Upcoming Event: A Conversation with Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer

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UBC Library presents, in partnership with UBC Forestry and the Simon K. Y. Lee Global Lounge and Resource Centre, a conversation with Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer on Friday, January 29 (1:00 -2:30 p.m. PST). The acclaimed author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants will be joined by moderators, Dr. Daniel Heath Justice and Corrina Sparrow to discuss the author’s influence on multidisciplinary understandings of her work and how readers can integrate this into our connections with land and each other through our respective disciplinary lenses.

Special thanks to Xwi7xwa Library for their contributions to this event in providing honoraria to the event’s moderators.

This free event will be held online, and registration is now full.

A Conversation with Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer

Date and time: Friday, January 29 (1:00 -2:30 p.m. PST)
Location: Online

About the author:

Dr. 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 Teaching 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. She 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 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, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both Indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability.

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.

About the moderators:

Dr. Daniel Heath Justice is a Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation/ ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ. He received his B.A. from the University of Northern Colorado and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Before coming to UBC, he spent ten years as a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Toronto in Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory, where he was also an affiliate of the Aboriginal Studies Program.

Daniel currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture at UBC on unceded Musqueam territory. His most recent book is Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, a literary manifesto about the way Indigenous writing works in the world. He is the author of Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History and numerous essays and reviews in the field of Indigenous literary studies, and he is co-editor of a number of critical and creative anthologies and journals, including the award-winning The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (with James H. Cox) and Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature (with Qwo-Li Driskill, Deborah Miranda, and Lisa Tatonetti). Other writings include the animal cultural history Badger in the celebrated Animal series from Reaktion Books (UK) and the Indigenous epic fantasy novel, The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles.

Corrina Sparrow comes from the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Nation, and the Qualicum Nation of the Pentlatch People on the west coast of what is now known as British Columbia; and they also have some Dutch ancestry. Corrina is a current PhD student with the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, whose research explores Coast Salish Two Spirit/Indigequeer identities and resurgence, and how this knowledge informs Two Spirit community development and wellness. Corrina brings extensive community-based experience to their work – from their most recent role as Social Development Manager with xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Nation, to over twenty years of strong advocacy and helping with Indigenous children and families in both rural and urban communities. Corrina sits on multiple working groups for Two Spirit advocacy, including the UBC IRSI-Indigenous Advisory Committee, the Trans, Two Spirit & Gender Diversity Task Force with UBC Equity & Inclusion Office, and they are the elected BC representative, and executive Co-Chair for the national 2 Spirits in Motion Society. Corrina is committed to the animacy of land-based knowledges that inform the centralization, protection, and wellbeing of Two Spirit/Indigequeer kin, and in the promotion of decolonial conceptions of Indigenous gender, sexualities, and research.