Robin Wall Kimmerer, Distinguished Speaker in Global Development and American Indian & Indigenous Studies Program Seminar Speaker

Partners across Cornell University are thrilled to welcome Robin Wall Kimmerer to campus on November 1. Robin is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is also the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim.

Seminar abstract

What might Land Justice look like? Dr. Kimmerer will explore Indigenous perspectives on land conservation, from biocultural restoration to Land Back.  This discussion invites listeners to consider how engaging Traditional Ecological Knowledge contributes to justice for land and people.

About the speaker 

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, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. In 2022, Braiding Sweetgrass was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith. This new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us.

Robin tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. In 2022 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild. 

Co-sponsors: 

• Campus Sustainability Office
• Department of Global Development
• American Indian & Indigenous Studies Program
• Cornell Botanic Gardens
• Einhorn Center for Community Engagement
• Native American Indigenous Students at Cornell
• Atkinson Center for Sustainability
• Land Grant Affairs
• Department of Anthropology
• North Campus Facility Programs
• Masters of Public Health Program
• ECO Environmental Collaborative 
• West Campus Houses
• Department of Natural Resources

Stay tuned for a full line-up of events on November 1.