Speaker: Robin Kimmerer | Air Date: August 11, 2018 | Run Time: 64mins | The Native Seed Pod: Season 1
TRUSTING in abundance: Finding your Regeneration Niche
In this intimate dialogue between Native Seed Pod host Melissa Nelson and special guest Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, we explore with them the beauty and sophistication of seed germination and how plants use their inherent intelligence to locate their regeneration niches to thrive in place. Robin shares her vast botanical knowledge and insight to discuss the generosity of berries, ant farmers that embed trillium seeds, and amazing pin cherry seeds that have built-in spectrophotometers to read light.
Using Indigenous and Western sciences and Anishinaabe language and philosophy, Robin and Melissa explore topics such as reciprocity, the sovereignty of being, the Rights of Nature, bio-cultural restoration, and collective remembering. They reveal a poetic and rooted understanding of belonging and kinship so needed in our fragmented society today, reflecting their own kinship as Anishinaabeg relatives.
ABOUT ROBIN
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, writer and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. She is also founding 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 collaboration with tribal partners, she and her students have an active research program in the ecology and restoration of plants of cultural significance. She is active in efforts to introduce the benefits of traditional ecological knowledge to the scientific community, in a way that respects and protects indigenous knowledge. Robin is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her writings include Gathering Moss which was awarded the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing in 2005. Her second book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants was honored with the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. Robin earned her B.S. in Botany from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and her M.S. and Ph.D in Botany from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of numerous scientific papers on the ecology of mosses 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.
ADDITIONAL WORKS BY ROBIN WALL KIMMERER:
Extensive, official web bio and video links http://www.esf.edu/faculty/kimmerer/
“Returning the Gift,” essay at Center for Humans & Nature, https://www.humansandnature.org/returning-the-gift
“Indigenous Science Statement,” at Center for the Study of Native Peoples and the Environment, http://www.esf.edu/indigenous-science-letter/
“Mishkos Kenowagmen: The Teachings of Grass,” Video of keynote talk at Bioneers, 2013, https://youtu.be/cumEQcRMY3c
CREDITS
Host/Writer/Director: Melissa K. Nelson
Producer: Sara Moncada
Co-producer: Mateo Hinojosa
Audio Editor and Engineer: Colin Farish
Assistants: Luke Reppe, Yvonne Martinez
Songs (in order of appearance):
Eagle Dance song, sung by Eddie Madril
Kanyon’s Chumash Grandmother Song - Kanyon Sayers-Roods