BIOL 225: Biodiversity & Climate Change: November - Indigenous Peoples Month

Serra Hoagland is a research biologist and liaison officer with the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station. Hoagland’s research includes the Mexican spotted owl habitat and the ecology and management of oak woodlands in California. But perhaps her most critical work is as liaison to the Salish Kootenai College in Pablo, Montana. There, she said she hopes to inspire the next generation of Native students toward careers in natural resource management and research.

Dr. Salmón is a Rarámuri (Tarahumara). He has dedicated his studies to Ethnobiology, Agroecoclogy, and Ancestral Ecological Knowledge in order to better understand his own and other cultural perceptions of culture, landscapes, and place. Dr. Salmon's recent studies have led him to seriously consider the connections between Climate Change and Indigenous traditional food ways.

Bertha “Birdie” Parker Pallan Cody is considered the first Native American woman archaeologist and ethnologist in the United States. Cody was involved in many significant discoveries; in 1930, for example, she found a Pleistocene sloth skull next to human artifacts in Nevada’s Gypsum Cave site. Cody also conducted ethnological research of California’s Native American tribes and published her findings from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Robin Wall Kimmerer (born September 13, 1953) is a Potawatomi botanist, author, and the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF). As a scientist and a Native American, her work is informed by both Western science and Indigenous environmental knowledge.

Sherrill Elizabeth Tekatsitsiakawa “Katsi” (pronounced Gudji) Cook is a Mohawk Native American midwife, environmentalist, Native American rights activist, and women's health advocate. She is best known for her environmental justice and reproductive health research in her home community, the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne in upstate New York.

Orville Huntington is an American researcher and educator of Native Alaskan Athabaskans descent. He studies how subsistence lifestyles directly impacts the fish, animals, and plants of Northern ecosystems and has been the lead or contributing author on the relationships between traditional or indigenous knowledge and Western science, climate change adaptations, indigenous expertise, spiritual relations, and ethical practices contribute to an understanding of ecosystems.

Deborah B. McGregor of the Anishinaabe is a Canadian environmentalist. She is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Environmental Justice at Osgoode Hall Law School. McGregor was the lead researcher for Indigenous Environmental (In)Justice: Theory and Practice, and other important projects. She earned international praise for the content of her work and for her innovative methods that included using digital and social media to engage Indigenous communities.

Rose Bear Don’t Walk, an ethnobotanist, tribal foods consultant at Indigenous PACT. She received her Master of Science degree in environmental studies at the University of Montana, where she studied the plants of the region and their relationship to traditional Salish foods and nutrition. Her fellowship project, Recovering our Roots, builds on that work, creating a Salish food plant curriculum and field guide for Flathead Indian Reservation schools that will help promote traditional plant knowledge for current and future generations of Salish people.

Linda Black Elk is an ethnobotanist and food sovereignty activist who specializes in teaching about culturally important plants and their uses as food, medicine, and materials. Black Elk works to build capacity in her community and beyond, to promote and protect traditional plant knowledge and environmental quality as an extension of the fight against extractive industry.

Dr. Cajete is a Native American educator whose work is dedicated to honoring the foundations of Indigenous knowledge in education. His curricula are based upon Native American understanding of the “nature of nature’ and utilizes this foundation to develop an understanding of the science and artistic thought process as expressed in Indigenous perspectives of the natural world. He is a Tewa Indian from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. He has served as a New Mexico Humanities scholar in ethnobotany of Northern New Mexico and as a member of the New Mexico Arts Commission.