User:Antirrhinum majus/Robin Wall Kimmerer

Kimmerer teaches in the Environmental and Forest Biology Department at ESF. She teaches courses on Land and Culture, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Ethnobotany, Ecology of Mosses, Disturbance Ecology, and General Botany. Director of the newly established Center for Native Peoples and the Environment  at ESF, which is part of her work to provide programs that allow for greater access for Native students to study environmental science, and for science to benefit from the wisdom of Native philosophy to reach the common goal of sustainability.

Robin Wall Kimmerer was born in 1953 in the open country of upstate New York to Robert and Patricia Wall. She grew up playing in the countryside, and her time outdoors rooted a deep appreciation for the natural environment. Her enthusiasm for the environment was encouraged by her parents, who while living in upstate New York began to reconnect with their Potawatomi heritage, where now Kimmerer is a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation.

Kimmerer remained near home for college, attending ESF and receiving a bachelor's degree in botany in 1975. She spent two years working for Bausch & Lomb as a microbiologist. Kimmerer then moved to Wisconsin to attend the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning her master's degree in botany there in 1979, followed by her PhD in plant ecology in 1983.

Kimmerer's efforts are motivated in part by her family history. Her grandfather was a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and received colonist schooling at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The school, similar to Canadian residential schools, set out to "civilize" Native children,  forbidding residents from speaking their language, and effectively erasing their Native culture. Knowing how important it is to maintain the traditional language of the Potawatomi, Kimmerer attends a class to learn how to speak the traditional language because "when a language dies, so much more than words are lost."

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