4TH ANNUAL LEOPOLD LECTURE & WRITING CONTEST
​AWARDS CEREMONY FEATURING

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Braiding Sweetgrass: "Restoration and Reciprocity"

​April 22, 2023

ROBIN WALL KIMMERER is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

​Named a MacArthur Foundation 2022 Fellow
CLICK HERE FOR MACARTHUR FOUNDATION PAGE ON ROBIN WALL KIMMERER

​Articulating an alternative vision of environmental stewardship
​informed by traditional ecological knowledge.
”I’m a Potawatomi scientist and a storyteller, working to create a respectful symbiosis between Indigenous and western ecological knowledges for care of lands and cultures. Biodiversity loss and the climate crisis make it clear that it’s not only the land that is broken, but our relationship to land. Both are in need of healing—and both science and stories can be part of that cultural shift from exploitation to reciprocity. I work in the field of biocultural restoration and am excited by the ideas of re-storyation. I hope that co-creating—or perhaps remembering—a new narrative to guide our relationship with the Earth calls to all of us in these urgent times. I’m really interested in how the tools of Western environmental science can be guided by Indigenous principles of respect, responsibility, and reciprocity to create justice for the land. I honor the ways that my community of thinkers and practitioners are already enacting this cultural change on the ground. Together, we are exploring the ways that the collective, intergenerational brilliance of Indigenous science and wisdom can help us reimagine our relationship with the natural world. I dream of a time when the land will be thankful for us.”