Living Earth Symposium 3 - Robin Kimmerer

"On the Table: Creating a Healthy Food Future" is a special symposium that explores innovative ways to build a healthier, more resilient food future that provides fresh, nutritious choices while protecting public health and sustaining our environment. In this segment, Robin Kimmerer, award-winning writer, scientist, and professor, speaks on the Native American value system and the importance of creating a culture of gratitude and reciprocity in relation to the earth and the food it provides.

Robin Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Band Potawatomi, is a scientist, award-winning writer, and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. Dr. Kimmerer is the 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. Her research interests include the role of traditional ecological knowledge in ecological restoration and building resilience for climate change. In collaboration with tribal partners, she and her students have an active research program in the ecology and restoration of plants of cultural significance to Native peoples.

This symposium, a part of the annual Living Earth Festival, was recorded in the Rasmuson Theater of the National Museum of the American Indian on July 17, 2015.