ECU’s Voyages of Discovery Series features distinguished teaching professor of environmental biology
Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer will headline the final Voyages of Discovery event of the 2021-22 season. (Contributed photo by Dale Kakkak)
East Carolina University’s Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences wraps up the 15th season of its signature Voyages of Discovery Series at 7 p.m. April 14 with a free, live-streaming lecture and a question-and-answer session featuring Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, who will discuss “The Honorable Harvest.”
Kimmerer is a distinguished teaching professor of environmental biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York, whose mission is to create programs that draw on the wisdom of both Indigenous and scientific knowledge for shared goals of sustainability.
She is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and 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 scientific journals on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology.
As a writer and a scientist, Kimmerer’s interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of people’s relationships to land. She tours widely, and in 2015 she addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.”
Kimmerer earned her bachelor’s degree in botany from SUNY, and her master’s and doctoral degrees in botany from the University of Wisconsin. She lives on a farm in Syracuse, N.Y., tending to her gardens, both cultivated and wild.
The event is co-sponsored by Dr. Kirstin L. Squint, Whichard Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Native American literature specialist. This year, the Whichard professorship is hosted by the Department of English and the gender studies program, housed in the Department of Sociology.