Dr. Jessica Dolan will present her current research on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg Ethnobotany in partnership with Plenty Canada and University of Guelph. We have built a team of students and community members who are working to combine historical data from museum archives, with cultural knowledge and biological field research to create an Indigenous digital atlas and printed ethnobotanical field guide. Our aim is to do work that will uplift Indigenous relationships with the plant relatives in Southern Ontario’s Greenbelt and along the Niagara Escarpment. The goals of this multi-year project are to generate digital and printed publications that will integrate Indigenous and Western sciences, in support of culturally-grounded learning about plants used for food, medicine, utility and craft. We intend for the field guide and Indigenous atlas to serve as tools that will accompany public, place-based education, that will enable people re-envision familiar, peri-urban landscapes as Indigenous homelands. Our work supports Indigenous treaty rights through multiple pathways of bio-cultural conservation and the development of co-management within the Niagara Escarpment Biosphere Network.
--------------------
About the speaker:
Dr. Jessica Dolan has a B.A. in History and Social Sciences from The New School for Social Research; an MSc in Ethnobotany from University of Kent at Canterbury; and a PhD in Environmental Anthropology and Indigenous Studies from McGill University. She is currently a Mitacs Post-doctoral Fellow at Plenty Canada and the University of Guelph Department of Geography, Environment, and Geomatics. She has also worked as an Environmental Science Officer for the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne Environment Program, and a consultant for Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe Environment Division.
--------------------
River Institute Science + Nature UNTapped Site
https://riverinstitute.ca/untapped/