Kimmerer: 'What does the Earth ask of us?'

It was appropriate that best-selling author Robin Wall Kimmerer spoke before a large, diverse campus audience on the first day of the Teach-In, as she discussed reciprocity in terms of learning from each other and learning from the land.

Kimmerer, author of "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants," gave a presentation before a standing-room crowd in the Kirkhof Center. Another audience at the DeVos Center watched a live-stream of her presentation and heard Kimmerer's central question: What does the Earth ask of us?

"The land is our identity," said Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. "The land gives us everything we need, and we need to be accountable to it. It's our pharmacy, where our wellness comes from. Plants show the strength of the Earth, we are healed by them.

"Is this the framework you learned about land?"

It was not the framework Kimmerer was initially taught when she enrolled in the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF) in Syracuse. She said she was "born a botanist who also wanted to be a poet."

As one of a handful of women in the forestry department, Kimmerer said she initially felt she made a mistake by choosing that program. 

"My first day at university echoed my grandfather's first day of education," she said. "He was sent to the Carlisle Indian School, where you 'kill the Indian, save the man.' He was a survivor of boarding school."

She now teaches at SUNY ESF as distinguished professor and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. In her classes and through the center, Kimmerer teaches about Two-Eyed Seeing, seeing the world through both Western and Indigenous perspectives. 

"So much of our education has been with only one of these lenses. We have never been allowed to see through the other lens," she said.

Kimmerer referenced a 2019 United Nations report on biodiversity that found nearly 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction within decades. There was "one shining light" from that report, she said.

Indigenous people live and care for 80 percent of the world's cultural and biological diversity, while living on 20 percent of the world's surface, Kimmerer said.

"We see so starkly the power of Indigenous science and land care, and yet, we do not start our courses with that land knowledge," Kimmerer said.