by
their foraging on acorns and beechnuts.
Their dancing movement, and even the massive quantities
of dung that built up underneath these roosts,
so much dung that in fact it would ignite
spontaneously, set the forest floor on fire,
which is exactly what Oak trees need in order to regenerate.
So the abundance of the birds and the food that they used
were linked in this quite remarkable way.
How they came to settle like a distant wind
into a grove of trees, and they had these wonderful
voices that when they came together they would talk
to one another at night and those voices linger
in the name that our people have for them.
And the name is omemee, omemee.
In recognition of the music of their voices.
I was also fascinated about the lives of omemee
and how they intersected actually,
with the lives of our Potawatomi ancestors.
And the theory that the great abundance of omemee,
of the passenger pigeon, was actually a result
of the deep population of Native Peoples.
Because Native Peoples had tended the land
in such a way that it actually caused
the massive increases in the number of these birds,
and then when our people were lost
to displacement and disease the ecological
stage was set for further population
explosion of these birds.
We also understood that in the Potawatomi way,
the passenger pigeons were understood
as flocks of departed souls.
And today our bird clan regalia, in which we dance
still is red and blue in the celebration
of the colors of omemee.
And that one of the great chroniclers of the
abundance of this beautiful bird was none other
than Simon Pokagon who was a Potawatomi leader
and writer in the Southern Great Lakes.
And he described them in the flowery language of
his time, "I have stood by the grandest waterfall
"of America," he wrote, "yet never have my astonishment,
"wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when
"I have witnessed these birds drop from their course
"like meteors from heaven."
He was pretty impressed and why not?
And in Simon Pokagon's people in their villages
up there on the St. Joseph River in Southern Michigan
was a chief was a leader named Chech-aw-gin
who had a daughter whose name was Shah-no-dah,
the wind blowing through.
And she was my many great's great-grandmother.
And Simon Pokagon's people lived in communal lodges
next to one another taking care of the oak forest,
harvesting those acorns, just like omemee did.
They too set their lodges in communal circles.
They too cherished a single offspring,
and would gather in the evening to sing together.
The forest that the bird needed,
and the forest that the Potawatomi used,
as you know were wanted by other people
for timber and for agriculture.
And as the forests were cut and agriculture implemented
in these areas the forest dwindled.
There were no more beechnuts and acorns to eat,
and so what did the birds do?
They turned to eating the crops,
which got them labeled as pests.
And when they were labeled as pests
the massive hunting began.
You know this part of the story I'm sure,
about how they were killed by the thousands
in nets and shotguns and all kinds of ingenious traps
invented just for the slaughter of these birds.
Packed in barrels of salt put on the train
for the East Coast where they were consumed
both in fine restaurants and by the
bucket load fed to pigs.
This was in the same year that our people
became fewer as well.
And our Potawatomi people were canoe people.
Until they made us walk, our lodges were built
on cold blue lakes under the birches and the aspens,
ringing with the voices of loons.
And we lived among our clan animals
who are our relatives and our teachers,
the cranes, the wolf, and the moose.
Our Potawatomi people were canoe people
until they made us walk.
Until someone wanted that forest and we were
marched away at gun point from all that we knew
in the era of removal and this is what we call
the Trail of Death as we were marched
from the Great Lakes to Kansas.
And I imagine the people, I think of my
great, great, many greats grandmother Sha-no-dah
her hands trailing over the leaves of those
beloved medicine plants as she left them behind.
And did she look over her shoulder at the last
tree whispering a silent farewell to maples?
We should ask them about climate change
because they lived it.
What is it like to exchange a cool, lush forest,
for a hot, dusty grassland?
Lakes, for dry river beds, baskets of wild rice,
for a sack of weedly flower.
Loons, well there is no replacement for loons.
The animal teachers were all gone,
the clans lost their meaning.
How do you heal your family without
the familiar medicines at your feet?
What do you eat?
The songs, the stories, even people's names.
The man whose name was light on the snow,
lost their meaning.
There were no reference points anymore.
This was climate change, this is climate change.
Climate change in a single season.
So much loss and shouldn't we too
be looking over our shoulders and saying, "Goodbye."
Because as we know climate change is one of the major
drivers of that species loss of
200 species every single day.
And when I found that photograph,
this artistic photograph of Martha,
the last passenger pigeon on her perch.
I felt in that lonely gaze that you see here,
a lament as if she's saying,
"How could something so beautiful, so ancient,
"so prolific simply vanish?
"What happened to the sound of their wings?
"Where did everybody go?
"What happened to the world that I used to know?"
And every time I looked at the photograph of Martha
I felt my great-grandmother's voice tugging
at my sleeve, born on the shores of Lake Michigan,
and buried on the windblown Kansas prairie.
Saying of her people and her culture,
"How could something so beautiful, so ancient,
"so prolific just vanish?
"Where did everybody go?
"What happened to the world that I used to know?"
Because as you see the stories of our people
and the stories of omemee converge don't they?
Because both of them were swept away, or I should say,
attempted to be swept away by the same wind.
And we know what happens when two great air masses,
two winds, meet, right?
There's a lot of turbulence above
and often times a lot of suffering below.
And two winds met on this continent.
Two winds of world views, world views that color
our relationships with the living land
that cares for us, which shape our answer
to the question, what is it that land means?
A world view in which land is understood
as our sustainer, as our library, as our identity,
as our home, as sacred, as our pharmacy.
A world view in which all living beings
are understood as persons and that humans
are just one member of the democracy of species.
In which everyone gets a vote,
people and passenger pigeons.
And this view of what land means suddenly
encountered another view, kind of values
climate change and the great wind
sweeping across the continent.
The whole notion of land as a set of relationships
and responsibilities was replaced by the notion
of land as a set of rights, rights to land,
as property not rights of land.
But rights to land as property, as capital,
as natural resources.
What Native People called the gifts of the land
became called the natural resources.
Nature as family, became nature as machine.
And our non-human relatives that we regarded
as our teachers became nothing more
than objects for our consumption.
And the whole question shifted from
what does the Earth ask of us,
to what more can we take from the Earth?
And this set of questions and these values
may seem to have, "Oh this happened in 1838."
They're playing out in 2016 aren't they?
They're playing out at Standing Rock,
these are the questions that are at stake at Standing Rock.
What does land mean, is land sacred,
is land all of these other ways?
Or is land property, capable of simply being exploited?
The real questions that we are facing
that have on the brink of climate chaos,
and the age of the sixth extinction is what is land?
Is it a source of belongings,
or is it a source of belonging?
That's the question we all face together.
And the turbulence of this clash of world views
spawned the wind that blew the Potawatomi to Kansas
and propelled the extinction of the
most abundant bird on Earth.
And we need to remember this heartbreak.
We need to hear and remember this sad story,
because it is the same wind that threatens
to blow us all away today.
And the temperature of that wind is rising.
And you should also know that the story
of Martha the last passenger pigeon,
and of my grandmother Shah-no-dah,
are also foretold in the teachings of the
Anishinaabe people which are known as the prophecies
of the people of the seventh fire.
And I don't have time tonight to talk to you
in detail about this, it would take days
to really talk about all of the teachings
that are associated with this.
But I'll just tell you a fragment of it.
In each of the fires of which I will speak,
referred to a historical era
in the history of our people.
And because in our way time moves in a circle,
prophecy becomes history, history becomes prophecy.
They are really inseparable from one another.
And the story of the people of the seventh fire
really begins way over on the Atlantic Coast
at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence,
where our people lived among our Wabanaki relatives.
We're all there together long before
the sails were seen in the East.
And it was said that a teacher came
among the people and said,
"Big changes are coming to Turtle Island,
"and in order to safeguard the sacred fire
"we shouldn't have all our eggs in one basket as it were
"and some of the people should move to the West."
And so it was decided that some of the families
would walk under the directive of go west
until you come to where the food grows on the water,
to the land of wild rice,
and there you should make your homes,
and that someday in the future the people
would come back together again.
And it was also foretold this whole migration path
of where we would stop and live for a time.
This took generations for the people
to move all the way out to the
land of where the wild rice grows.
But it was told that in each one of these fires
there would be certain things that would happen.
And in those fires it would talk about the time
when new camp comers came to Turtle Island,
and we know that has come to pass.
And we also in these stories would be told
at the time was it would be the people
would be separated from their homelands.
They'll have to make long walks,
and we know that that came to pass.
That the language would be lost.
That new religions would come among the people
and try to break the sacred hoop of the people.
It was said that there would come a time
when you could no longer dip your cup
into the stream and drink.
There would come a time when the air
was too thick to breathe.
And that there would come a time when
the plants and animals, our relatives,
would start to turn their faces away from us.
And we know that that too has come to pass.
That that is a time in which we live.
These are the teachings of the seventh fire.
But it's told that in the time of the seventh fire
all of the world's peoples, the original peoples,
and the Sauganash the newcomers,
would stand together at a fork in the road.
And when we think about that fork in the road
this decision that needs to be made
about how it is that we will live here on the Earth.
That in my imagination anyway,
one of those paths is so soft and green
and all spangled with dew, you would want to take
your shoes off and walk barefoot there.
We know that's the path we want.
And the other path is black and burnt.
And it's all made of cinders that would cut your feet.
And we're told that we all stand there,
and have to make a choice.
What the prophecies of the seventh fire tell us
is that we can't just go bounding down
that green path, not yet.
In fact what they say is that what we have to do,
all of us together, is turn around and walk backward.
Walk backward along the ancestor's path
and pick up all of those things that have been
dropped along the way.
To pick up the fragments of land, and stories,
to pick up the teachings, to pick up a world view
of belonging to land.
That to pick up the ceremonies,
to pick up our plant and animal relatives.
And after we have done that, and put them in our bundles,
then we can go together and walk down that green path.
And when we choose this life-affirming path
which is imbued with mind, body, emotion and spirit
all of those ways, then we can walk forward
and light the eighth and final fire.
And our elders tell us that this eighth, and final, fire
is the one that will endure and they tell us
that we are the seventh fire people.
That we are the ones who stand at that crossroads
and that it's incredibly difficult work
of reweaving the world.
But that that is our responsibility as seventh fire people.
It's a hard story, but also a hopeful story.
That that work is there to be done.
And that if we go pick back up those things
that the land has taught us throughout history,
then we'll be able to light that eighth fire.
And one of the things of course that we need
to pick up along that pathway is
traditional, ecological knowledge.
And that's really what I want to spend
the rest of my time talking about is what are
those things that we might pick up along the way?
Now, I'm going to assume that because there are very,
very few places where you can study
traditional ecological knowledge in a university setting
that most of you are not familiar with this.
So let's just take a quick look at what we mean
by TEK or traditional ecological knowledge.
And oftentimes we think about it as just this, as just,
I don't mean as just, as the local knowledge
of plants and animals, it's land knowledge.
Empirically derived experience on the land
that brings us great understanding about the land.
But as you see it's also embedded in how we care
for the land and the land management practices,
which are embedded in social institutions
of how we organize ourselves and think of ourselves
which are embedded in the world view.
So the world view that we talked about
a few moments ago, is as integral to thinking
about TEK it's the philosophical constructs
that in which the empirical knowledge
of the land is really embedded.
One of the things that's important to note
is when you say traditional ecological knowledge
it sounds like a museum piece, like you know
it's what we used to do.
But it isn't, it is in fact some people say
a lot of Native scholars say,
We should call it naturalized knowledge.
Because this is knowledge which is constantly evolving.
It's adaptive knowledge.
It's the knowledge that lets you survive relocation
and removal and the climate change
that was associate with that.
It's dynamic knowledge and that this is knowledge
that doesn't come with a chromosome.
This is knowledge which is shared with people
who pay attention to land.
So this is land, this is knowledge which is held by the land
and shared with the people.
So I think about traditional knowledge
in the most simple way, as it is the way
we enact reciprocity with the land.
As the land gives to us and sustains us
we use traditional ecological knowledge
to in turn sustain the land.
And I'm very fortunate where I live in Central New York,
to sit at the confluence of two great
intellectual traditions of traditional ecological knowledge
represented by the Haudenosaunee on whose homelands I live
and the SEK of the university where I work.
SEK was an important term I think to bring up there
because we often hear, well we have TEK,
and we have science.
Like science is the valid kind of knowledge and we have TEK.
So I like to call science SEK it's
scientific ecological knowledge.
There are multiple ways of knowing
and we need to understand both of them.
But you know what you too sit at a confluence
of knowledge systems here don't you in Nebraska?
Between the knowledge of the first peoples here
and the knowledge of the university.
And certainly at my university there was
very little conversation between these two ways of knowing.
And the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment
was really born out of that conversation,
that beginning conversation of how could we use
both these splendid tools for caring for Mother Earth
and bring them together in an important way?
And it's really important that we do this
of course because let's just step back for a second.
We're really talking about evolution here.
I would submit to you that if we are going to arrest,
also species loss of 200 species every single day,
that we need cultural evolution, right?
We need to live differently.
We need to conceive of ourselves differently.
And what is it that drives evolution?
We all learn in Bio 101 what it is that drives
biological evolution, it's genetic diversity, right?
We all know that.
And what is it that drives cultural evolution?
An element of it is intellectual diversity,
cultural diversity, and so we need all
of these ideas on the table.
For too long traditional ecological knowledge
has been dismissed as folklore and marginalized
from the academy and our work is to bring it back.
And the model that we try to use
at least in our institution is a model
taught to us by the great intelligence of the plants
and the way that Native Peoples used them.
You're looking here at a three sisters garden, right?
I think you're all familiar with that kind of polyculture
in which corn, beans, and squash are all grown together.
And they help each other,
they don't compete with one another, do they?
They help each other out, they're complementary.
And does the corn become the beans when they grow together?
Of course not, beans don't become the squash,
they maintain their individuality, their sovereignty.
But they work together.
And we like to take this metaphor
of the three sisters garden and think about
how do we plant a knowledge garden
that looks something like that?
Where the traditional knowledge isn't subsumed
by science, they keep their individuality,
they work together and so we really are imagining
what would it be like to have a knowledge symbiosis
where the powerful tools of Western science
are guided by the indigenous world view
toward conservation and the sustainability?
That's what we're reaching for,
that's the great experiment that we're doing.
And so when we talk about the realms of
traditional ecological knowledge,
just a little whirlwind tour about
what we're talking about.
We're talking about agricultural knowledge, right?
Like the example of the, what was it,
damn wildcats term of the indigenuity of
the three sisters garden.
Agricultural knowledge, certainly pharmaceutical knowledge
of medicine plants which is very deep.
Knowledge of wildlife and fish population dynamics,
that in many cases rivals and in documented cases
exceeds what wildlife biologists understand,
and let's not forget that the first red flag
about climate change was raised by Inuit people
who knew so much about their Bering Sea food chains
that they could say, "Something is amiss here.
"Something is amiss because all these warm water fishes
"are here that shouldn't oughta be here."
But we didn't listen.
Another story of what is traditional knowledge
comes from just a tiny anecdote here of some
work that was done in South America.
To differentiate traditional knowledge
from what was called folklore.
The folklore was that the Quecha speaking peoples
would go to a certain mountain on a certain day
and the elders would go there and they would ask
the stars what they should plant that year.
And then they would listen and they'd go plant that.
And this was widely dismissed as nonsense, right?
Not really validated, the stars aren't gonna
tell you what to plant.
Well it turns out of course that what was happening
is these were very skilled observers
going to exactly the same place on the same
calendar day of the year looking at the Pleiades,
the cluster of seven stars, that vary in brightness.
And they were looking and comparing the brightness
of those stars and it turns out that the brightness
of those stars varies with the density
of ice crystals in the stratosphere.
Which varies with the temperature of the South Pacific.
Which varies in what we call
the Southern Oscillation, also known as El Nino.
They were predicting El Nino years long before
Western science even knew that that oscillation existed,
and were adjusting their agricultural
strategies on an annual basis.
That's the predictive power of
traditional ecological knowledge,
and the kind of sophisticated observations
that are linked from the stars to the soil.
Traditional knowledge is as I said not a museum piece.
Traditional knowledge is of vital importance for us
in conservation and a resilience in a time of change
particularly in a time of climate change.
I want to give you just a few examples.
We think about as desertification,
as one of the great, large impacts of climate change.
So can we rely on our relatives from the Southwest
who have devised these remarkable forms
of dry land farming to lead us to sustainable agriculture?
Knowledge of alternative food plants.
We eat so few plants.
We eat basically 10 plants folks,
and there are a quarter of a million others
to choose from that are eaten by Native Peoples
all over the world as a way
of supplementing our diets.
This shot is to remind us of the power of
traditional land management what you're looking at here
are some beautiful tall grass prairies,
of some of the eastern most distribution of them.
This is at Walpole Island First Nation, Bkejwanong.
Bkejwanong has the highest tall grass prairie
biodiversity on the planet.
Botonists, ecologists, go there all the time
to study what a real tall grass prairie ought to look like.
Why does it look so good?
Because this is the home of three fires people,
who have an uninterrupted history of annual fall burning
of these tall grass prairies.
The traditional management regime
has never been interrupted
and has been a powerful generator of biodiversity.
As we think about land management
and conservation strategies oughten we
to be thinking about the traditional tending practices
that in many cases generated and protected biodiversity?
There are models all over the country,
and often models that are not celebrated,
receive much attention like the amazing forests
of the Menominee Nation of Northern Wisconsin,
who have been using traditional ecological knowledge
to manage their forests for centuries.
When you go to that forest it looks like
an old growth forest, yet they are taking so much
timber out of that forest that they can sustain
their entire tribal population.
They've cut that forest over four times
and there's more timber on it now than when they started.
This is traditional knowledge in action as a model
for sustainability yet how many forestry courses
study Menominee forestry and the teachings of Chief Oshkosh?
Not too many.
What about the fishing wildlife service
working in tandem with the Nez Perce people?
Using traditional knowledge and traditional wolf stories
to restore the wolf to Idaho.
What about the fact that by using treaty rights
and traditional knowledge and traditional responsibilities
to the salmon that the Columbia River tribes
are really leading watershed restoration
in the Pacific Northwest against all odds
to care for their salmon relatives led by
amazing scientists and leaders like Billy Frank.
In my own territory what you're looking at there
is Onondaga Lake the sacred lake
of the Haudenosaunnee Confederacy.
The place where democracy was modeled.
The place where the great love of peace
was delivered is also the home of 13 different
Superfund sites the most
contaminated lake in North America.
And the Onondaga Nation has put forward their vision
based on traditional knowledge of what that lake
ought to be as a partner to the
scientific tools of restoration.
This is what I'm talking about of how traditional knowledge
can be used as a guide and an
inspiration for doing our work.
I want to take a minute and have you look
at this map for a second which might be familiar
to those of you in the conservation community,
because it's a map of biodiversity hotspots.
You've probably seen this from World Wildlife,
from the Nature Conservancy, IUCN,
really famous map showing all of the places
that are super species rich.
And overlain onto that map of species biodiversity
is a map of language diversity and cultural diversity.
And they map almost one-for-one, isn't that interesting?
Why should that be?
We could talk all night about that,
but just a glimpse of this,
why is linguistic and cultural diversity
associated with hotbeds of biodiversity?
In large part because of the care taking
practices of people for that land.
The respect that they have for the plants and animals
around them and it is held in language.
Language as a window for how it is
that we see and interact with the world.
A tiny story about that, you're looking here
at the endangered species the desert tortoise.
A species that was so endangered that the
fish and wildlife biologists who were designated
to create critical habitat for it
weren't even sure exactly what it needed to survive,
which pieces of land should be
designated for its protection.
And my friend Gary Nabhan, whose writings you probably know,
a wonderful ethnobotonist, and writer,
and conservation biologist was working with them
on trying to find the right
habitat for the desert tortoise.
And he brought along a friend of his
who was a Tohono O'odham herbalist.
And she didn't speak much English and she was
pretty quiet on most of the field trips
as they got in and out of the truck driving
to this place and driving to that place
assessing his habitat suitability.
Until they came to a particular valley,
and they were saying, "Well, yeah maybe, I don't know."
And she pointed to this plant that was abundant
in the bottom of that valley floor,
and she spoke in her language and she told them
the name of that plant and the name of the plant
was desert tortoise eats it.
(audience laughs)
Linguistic diversity, biodiversity,
you know where the desert tortoise reserves are now.
(audience laughs)
So just a quick commentary on this
preservation and revitalization of indigenous languages
is not something that we often think of
as a conservation biology tool,
but I hope you're getting a glimpse
of how very important it is.
And one of the important elements of this not just
in the vocabulary but in the whole way
languages are structured, is in my own struggle
to learn Anishinaabemowin, the Potawatomi language,
one of the real challenges of learning this language
is that it's all verbs, 70% verbs.
And that those verbs have different cases,
not for gender, as in some of the romance languages
but for animacy, and inanimacy.
And you hear an airplane with a completely
different verb than you hear a blue jay,
because one is animate and one is inanimate.
So we speak a grammar of animacy.
Such that, you know if I said, of Dr. Hubbard,
"It's sitting in the front row."
Is that okay?
Would that be okay, if I said that,
"It is sitting in the front row?"
If your grandma was standing by the stove cooking
soup for you and you say,
"Oh it's wearing an apron."
No, we don't do that, we don't do that, right?
Because it would be so disrespectful
to say of our relative, it.
I would rob you of your personhood, right?
But in English how do we speak of maple trees,
geese, rivers, it's all it isn't it?
Isn't it (laughs)?
Yeah, we do not speak a grammar of animacy.
And in English the very fact that we have
a special grammar for humans reinforces
human exceptionalism doesn't it?
That we are somehow more entitled to the gifts
of the Earth than any other species.
That we're somehow different and more special.
As opposed to being a member of the democracy of species.
And this very notion captured in many indigenous languages
of the essential qualities of all living beings
recognized as persons, is an essential difference.
And so I've been doing a little word experiment
as a modest proposal of transforming
the English language and our relationship to nature
with a couple of pronouns.
Who thought that grammar could matter?
But what if, have you ever felt unsettled by
calling the natural world it?
Yeah, as a student of the mosses.
I've spent decades on my knees among the mosses
it hurts me to call them it.
They're not it, they're my teachers,
they're my companions, but English imprisons us.
We can only say it.
And so I asked my language teachers and elders
about could we think about a way to infuse
animacy into the English language?
And if so, what would that word be?
Can we find a word that we can slip in
along he, she, it, and something else
that means a being, an animate being?
Not a thing, but a being of the Earth.
And there is in our language a beautiful word
called bmaddiziaki which means an earth being.
But I'm pretty sure that we can't slip bmaddiziaki
into English language and so one of the things
we've been talking about is think about
that last word aki means the Earth.
Can we use that last syllable, ki,
to sit beside he, she, and it?
So that instead of when we go and tap the maples
the inanimate in the spring time instead of saying,
"I'm gonna go drill a hole in it," we say,
"I'm going to ask ki if she will share her gift with me."
So animating our language.
And of course we need a plural for that too.
And in English we already have it.
We already have a beautiful word for that.
Imagine every time we spoke of the natural world
we spoke with respect, with respect for the animacy,
and the personhood of those geese flying overhead.
Or the trees that are around us.
Conservation biology in indigenous languages and pronouns.
I need to, there we go, we're right on time.
How about that?
And so, with the advent of tools of molecular biology
you've probably heard that there is a movement afoot
to de-extinct species like the passenger pigeon.
To use Martha's DNA to recreate her in the lab.
There's a lot of interest in doing this.
Mastadons too, right?
You probably hear about that a lot.
But I would ask us, didn't Martha's
loneliness teach us anything?
That a species is so much more than its genotype,
that it's so much more than its genome.
And it would really just be an exercise in loneliness.
But if there's anything that we should be investing
our energies of de-extinction, let it be
to de-extinction of a world view.
Because against all odds, unlike our sister species,
omemee, our people are not extinct.
Our people are not extinct despite the Trail of Death,
despite tremendous losses.
They carried something with them that allowed them
to endure through great climate change,
great upheaval, resilient in the face of all odds.
To be resilient may we ought to be thinking about
what that was, what are the tools of resilience
in a rapidly changing world?
And some of our elders say that the reason
that traditional ecological knowledge has been
held by our people for so long against all odds,
it's really a miracle that the fragments exist at all,
is because one day the whole rest
of the world would need it, at that point when
we stand at the fork in the road of the seventh fire.
And if we think about walking back along
that ancestor path to pick up what was left behind
that we could have cultural evolution toward
a livable planet and just human communities.
What would it be?
What might be some of the most valuable resources
from traditional knowledge that are resources
for resilience and conservation?
The one that I want to share with you in closing
is a group of ways of being both practical and philosophical
both material and spiritual because in traditional
ways of thinking we let those dance with each other
rather than vanishing one to the corner
the way we do in Western science.
And this is a group of teachings
that have been shared with me as a botanist
by plant gatherers, berry pickers, nut gatherers,
plant medicine harvesters, and is a synthesis
of many of the things that I have been really blessed
to learn from Native harvesters.
And it goes something like this,
if we really take animacy seriously.
If we really take seriously that all of the
other beings around us are persons.
How do we consume them?
It sets up an ethical dilemma doesn't it?
Of how do you consume your relatives?
But that's the way the world works,
we're heterotrophs, right?
None of use can photosynthesize, we have to eat.
And when we think about the other beings as persons
that means that the way we take from the world
has to be honorable because it's not just stuff
it's our relatives who are giving their lives to us,
so that we can live, how do we do that with honor?
And so, in plant harvesting if we're gonna go
pick berries and we just go into the meadow
we just start picking berries?
Do we just start grabbing and filling our buckets
as fast as we can?
We do not.
What I've always been told is that
you never take the first one.
You look around you, you appreciate,
you never take the first one.
And that self-restraint means you're not
ever going to take the last one, right?
And then you look around and you see how many there are.
Different cultures different practitioners
have different numbers that they'll say,
"Only take if there are four.
"Only take if there are seven."
There are lots of different prescriptions of self-restraint.
But before you take you ask permission.
You greet that plant and you tell it your name,
and you say what you're there for.
That your daughter has a cough,
and you need some of the root.
And you ask that plant, "Could I have some of that root?
"Could you share with me, in order that your gift
"could help my daughter's cough go away?"
You ask permission.
Think about it this way, if that sounds crazy to you,
if you came into a strawberry filled meadow
and found someone talking to the plants,
you might think she was crazy.
But in our way it's just good manners, just good manners.
Because would you go into your grandmother's house
and start rifling through her cupboards to get the cookies?
I see some guilty faces out there (laughs).
You might do it once, right, just once.
But isn't that what we do with
our beloved Grandmother Earth?
We just take what we want.
We need to ask permission.
And if you're going to ask permission,
you have to listen for the answer.
And it might be no, but more often than not it's yes.
Because they have gifts to share with us.
They're generous beings.
You have to listen for the answer.
And science is a great way of listening to the answer.
Of doing species monitoring and species inventory.
Is there enough to share, is this population thrifty
and healthy, that's a great way to listen for the answer.
There are also the intuitive ways to listen
to the answer from those plants,
of whether they're willing to share with you.
Think about it we're also told to always
take only that which we need, no more than that.
Which is why when you introduce yourself
you say what you need it for.
I need it for this, so that sets some limits
on what it is that you're going to take.
And take in such a way that minimizes harm.
The teaching that was given me is don't use
a shovel if a digging stick will do.
That kind of rules out bulldozers,
minimize harm, take in such a way
that is appropriate to your task and only that.
To omemee, was omemee, harvested by Native People
throughout it's range?
Yes they were.
Yes they were in their tremendous abundance
these birds were hunted, and Simon Pokagon
describes his horror at the way the birds
were harvested by the settlers and the colonists.
And he said, "Well the way that we harvest them
"is only in the spring and we only take the young ones."
They nest really early in the year and so when those
squabs would be big enough to leave the nest
that's what they would harvest,
that's who they would harvest is those young ones.
And it turns out that the passenger pigeons when,
if they lost their nestlings early in the spring
they would re-nest, there was time in the season
for them to re-nest and so their population numbers
remained stable and the people
got to eat at the same time.
And they were harvested honorably through these protocols.
And in fact in the longhouses of my Haudenosaunee
neighbors they still do the pigeon dance
which is a dance of gratitude for the birds
for feeding the people, the giving them the gift
of this life even though the pigeons are gone
they still do that dance as a reminder
of what happens when we fail to be grateful
and fail to pay attention.
So back to the honorable harvest.
The honorable harvest continues that use
everything that you take because when a life
is given to you it is so dishonorable to waste it.
And of course we have really forgotten that
the easiest way to have everything that we need
is not to waste what we have.
So this is an important teaching,
and be grateful for what has been given to us.
And gratitude might seem like really weak tea,
given a species loss that we face,
given climate chaos, but gratitude is
a really powerful emotion and a powerful motivator.
Gratitude reminds us that someone else
has given their life for us, that we can live.
It reminds us of our interconnection
and when we're grateful when someone gives us
a gift and we say, "Thank you," what do we do next?
You say, "You're welcome," and if you've given me
a birthday gift when your birthday comes around
I'm gonna give you a gift, we reciprocate, right?
Gratitude opens the door to reciprocity.
And indeed the next teaching in the
honorable harvest is to share what you've taken
and to reciprocate the gift.
That you always give a gift back.
Sometimes, traditionally, it will be a ceremonial
gift of putting down tobacco, which for us
is a sacred plant, a sacred gift but sometimes
it's a song, you give a song to that plant.
Or sometimes it's a very practical thing
of weeding around the plant that you just harvested from.
Or taking those seeds and carrying them to another place
and planting them, you reciprocate the gift
the plant has given to you so you give back to the plant.
And so the world keeps going through reciprocity.
We're also told that the even older harvest guidelines
are take only that which is given to you.
All these other guidelines to me are really quite doable
and they're part of my own practice.
And probably part of yours too.
But this notion of take only that which is given
is for me a bit of a harder philosophical construct.
How do we know what's given to us?
Berries are easy, they are given to us aren't they?
I mean the plant is dangling these little packages
of sweetness right before us, they want us to take them.
In fact did you know in our language,
the word for gift, min, is the same as the word for berry?
The berries are gifts to the people,
and so we take those gifts and do we reciprocate?
Sure we do, by spreading their seeds right?
That's why they want us to take those delicious berries
so we can propagate them and it turns out for
a lot of berry plants the act of picking
is a kind of pruning that shifts
the apical dominance, and the hormone regimes in the plants
so that they make more berries the next year.
So this is good, this is mutualism.
So those kinds of take only that which is given,
that makes sense to me.
But some of it I'm still puzzling over.
But I feel really darn sure that coal from
mountaintop removal is not given to us.
I don't think that tar sands oil is given to us,
given the damage that we must inflict
in order to, I won't say receive that gift,
in order to take that from the Earth.
So what I'd like to think about is that
renewables, the sun shines every day,
is that given to us?
The waves roll every day, the wind blows every day,
that's given to us, not without its cost, but given to us.
And so this honorable harvest that you might look at
and say that's a kind of a quite protocol
for picking berries it's a lot more than that isn't it?
It is a very sophisticated mechanism for thinking
about how it is that we as a
heterotrophic species take from the Earth.
What if we used the honorable harvest
as our guidelines for sustainable energy policy?
What if we used the honorable harvest
before we plow up a virgin prairie for a parking lot?
What do you suppose would happen if we had
to ask permission of the meadow larks first?
It's a restraint isn't it?
What we're looking at here is an ancient
and urgent protocol for conservation.
And to finish up I worked for a time
and continue to work in the field of restoration ecology,
of healing ecosystems like Onondaga Lake.
But what I came to realize is that it's not
just the land that's broken,
it's our relationship to land that's broken.
And traditional ecological knowledge
is as much about healing relationship
as it is about healing the land itself.
Science can be a really great tool for ecosystem restoration
but by the simple fact that it excludes values,
emotion and spirit it is not the tool
for healing relationship to place.
And this is one of the great strengths of
traditional ecological knowledge,
and using all of those ways of knowing
to heal our relationship to place.
So that we can once again engage in the honorable harvest
so that we as humans can once again
view ourselves as givers to the Earth.
Not just as consumers to the Earth,
but as being part of the covenant of reciprocity.
And I think that had we adopted the wisdom
of the honorable harvest, instead of marching
in a way to wither in the dry lands of Kansas
we might this very spring have looked up
to see flocks of omemee passing by us
like a living wind.
(Speaks foreign language)
Thank you.
(audience applause)
Thank you.
Thank you so much, thank you.
Thank you.
And do we have time for a few questions is that the plan?
Yeah, I'd be happy to take a few questions,
or thoughts, or comments, or songs (laughs).
Yes.
Woman: We'll ask that you just wait
until Madeline comes to you with the microphone
'cause we're filming.
Woman: Okay do I have to stand up too?
-: If I do you do (laughs).
Woman: You talked me into it, okay.
My name is Sloan Cornelius I'm Oglala Lakota
my people are from Pine Ridge Reservation.
I grew up around here south of here by Beatrice.
I stood up really fast hold on let me catch my breath, okay.
I am a youth assistant, I'm also an activist
and so I work a lot with kids.
My question is with our traditional knowledge
what I see happening as it become commodified
by non-native people, and so then,
our traditional knowledge non-native people
have more access to our traditional knowledge
than say we do.
And so how can we as Native People equalize
the playing field so that like I'm here,
I can take this back to my kids where I work,
but I don't see anybody that I know here.
So how can I equalize the playing field
and make sure that our knowledge
belongs to us first and that we also
have access to it and we don't become
alienated from it in the process?
-: It's a powerful question thank you for asking.
Sloan: Yeah, good luck.
-: Well really, yeah.
And I think that, one of the things
that has been very important and somebody
said at the outset traditional knowledge is receiving
more and more attention for its power
and all of these realms.
But what becomes really important is that
the sovereignty of that knowledge that is
embedded in communities that, that knowledge
can't really, shouldn't really be separated
from communities, right?
And that Native Peoples need to have the control
over that knowledge because it's,
we know that biopiracy goes on all over the world.
Cultural appropriation, and so in many cases
it seems like your work with youths
strengthening our own, do I want to say,
I was gonna use the word ownership.
But I mean that in a broader way, you know.
That strengthening of identity and strengthening
or the way that we use that knowledge
is a powerful tool against commdification,
but the power differential is extreme
and one of the things that we work a lot with
in our centers thinking about this question
of what are the elements of traditional knowledge
that should be held very closely and what
are the elements that can be shared?
And as you notice here we share philosophy,
but not necessarily details.
And one of the things that's really important
is also that for these kinds of relationships to work,
for settler society to use these tools
they have to come from the heart.
They have to come from relationship,
authentic relationship with place.
Not be borrowed and what I'm seeing in many places
is this liberation of loving the land.
Of saying, "Well I love this land.
"This land feeds me.
"This land is the place that I drink from.
"And I owe reciprocity to this land."
So the honorable harvest emerges from that,
from settlers as well as Native People.
Thank you for that really good question,
and that's a hard answer, yeah, yeah.
Other thoughts or questions, yeah.
Woman: Hi, my name is Brittany.
I'm a graduate student here at the university
in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture.
And I was just wondering do you know of any
global repositories of traditional ecological knowledge?
I know I guess it kind of surprised me
that the last person said that they weren't
sure if their own people knew all
of their traditional knowledge.
I was thinking about peoples that don't necessarily
have communities because they're so broken and lost
that is there a way, or is someone collecting
that knowledge somewhere is there like a global repository
where everyone could look at what everyone knows?
If you know of anything like that, that's going on?
-: There are many efforts at I guess you would say
documenting and revitalizing traditional knowledge,
but the most successful and really I think culturally
appropriate ones are the local scale.
Within nations, within communities,
where they have the role of protecting
and safeguarding that knowledge
and being sure that the knowledge which is in
such a repository is the knowledge
that they want to have there.
I don't know of any global repositories.
India has done a great job they have,
what do they call it?
I think it's the plant knowledge bioregistry in India.
That they have been using to safeguard their knowledge
and to document it and that really came about
after cases of biopiracy, where companies would come in
like the neem tree controversy that you
probably know about where somebody came in
to try to patent the neem tree which is part of
their traditional, medicine traditional life ways
from (mumbles) memorial and a Western company came in
to try to use it and commodify it,
and so the bioregistry came about as a way
of protecting it to be able to say,
"No, this is our knowledge, this is not your knowledge."
I don't remember what the pharmaceutical company was.
So there are some international registries
of traditional knowledge but most of those
with which I'm familiar are a community and nation-based.
Does somebody have something else to say about that?
More knowledgeable about that?
Brittany: It would definitely be a tremendous
amount of work so it doesn't surprise me
that there's not a whole lot.
-: Yeah and it's just as antithetical to the nature
of traditional knowledge which is so embedded
in culture, and in place, and in locality,
and in language, and practice to abstract it and put it
in a repository of some kind would cross
world views it would make the animacy
of traditional knowledge into a thing.
And all the risks that come along with that.
Brittany: Thank you.
-: Yeah.
Yes.
I think it's coming to you.
Woman: Hi, I'm Anita Cusill
I'm a student at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.
I'm an anthropology major and potentially
a soon to be environmental studies major, hopefully.
I guess this isn't a question it's more of a comment
or announcement on something you said,
you mentioned the fight that's going on
up at Standing Rock, and I just wanted
to make it known to everyone in this room.
Even if it feels like you can't always do something
to help on a larger scale there is a protest,
or not a protest, a march going on this Saturday
at 12 p.m. in front of the capitol building
that's being organized by people who have been up there
and by myself and other people who have
been up there who are in support of the movement.
And it would be wonderful to see any of you
in this room who are here to support sustainability
Native Peoples of this land and it'd be wonderful
to see you up there to actually support
them in person, so thank you.
If you have a comment on that then please.
-: My comment is thank you.
Yeah, I'm so glad you're doing that because
this is a movement which is at the heart
in Indian country and in everybody
who's coming together at Standing Rock
including allies from all kinds of communities
all walks of life because water
takes care of all of us, yeah.
There's a couple in the back.
Woman: Hi, I'm Phyllis Stone.
I am Lakotan, Sitting Bull Lakotan.
I wanted to make a small comment about the Standing Rock.
It's not just for Indian people.
This is for everybody.
The Indian people have just chosen
to put ourselves in front of all of this,
because water is very important to us
and I really feel that our sun dance ceremony
is one of the reasons why it is so very important.
We give up water for a good five days.
We don't touch water.
We don't drink water.
We have nothing to do with water,
and we know how important that is.
I mean if you do that for several years,
and you need to pledge for four years of doing that,
it gets to become you realize
water is very important.
Very, very important, and it's not just
important to Indian people.
It's important to everybody.
And I wanted to make a quick comment to simplify
when they came in to try to take the neem tree
and make it, patent it, it's very much
like that person I'm sorry I don't remember
people's names if I don't like them.
(audience laughs)
-: Probably a good thing (laughs).
Phyllis: Anyway, this man, this (speaks foreign language)
comes into our country and he finds pipestone.
The Indian people, the Lakota people,
have always known pipestone.
But this man found it and chose
to name it after himself, there, there, yes.
I just thought that was a very simple thing
to name something after yourself.
(audience laughs)
-: Thank you, thank you for those wise words.
And in fact one of the greatest examples
of that kind of linguistic imperialism
of renaming things is I think the notion of it.
To say of our relatives that we're not
gonna call them our relatives anymore,
that we have to call them it.
So there's so many examples of that
that we need to reclaim, thank you.
Woman: Hi, my name is Kaylee, I'm a doctorate
plant health student in agronomy and horticulture.
I've always been fascinated with plants, fun story,
and I can't seem to run away from them
no matter how hard I try, but I also love people.
And that's something that I appreciate about
what you spoke about, and it's been a concept
I've been trying to struggle with for a while
back and forth as both somebody that's people oriented
and cares greatly about relationships between people,
but then also cares greatly about science
and plants and how that affects our world.
I guess my question is how do we take
someone from multiple cultural backgrounds
how do you get these things to cross these concepts
to cross cultural boundaries and bring people
together instead of divide them more
and get people to see how, just like you're talking about,
integrating science with thoughts
and both emotion and spirit.
Because I think that's very important.
How do you not only teach that to younger generations
but how do you do that to bring people together
and to bring people together to better the world
both scientifically and culturally together?
Like what are some practical ways I guess?
-: That's a big question.
I think that a piece of the answer
that I would like to give is that when
I'm faced with a weighty question like that
that seems unanswerable because of all of its dimensions.
I try to turn to intelligence that's far greater
than my own, and that is I go to the natural world.
And understand that the nature, the natural intelligence
of the landscape of the plant beings,
of the water beings, of the animal beings,
that they all have a lot more
to say about that than I do.
And I think that one of the most powerful ways
to heal this relationship is time spent
on the land because it's the land that's the teacher.
And when we isolate ourselves indoors all the time
with our digital distractions and all the other things
that we use to separate ourselves,
we cut ourselves off from the teachers
the ones who can tell us how do these things cross cultures?
How do they cross cultures because the plants
will give you their lessons if you pay attention.
It doesn't matter who you are,
if you ask, if you pay attention they're
gonna teach you too, they'll teach everybody.
So I think time on the land is the most important thing.
And when we know that we live in a society
which is plagued by a nature deficit disorder
but the medicine, the medicine is in the land
and it's reconnecting with the land
and that's where we'll learn how to do this.
Because the land feeds all of us.
When you're on the land you can't help
but know these things, and know that you don't have
a bigger piece that the land doesn't feed you
better than it feeds somebody else.
And so it heals the relationship among people as well.
So I think we have to just spend more time on the land,
put your hands in the earth, is a piece of it, so.
Susan: I think with that--
-: Thank you.