5x15 Presents: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Live at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
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My name is Alex Antonelli and I have the great honor and pleasure of being the director of science here at the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew and to welcome you to the beautiful Kew Gardens in this nice evening.

And we are very pleased to have a very stunning relationship with 5x15 and the 5x15 by Q series. So last year, we held two series of talks where we tried to bring speakers who are very inspirational from across the disciplines to engage in conversations about the natural world and how we as humans can engage with nature and live in harmony with nature.

And last year we had over 1,800 people attending us either live here, also online, and then over 11,000 people watching the talks on YouTube and also on the 5x15 SoundCloud podcast in their own time. Yay!

It's amazing. Yes, it is impressive. And we are delighted to have this collaboration with 5x15. And tonight's highlight is the talk by Dr. Robin Wall-Kimmerer. And she's a mother, a renowned scientist, an author, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Association.

Potawatomi Nation. And she's also the creative professor of environmental biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

So her work encompasses traditional ecological knowledge, something that all of us now scientists are becoming increasingly aware of, and the amazing knowledge held by indigenous and traditional communities. Moss ecology, for those of you who love baritophytes like I do, and also how to reach out to tribal communities and how to communicate science to the wider audience.

And she's been very well recognized for her amazing books, including "Rating Sweetgrass" and "Gathering Moss", educating us both on the biology of those organisms she writes about, but also our relationship, of course, with nature and how we can best learn from indigenous communities to live in harmony with nature. And that's the United Nations goal for this century, really, that we'll start living in harmony with nature, which we actually don't do at the moment, of course.

A few years ago, I do have an indigenous background myself. I was born and grew up in Brazil, and I was really keen to learn more about people's relationships with nature, and I was recommended. The only book you have to read on this topic to really start off is Braille and Sweetgrass. So...

I really highly recommend, I'm sure that all of you have read it already, but that was transformational for me in my understanding, my thinking, and I'm really keen to see how this will widen towards the scientific community so that we all start engaging those conversations. And this evening's talk is going to be very much about how we can best do that. So it's going to be a journey, we think, through time in nature, exploring the intersections of traditional knowledge, botany, and the human experience.

So it's really important, even for us at Kew, because as many of you will know, we are not only a beautiful botanic garden in southwest London, which we are, but we are also a major global scientific organization. So we're now celebrating 265 years of botanical exploration. We have the world's largest collections of plants and fungi. We work in more than 110 countries.

And we really want to bring those stories about those plants and that interaction between humans and known human species in a way that is much more inclusive and representative of the history of that exploration, which hasn't always been done in the best way. But we need to acknowledge and learn from our past so we can better influence our present and move forward towards the future.

So without further ado, let us embark on this journey with Dr. Robin Kimmerer. And thanks so much for being here and I hope you'll have an enjoyable evening. Thanks so much. Thank you.

And in our beautiful Potawatomi language, I tell you that my name is light shining through Sky Woman. I'm a member of the Bear Clan and also of the Eagles. And I'm just a beginning student of my language, but we are told to speak it whenever we have the opportunity to breathe life into that language. So thank you for listening.

It's also part of our traditional protocol that we always begin any gathering with gratitude. And so I'm imagining you have all had busy days. So let's just take a minute. Let's just take a minute together to think back to this morning when we first put our feet on Mother Earth, that we had everything that we needed. We had that first breath of morning air. We had a drink of cool water.

We had food, the companionship of clouds and birds and trees and one another and the comfort of the purpose of our lives.

I also want to give great gratitude for the opportunity to be here at Kew. When I was a baby botanist, I first heard about Kew, and it had always been my goal to visit here, and this is my first visit. Oh, my gosh. So thanks to all of you who made this possible. As I said to somebody today, I think I've almost run out of wow.

So it's really been wonderful, and I thank you so much for that.

I also want to say that where I come from, and I'll tell you a little bit about that in a second, we almost always begin gatherings like this with what we call a land acknowledgement, where we take a moment to recognize that as a scientific educational institution, we are occupying someone else's homeland, right? And so we think about that unpaid debt of land and history that we owe,

And so here at Kew, the way it felt right to me to think about a land acknowledgement is to think about the ways in which Kew, in its exploration, in its complicated history of extractive colonialism, has had outcomes that we grieve.

And so to take a moment to also acknowledge those.

And to acknowledge that in my time here at Kew today, I heard so many examples of people working in a decolonial context to try to heal those harms, to reach out and to bring the benefits of Kew and botanical exploration to the world in service to justice.

And so I'm really grateful for the stories that have been shared and the seeds that have been planted in that regard. We all have to begin that decolonial work and to encourage it and breathe life into it. So all my commendation for the work of decolonization that is beginning.

And, you know, I also want to say that as an Indigenous botanist, my goal tonight is to maybe contribute a little bit, to shed a little bit of light. I often think about my name, Light Shining Through, to shed a little bit of light on the Indigenous worldview around plants and botany. And that's what I'd like to hope to do.

So let me tell you just a tiny bit about where I come from. I'm a Potawatomi woman. Our people are of the Great Lakes, the southern Great Lakes. But I live today just near the end in Onondaga that you see there, which is the central fire of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Six Nations of the Iroquois.

And together we live in this beautiful, well-watered, deciduous, temperate forest, right, that we share. We are two different nations, though. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Confederacy to which the Potawatomi belong. So long before settlers came to what we call today Turtle Island or North America, we had to have an agreement between our two nations of how we would live in this place.

And I want to share that agreement with you. And it's called the Nalgan Gebejik Emkwa in our language. This is a document. This is a treaty that you're looking at here. It is a treaty sewn of Quahog shell wampum beads.

And what this treaty says, and my people have a copy of this in our governance lodges, as do my Haudenosaunee neighbors have the same copy. And what this shows us is in the center of the white band, that purple shape is the shape of our traditional birchbark feast dishes. And so the teaching is that while we are two nations, we are all fed from the same bowl.

The bowl that Mother Earth fills for us. So it's an acknowledgement of our utter dependence on the gifts of the land. And so it's about how the land gives to us, but it's also our responsibility for the land. That as two nations, we're not going to compete about that. We're all going to collaborate in order to keep that bowl clean and full so that both of our nations can live.

But notice that it's not just about the nagon, about the dish. It's also about the emkwan, the spoon. And there's Be'ezhik emkwan. There's one spoon, two nations. What does that mean? It's an agreement about justice and about sharing, isn't it? That we will collaborate. There's not a big spoon for some people and a little tiny spoon for others, right? This is a really important statement about the relationship between people and the earth.

And my colleague from the Tuscarora Nation, Neil Patterson, says this is the oldest sustainability policy on the planet. I think that's probably true. And so therefore, you all studied it on the page one of your ecology textbooks, right? We know that answer. And shouldn't we be asking why?

Shouldn't we be asking why about the erasure of traditional ecological knowledge and how it is that we can all together breathe life back into that knowledge as well and combat erasure ourselves?

So, you know, while we give thanks for all of these gifts of Mother Earth, almost all of us also find ourselves embedded in institutions and in the economy, which is relentless, let's be honest, in saying, what more could we take? What more could we take from the Earth, despite the fact that we're showered with everything that we need?

And it seems to me that, of course, it is that question, what more could we take, that has us perched on the edge of climate catastrophe, doesn't it? In the age of the sixth extinction. I think the question that we need is, what does the earth ask of us? What is it that we can do? And this is very much the theme of Braiding Sweetgrass, the theme of reciprocity, of in return for the gifts of the earth, what are we called upon to do?

And rarely do we even ask that question.

But we know we're in trouble, right? You don't even need to read this quote to know you know we're in trouble, that our so-called sustainability is in question. So let's talk about language for a second. We use that term all the time, sustainability. And a little story from a colleague of mine, Carol Crow, an Algonquin biologist, and she tells the story of going to her tribal council to ask for a travel grant to go to a sustainability meeting.

And her elders said to her, "What's sustainability?" And she kind of laughed, saying, "Well, that's how our people have lived in place well since time immemorial." But she also gave them all these definitions that are on the first page of our ecology textbooks, right? And so she told them these, you know, "Let's choose one, ensure the attainment and continued satisfaction of human needs for future generations." Okay?

So she was very surprised when the elders sort of scowled at her. They're going to turn me down? And they said, no, no, you go to that meeting. But you go to that meeting and carry a message. Sustainability? That sounds to me like they're trying to find a way to just keep on taking.

It's not our right when your feet hit the ground in the morning, we should be thinking, what should we give? And look at these definitions. That really is what it's all about. How can we keep on taking? So how do we change that? How do we, inspired by the Indigenous worldview, think about ourselves as full participants, as givers to the natural world, not just consumers?

You know, those folks who think about sustainability, who don't ever ask the question, what does the earth ask of us? How many times has anyone asked you that question? Isn't that stunning? That question is not on our agenda, but it is on the agenda of so many indigenous peoples, so much so that it is at the heart of our creation story.

I want to tell you just a fragment of that creation story, which as it is, is shared by my Haudenosaunee neighbors and my own Potawatomi people. Just a tiny bit of the story. In the beginning, everyone lived in the sky world where people lived just as we do today. They were growing their gardens and playing lacrosse and raising their children. But as a botanist, I love to think about one of the things that was different there is that there was a tree called the Tree of Light.

And the tree of light on it grew every single plant, every berry, every medicine, every root was on the same tree. And one day a big storm came through the sky world and it toppled that tree.

And so the next morning, a beautiful young woman named Gij Kukwe, the sky woman, came out of her lodge and she went over to where that tree had fallen. And she saw, instead of seeing the roots and rocks that you would expect in that big hole, it was empty, absolutely empty. It was just black.

She couldn't believe it. And so she went over to the edge of that hole to see what was going on. And she started to fall. She started to, the earth was crumbling at her feet. So she reached behind her to steady herself on the tree of light. And the branch broke off in her hand. And so she fell. She fell into nothingness so far from the only home that she had ever known. Imagine how frightened she must have been.

But it turns out that it wasn't empty because that hole looked down on the water world.

And in the water world, as it happened, all the water beings were meeting together in council. And they were surprised, too. They suddenly see this shaft of light shining through the clouds. And in it, they see this little speck, and it's coming toward them. And as it comes closer, they see that it's a woman with her arms outstretched. And they've never seen a person like this before. But they rose as one and went up and met her. And they caught Sky Woman in their wings.

Imagine the rescue of the helpless human. And they carried her down to the water where, of course, they couldn't just stay on the back of the geese. And so the turtle, the snapping turtle who was floating there said, let her rest on my back, which she did. And then all the animals came together and said, oh, we know what she needs. She needs land. And we've heard about this mud down at the bottom of the water. Let's go get her some. We'll build her. We'll build her some land.

And so Loon, our Hmong in our language, the very strongest swimmer, said, I'll go. I'll go get it. And so he went down. But he came back up and just shook the water off his beautiful plumage and said, I couldn't do it. It was too far, too cold. And Sturgeon said, I got this.

So Sturgeon tried with the same result. And beaver and otter, they all tried. And no one could get this mythological soil from the bottom of the water until only little Muskrat was left, you know. And his relatives looked on pretty skeptically. But he said, I'm going to do this. And he paddled his arms and kicked his feet and down he went. And he was gone a really long time too. He was gone too long because pretty soon little Muskrat

Trail of bubbles came up and broke at the surface, followed by the body of the muskrat who had given his life trying to make a home for this newcomer, for this immigrant. And when his relatives came around, they opened his paw and there it was, the little bit of earth he'd done.

And Sky Woman said, I know what to do. Give that to me. And she took that little bit, that gift of the animals, and she started to spread it over the back of the turtle. And she began to sing a song of gratitude. And she began to do the women's dance around the back of that turtle where your feet never leave Mother Earth. It's a caress to Mother Earth.

And the power of her gratitude and the gift of the animals was such a powerful alchemy that the back of the turtle started to grow and grow and grow until it became North America, our home. Minis came, mine, the turtle island. And you'll remember that like any good guest, she had not come empty-handed. What did she have in her hand?

The branch from the tree of light that had all the biodiversity, all the plant biodiversity on it. And she scattered those seeds over the back of the turtle. And so we live in the garden that we have today.

That powerful story means that within my people and the people who I live among as neighbors, the question of what does the earth ask of us? That's what this creation story asks, right? Of we humans, the earth that provides everything for us, what are we called to give in return? And those answers are gratitude and reciprocity with plants.

Let me just say for a second that our Anishinaabe Potawatomi people have always been botanists. You have only to look at our famous floral beadwork, much of which you can tell what plant families those are in beautiful beadwork. And when you think about how we talk about plants in our language, one of the names, the most important name for plants is Mishkikinikin.

And Mishkikinik doesn't mean plant. It doesn't mean kingdom planta. It means the medicines. All of the plants are called the medicines.

because they all are healing, both spiritually, physically. All the medicine isn't for us, is it? It's for the other beings as well. And the beauty of that word and the importance of revitalization of indigenous languages is that when we take that word apart, meshkekin, the singular medicine, it means the strength of the earth. The other name for plants is the strength of the earth.

that we are healed by the strength of the earth. And what a powerful teaching. And I wanted to share that with you here in this amazing capital of thinking about plants, to think about the plants as the strength of the earth for which we owe gratitude and reciprocity.

And when I think about not only my culture, but many cultures around the world, our plants and our plant knowledge are inseparable from our culture.

But whenever we teach about plants, and I wonder whether how this resonates with how you work here, when somebody will come to me in one of my classes and say, what can I use that plant for? Or who is that plant? The answer is, well, let's talk first. And that is, we don't talk about what their uses are until we talk about our responsibilities for the plants.

Only when you've sort of demonstrated that you can be responsible for that knowledge is the knowledge shared. So protocols of respect and reciprocity are taught first before the specific knowledge of the plants. One of the things that...

As an Indigenous scientist trained in both the Western race of botany and in Indigenous cultures, one of the places that it seems so important to me is to understand that in our Indigenous science systems, in our Indigenous knowledge systems, we don't just rely on human knowledge. Because remember, we are the newcomers.

We are the newcomers to the world. There are intelligences other than our own here, included in the plants and the animals whose story we just heard.

And so unlike perhaps in a setting such as Kew and others like it where plants are understood perhaps as objects, you know, as specimens, as for ornament or for commerce and prosperity, for us our plants are understood as our teachers.

That is one of the first conceptions of the plants are here to teach us. They were here before we were. And I mean, after all, think about models of generosity. These are beings who take light, air and water and turn it into food and then give it away for free. Well, not without its ecological costs. They make medicines and give it away for free. How's that for a health care plan?

And so the plants are really revered as sort of models of virtue, of who it is that we could aspire to be. And plants are our teachers of what does the earth ask of us.

And so I want to share just a few reflections on this particular question. And as the Sky Woman story tells us, human gratitude is a gift that we have. And when we give that deep gratitude to recognize that our lives are totally contingent upon the lives of plants, you have only to breathe life.

to know that that's true, right? So gratitude in this deep way is a really radical act in a consumer-driven society. It's always telling you, you need more, consume more, consume more, take more. What if in deep gratitude you said, I have enough, thanks. I live in a really abundant world. It's a radical act to practice that kind of gratitude. And then in return for the gifts that you're given, say, well, what am I going to give back? Not just, what am I going to take?

We are more than consumers. We can be givers in this indigenous worldview. And one of the most important teachers for me about reciprocity you see here.

We saw in our wonderful visit to the herbarium today, we had a look at the database where all of the Hyra chloe odoratas were arranged. That's the name that Linnaeus gave this wonderful plant. We call her wingosh in my language. But Hyra chloe odorata is a case where, boy, did Linnaeus get it right. Because that translates to the sacred, fragrant, holy grass.

which is known as sweetgrass. And how many of you have red-braiding sweetgrass? Should I just go home now? So you know about her. You know that in our creation stories, when Sky Wynne planted all those seeds, the first ones to grow were sweetgrass. We call it the hair of Mother Earth.

Because it was the first and it's so long and silky and fragrant. That's why we braid it. Think about the last time you braided someone's hair or they braided yours. If you could see your face, it's the soft smiles that just went across this room, right? What is it when we braid somebody's hair? That's this really tangible way of saying, I care that you are at your best.

That's why we braid Mother Earth's hair. This is a sacred plant that is that bond that says, Mother Earth, I care that you are at your best. And this is a reminder of that. And for the few of you who have read Braiding Sweetgrass, you know that this serves as the dominant metaphor for the book and for my own journey as an indigenous scientist.

to think about how when we make that strand, that braid that says, "I care for you, Mother Earth," how do we do that? We can care with a whole bundle of Western scientific knowledge. You have only to look at the work in conservation being done here at Kew to know how powerful is Western scientific knowledge for caring for the plants, for the Earth, right?

But what is often erased is indigenous knowledge as a way to care for the earth as well. So for me, that's another one of those strands. But both indigenous knowledge and Western scientific knowledge are human constructs, right? They're our way of making sense of the world.

And so I also want to invoke what are the plants know? Those intelligences other than our own. And how much stronger would our problem solving be? How much bigger would our imaginations of a sustainable future be if we use all these ways of knowing instead of just the one that for the most part we operate within?

So a little bit of a story about my own relationship to those kinds of knowledges. I was lucky enough to grow up a pretty free-range kid in the woods, and in the fields, and the plants were always my friends and my teachers. So there was really little question that I would grow up to be a botanist, although I did want to be a poet as well, but I was told, oh, you can't do both of those things.

So the plants chose me and I chose them. And famously, perhaps for those of you who have read this chapter, when I decided to go off to college to study botany, I knew that at a forestry school where I was going, I would be one of the only women in the whole forestry school. And that's where you went to study botany in that time. And I knew for sure that I'd be the only indigenous person on the whole campus.

So I want to be ready, as much as you can be ready for that. So one of the things I did was to go out and buy a red plaid wool shirt. Yes! I'm going to channel Paul Bunyan here, and that will help me fit in, because I knew that I wouldn't.

And the other thing that I did was I knew that on the first day of enrollment, I'd have to have an interview with my botany professor, my new advisor. And so I wanted to be ready for that as well.

And I thought I knew plants pretty well because I'd spent so much time hanging out with them, learning from my teachers. And two of the plants that I loved the best are these goldenrod and asters. They look so beautiful together, don't they? Do you have this combination here, goldenrod and asters? Some of you nodding your head. Yeah, yeah. Stunning, isn't it? And one of the things that I had noticed as a young botanist and plant ecologist is that they seem to share the same kind of habitat.

But they could grow on opposite sides of that field, but they don't. They grow shoulder to shoulder in the way that makes this so stunningly beautiful. And I thought that must be revealing of some kind of ecological pattern.

And so when my professor said, so Miss Wall, why do you want to study botany? I said, I want to know why goldenrod and asters look so beautiful together. That's what he did. He laughed. He actually didn't laugh. He looked at me like, I've never heard an answer like that before. And he went on and he said, Miss Wall, if you want to study beauty, you should have gone to art school.

day one of forestry school. I shouldn't be here, right? So then drawing on Potawatomi ways of thinking, I said, well, I also want to know why plants make medicine for us. That's not a science. That sounds like anthropology. You know, I went on. I want to know why some work really well for baskets and others don't. And he just kind of waved me off and said, tell you what, you come take my plant science classes and then you'll learn something about plants.

He said to the young woman who was born a botanist, "That's why I look so happy." Yep. Our freshman mug shots taken on that same day.

I'm waiting for my real mugshot. It'll come. But, you know, you could laugh at this or cry. Both are appropriate responses. Because, you know, I had no vocabulary of resistance. I had no one to follow. There were no other Native students there. I didn't know a single Native scientist. Truthfully, I thought I must be wrong.

Because I was in the professor's office. He was a botany professor. There are pictures of Linnaeus and Asa Gray hanging on his wall. Clearly, he knew what botany was. And clearly, I did not. It was really, really hard, as you could imagine. I felt like I was knocking on the door of a club that did not want to let me in, where the way that I thought was not welcome. And I was right.

You know, I didn't think about it at the time, but I sure did later how my first day of school was an echo of my grandfather's first day of school.

This famous photograph of the Carlisle Indian School, one of the notorious residential boarding schools. My grandpa was only nine years old when he was taken from his family in Oklahoma, put on the train for Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he too was told that his way of knowing was not welcome, that his knowledge was to be erased. The motto of these schools was kill the Indian to save the man.

And we look at that as a tragedy of assimilation and knowledge loss. But as an indigenous student and scholar in Western academia, I want to tell you that it's still profoundly assimilative, where only certain ways of knowing are really privileged.

And we say we live our ancestor stories. And, you know, as a scientist, as a writer, as a teacher, as a mother and a grandmother, I know I'm living in response to this story from my grandfather. But this is my work. This is my work to do that kind of healing, to contribute to the anti-erasure of what happened in such places. Because as a young person, I grew up thinking that the plants were people.

The metaphor for the living world was nature as subject, nature as family. Right? That's just a given. Well, would you say that in the world that you were educated in, the world that you live in, is this how we think about plants? Is this how we think about plants here at Q? No.

as plants, as people, as subject, or the dominant metaphor that we usually think about in the Western world of plants as objects, ecological objects in a sense. And the dominant metaphor is not the family, but the ecosystem as machine and human beings to tinker with that machine and to control that machine.

I think it's fair to say that this is a perhaps oversimplified, but generally true element of the Western world and how we think about the natural world and plants. So can you imagine how difficult it was for me as a young Potawatomi student in fitting in to the university? We don't talk about beauty unless we're in art school. The mission of those schools was to erase Indigenous knowledge and replace it.

with Western knowledge. And so how can we, again, in this decolonial effort, how can we

liberate ourselves from this idea of erase and replace. A question that I want to ask you, because one of the really important agents or the outcomes of these boarding schools was to erase our language. That little fragment of language that you heard at the beginning, there are only nine fluent speakers in my entire nation. The engines of assimilation did a pretty good job

But they didn't win. Our language is now being revitalized as we speak. But why do you suppose language erasure was so important that they would create these institutions to erase it, to exterminate it? Let's think about that together.

Let's do a thought experiment together. When you think about land in your own culture, whatever that might be, is it safe to say that in the Western culture, we think about land first and foremost as property?

private property, right? Which is a bundle of rights. We buy rights to exclude others and uses from it, right? We think about, therefore, land as capital. Land as natural resources, which seems benign enough, right? Until you really remember what natural resources mean, raw materials that if we extract them will become useful to us.

Right? That's what land is too. And sometimes more gently, land as ecosystem services, those gifts that the land provides for us, like oxygen, pollination, fertile soil, water cleaning, et cetera. Would you agree that this is the dominant framework in which we've, most of us grown up? This is what land means, right? We don't even question it. This is what land means. Because have you ever been invited to think about land differently? Right?

This is what it is. That's erase and replace right there.

As a native person going into a college of forestry and natural resources, that's what I was told land meant. Whereas to me, land was a source of identity. Land is the ones who sustain us. Land is not only my home, but the home of my more than human relatives, not objects or specimens. Land is the connection to our ancestors and to the ancestors that we will become. Land is the teacher's.

It's literally the library. It's also the pharmacy to heal all of our ills because the land is spirited, because the land is home. And never do we think about land as a place for which we claim or purchase rights, but a place for which you accept moral responsibility because the land is sacred.

Is this a way of thinking about land that was part of your education? Was this an option that was given to you? When you compare these two ways of thinking about land, do you feel more at home in one of them than the other? Troubled by one, embraced by the other? Is land a source of belongings, or is it the most fundamental source of our belongings?

So I ask you, as we talk about colonization and decolonization, when you think about those two ways of thinking about land, has your worldview been colonized? Who taught you to think about land as property as opposed to sacred home? What are the consequences of having our notions of what land and plants are? What are the consequences of that for the earth and for each other? And as you think about that, what are you going to do about it?

What do we do when we recognize that we too have been colonized?

In this wonderful visit to Kew today, which I've been so looking forward to, I feel like I've probably been looking forward to this for the last 60 years or so. So it's a big day for me to be in this wonderful place of so much care and attention for plants. But I'm not going to lie. I am in a way of two minds here.

about an institution of this nature and you're all nodding your heads because you know why, right? Two minds on one hand.

A repository of all the plants in the world is a place of wonder. It's a place of investigation and protection for plants. It's a place where the plants really are teachers. I got to go to the herbarium today to see where specimens were being digitized so that they could be shared with the world. Those plants will be teachers for so many, right? That's of one mind, like, wow, this is amazing.

But the other mind, of course, is to understand the consequences of extractive colonialism that also underpins an institution like you, right? Where plants were understood primarily as objects of commerce, right? And dominion and imperialism, right?

So it is, for me, a really challenging space to be. And I thank you for the really good conversations that we have had today about that. Because when we are of two minds, to me, that is a very productive place. It's like an ecological ecotone. And good things happen there.

Well, I am, I better get going here. I am really proud to tell you that right down the hall from where my professor said I should have gone to art school, we now have the Center for Native Peoples in the Environment. Yeah, where our goal is to bring together the tools of Western science and the philosophical and ethical guidance

of Indigenous knowledge and the tools of Indigenous science as well. One of the metaphors that we use for our own learning and research together is this idea, this metaphor of two-eyed seeing. It's a metaphor that was put forward by two Mi'kmaq scholars to say that most of us have been educated as if there was only one way of seeing the world, the Western worldview, the Western scientific worldview.

And so when we try to solve environmental problems, that's the tool set that we're using. But most of us have not had the opportunity to see the world through the Indigenous lens.

And so our educational goals are to use both of those lenses, both of those tools, not to privilege one above the other, but so that they can work in complementarity with one another. And this, I think, is where so much fertility and expansion of imagination and problem-solving lies, is when we have this intellectual pluralism rather than one single lens.

And I'm sorry, the slides and converting between platforms kind of messed up. But what this is really meant to convey is oftentimes people say, well, you want to engage Indigenous knowledge, what to go back to some time in the past?

It's not that at all. It's to engage indigenous knowledge in order to go forward into real sustainability so that we could guide the tools of Western science with an ethos that considers the land to be our responsibility, not our rights. And so how much more will we know when we use both of those ways of knowing?

This is probably the right time to invoke this report from the United Nations. It's probably on many of your desks here, Q people, right? In this biodiversity report, it's heartbreaking. You know, this is the one that, the one of many, that documents the catastrophic decline in biodiversity around the planet. I don't need to go into details. You know, right? Okay.

But in this heartbreaking, truly heartbreaking report, I mean, 70% of all of the songbirds gone in the last 50 years? The insect apocalypse? Whew, heavy reading. But there is a bright spot in this report, and that is there are places on the planet where that's not happening. And you know where those places are? In the homelands of Indigenous peoples. Shouldn't we in the conservation community

be stunned by this finding. Think of all of our decades of work in conservation and what we see is in Indigenous homelands, that's where it's really happening. What's that all about? I could talk all evening about this and I try to teach a class about this, but the

Short version is indigenous science, indigenous land management, indigenous ethics. This notion that we don't have nature over here and people over here, but that we live together, that they're in reciprocity, that human well-being and the flourishing of the land is the same thing, that people are givers to the land, not just takers. It is this whole panoply of ways of knowing that translate to a much higher ecosystem impact.

integrity in those places. I'm greatly simplifying that story, but I have only a few minutes. So this map, again, may be familiar to you. It comes from a wonderful organization called Terra Lingua, which again is about indigenous languages. And on this map, what you're looking at is a gradient of plant biodiversity appropriate to this audience and mapped on top of it

indigenous language diversity. Biodiversity hotspots are also indigenous language hotspots. So how do we care for one without caring for the other? These things are linked, aren't they? And we're going to talk about language this evening.

So back to our general question, what does the earth ask of us when faced with the circumstances that we find ourselves when faced with the notion that we've been looking at the world through a monocle instead of glasses with two lenses? If plants are our teachers, let's just take that as a hypothesis. How can we be better students?

What if we took seriously the fact that plants, through biomimicry, are able to teach us what we might do in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss, right? Nature-based solutions. Well, we all know, teachers and students alike, that the most important thing to be a better student is to show up to class. For one, right? You've got to be present. You've got to be present with those teachers. What does the earth ask of us? Pay attention.

Pay attention. In this room at Kew, I don't have to say pay attention to plants. Maybe you need to say stop paying attention to plants. Sometimes my family will say that to me. Just for a minute, Mark. But this notion of paying attention is the work of botanical gardens all over the world.

Because we know, of course, that in the conservation community, it's been documented that there's this phenomenon known as plant blindness, right? That people just don't really think about plants and conservation, hence deficits in funding for plant conservation, plant protection, etc. One tiny story about this kind of attention. What are we paying attention to?

A really interesting study showed that the average American school child, and maybe you can test this here, recognizes 100 different corporate logos. You can probably do it right now, right? And it turns out that the taxonomy part of our brain is also the part of our brain that processes symbolic information like logos.

Our ability to tell a poisonous plant from medicine, we need to be able to recognize a certain pattern of color and shape. And it turns out that it is the same area of the brain. Well, what happens when our children, when ourselves, let's be honest, can recognize 100 corporate logos and on average 10 plants? Yeah. And when you look at that list of 10 plants, one of them is Christmas tree.

Nine. Right? Right? So pay attention. And the role of botanic gardens like Q is to focus our attention on those things that truly sustain us, not those things that are asking us to consume, consume, consume. Knowing plant names. And I don't mean necessarily knowing all the botanical Latin, although, boy, I love me some botanical Latin. Right?

Rhetidia, Delphus, Triquetrus, mosses have the best. Anyway, by knowing names, I don't necessarily mean knowing their technical names. I mean knowing them like you know your neighbors, right? How can you call on them for help if you don't know who they are? How can you help them if you don't know what they need? So paying attention to the plant world is a really important step in healing our relationship to the land.

The last thing that I want to share about, I think it's the last thing. Oh, yeah. Not quite. When we think about how do we answer that question of what does the earth ask of us, it depends on

what you have to give, what's your gift. You know, doing good science, that's a gift back to the land. Doing transformative art, so is that. You know, policy making, activism, all of those are really important ways that we can give back to the earth. The shorthand that I like to use is, what does the earth ask of us? Raise good children? Raise a garden?

and raise a ruckus. Raise a ruckus when you need to on behalf of life. And one of the, this really is the last point that I want to make, is about language and how language as a human gift can help us on this pathway toward real sustainability. And let's see what we mean by that.

The gift of human language is to take nothing away from the language of Ticketees or of orcas, right, or of aspen trees. They all have their own languages and ways of communicating. But we have a very special gift, don't we, in language. Let's think about how it serves or doesn't serve the thriving of life on Earth today.

We've talked a little bit about imperialism tonight. Have you heard about linguistic imperialism? You know, the replacement, this erase and replace, again, erasing a language and replacing it with the language of the colonizer, right? Happens all over the world. It is a contemporary tool of colonization. Place names are a good example. But isn't what does land mean also a kind of linguistic imperialism?

No, land doesn't mean a sacred home place, it means property. That's a kind of linguistic imperialism as well. But the one that I want to talk about is this little word right here. I think one of the most pernicious elements of linguistic imperialism. This

nondescript little pronoun that you use so many times a day. If you're pointing out the window at that robin singing in the treetops, you're going to say, it sounds so pretty. Of course, that's how we speak. You know, if you're talking about those salamanders, you know, it's hiding under a rock.

Our way of speaking in the English language about the living world is to call all the other elements of the world "it." Right? English doesn't give us any choice about that unless we know their name. And we've just seen we don't know their names. So we're "itting" the world all the time. Think of how many times a day you say this without even thinking about it. Right?

It turns out, well, let's do this thought experiment as well. Alex, I'm going to pick on you. What if I said it's sitting in the front row listening? Oh, thank you for groaning, right? That wasn't nice, was it? What did I just do to Alex? I objectified him. I reduced him to a thing. I stole his personhood. I disrespected you. I'm sorry. Right? We would never say that about each other.

If my grandma came in here, you know, bringing me a glass of water, would I say it's wearing an apron? I sure wouldn't. Right? But think about it. But we objectify the whole living world. All other beings we refer to as if they were objects. Right? It turns out that in the Potawatomi language, it's impossible to say it about a plant.

grammatically impossible, or a bird, or an insect, or any one of our relatives. We refer to one another with the same grammar as we do our family because it's our family. Think about this really interesting element of English grammar. We are invited to objectify the world with our own grammar, aren't we? In fact, we must objectify the world.

Is it any wonder that English is the language of global business and capitalism? By it-ing the rest of the world, we can convert living beings to natural resources with a single pronoun. This is what happens when we look at the world through one lens without knowing there is another way, right? This is an example of human exceptionalism at its worst, isn't it? This is the fiction.

of the Western worldview, that of the 200 million and counting species with whom we share the earth, one species, and please notice some members of one species, are more entitled to all the rights and riches of the world than anyone else, that we're in charge. We're at the top of some fictional pyramid, right? In which everybody else is an it and everybody within our in-group gets to be referred to as a person.

The language maps exactly onto this Western worldview. Well, in Paruarme, we say that we speak a grammar of animacy. We have a different verb for, we heard so many airplanes go over today. I have to hear those airplanes with a different verb than I hear a blue jay calling. It's really hard to learn the language. Why? Because we always give respect to those who are alive.

And we distinguish those who are not. Every facet of the language is a verb-based being. And as a scientist, who I've spent years on my knees before a mossy log, studying with my teachers, the bryophytes, and then I write a scientific paper and I have to objectify them.

I have no choice in a scientific article. Could we heal the human exploitative colonialist relationship to the living world with grammar? What if we could, inspired by not only Potawatomi language, but this is true in many indigenous languages, although certainly not all, by imbuing English with animacy. This modest proposal to create new pronouns

that we could use to speak of the world respectfully as beings. And I worked with my language teacher about this, a wonderful Potawatomi elder. And at first, you know what? He really shook his finger at me. He said, "Wait, wait, wait, Shavadaske Gishkokwe. You are trying to tell me you want to create a new form of the English language based on ours,

to heal them, the people who tried to erase our language. This didn't make a lot of sense to him until we talked about language as medicine. What if our language could be medicine for a broken relationship with the world? And he came around and he said, well, what would that word be in our language?

Well, bema desi aki. Bema desi aki would be a word that just means a being, not a thing, and not a he or a she. And in talking about plants, sometimes that makes no sense at all anyway, right? You're just a being. You're a being. And he said it would be bema desi aki, a good being of the earth.

And I love knowing that that word exists, but I had absolutely no illusions that we were all going to start saying, not going to happen. But what about the last little bit of that word, which in our language means the earth? That little sound ki at the end is largely unclaimed in the English language. What if we could say ki is enjoying a feast of berries?

Why should we be itting our relative the bear, right? Every time we speak of them, we speak of them as property, as object. I don't think we need words for objectifying the living world anymore. So what if instead of having he, she, it, we had he, she, he and it. So you could have an option of speaking about living beings in the world.

My students have been practicing with this. They've been using it to write, to give their presentations, and in ordinary conversation. And of course, they say this sort of stumble over it. I'm like, yeah, that's a little hard. But then they get it and they say, you know what? In that little moment when I'm stumbling, I really feel great because I'm saying, oh, you're not a thing. You're a being. And it is a little moment of justice, which is worth a hesitation in a sentence. Yes.

But you know, friends, we're also going to need to create a bigger grammar here, aren't we? We're going to at least need a plural. And one of the ways that we pluralize things in Potawatomi is to add an N. Oh. What if we said kin are flying south for the winter? Come back home. We're going to miss you. What if every time you spoke of the living world, you spoke of relatives? Would we live in the same world that we do today?

if we called our plant and animal companions kin? I think we would not. So I encourage you to think about this as an experiment, a linguistic experiment. And you know, that experiment is not only a linguistic trick, if you will. It's a philosophical construct. I think these are the pronouns of the revolution, quite honestly, right? To de-objectify the world.

But we also need this language for the new landscape in which we live. You're looking right here at a photo of the sacred Whanganui River, right? In Aotearoa, New Zealand, where the Maori people for decades have tried to appeal to the government there to recognize the intrinsic rights to be of their sacred river. The right not to be dammed, the right not to be polluted.

And just a few years ago, they won. Indigenous leadership led to legal personhood being recognized for a river. Did you know that legal protection for the personhood of Mother Earth is written into the constitutions of Indigenous-led governments like Ecuador and Bolivia? We can do that.

Before the United Nations, there sits the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Nature, for which we're going to need words like key and kin to recognize the personhood of all being. These are transformative ideas by which we can really start to decolonize our relationship with the world and heal a broken relationship with land.

This is the language that we need to fuel the Rights of Nature movement, isn't it? This new system of law which recognizes that the living beings around us are not objects for us to possess, to sell. Sorry? Yes, indeed, right. This is a way of not othering anyone. We are all bhamadasi aki. We are all beings, right?

And as you know, the rights of nature is moving across the world, particularly in what we call Indian country and native country in the United States, where the Yurok nation changed their constitution to recognize the rights of a river. In the United States, there are, of course, legal persons other than human beings.

corporations, right? Corporations have the rights of legal personhood where pine trees and blue jays certainly do not. But we need to fix that. And, you know, one of the things that being a legal person means is that you can sue. You can take somebody to court for damages, right? Well, Nishnabe

related to Potawatomi. My relatives up on the White Earth Ojibwe Reservation, where manomin, wild rice, our sacred food, has been threatened by oil development, by fossil fuel development and pipelines. They couldn't, using existing law, legal frameworks, they were helpless to stop this. So the tribe passed a resolution in their own sovereign court that declared that manomin, that wild rice, was a legal person.

Well, if you're a legal person, you can go to court. Manoma and Wild Rice has sued the oil companies. Yeah. So this is a whole new revolutionary way of thinking about giving agency to the earth, agency to plants around us. What does the earth ask of us? The earth asks us to change, to change. When we think about so much of our environmental discourse, it's all about changing technology, right?

one more kind of policy, right? What I think we really need is to change minds, to change worldviews and indigenous knowledge in that two-eyed seeing is a powerful way to move us away from this fictional pyramid of human domination of the world to the kin-centric worldview of recognizing that we are all members of the democracy of species.

Thank you for listening.