Learning, Sharing, Adapting with Plants
Mar
2
2025
Mar
2
2025
Description
Throughout history, plants have supported peoples’ survival and well-being, providing them with necessary food, materials, medicines and ceremonial symbols.
Join plant-lovers and scientists for this special annual event at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. The 2025 Jean Andrews Plant Biology celebration will offer up an exciting look into plant life, opportunities for conservation and lessons gleaned from Indigenous elders and cultures.
Enjoy demos and activities at an all-ages science-themed fair, celebrating discovery and the natural world for the first part of the event. Then hear world-renowned expert Nancy Turner’s talk, “Learning, Sharing, Adapting: Indigenous Peoples’ Ethnobotanical Knowledge in Northwestern North America,” which will delve into lessons from Indigenous people whose roots in the region trace back over 14 millennia to when the glacial ice of the Pleistocene covered the area. Learn about how over time people developed complex, long-term, ever-changing relationships with plants and their homelands.
Find out how hundreds of culturally significant plants species, with names in multiple Indigenous languages, are a reflection of the ways people share common knowledge, even across different geographic and linguistic regions. In highlighting the importance of land-based knowledge for the future of all humanity, the talk will explore questions such as:
- How did people acquire such rich knowledge about their environments and the plants, algae, and fungi there?
- How did people pass on their knowledge, practices and beliefs from generation to generation, from family to family, and from community to community?
- How did they adapt these uses and practices to new and changing situations across time and geographic space?
- In the face of the rapidly changing environments of today, how can we learn from all of this for the benefit of future generations?
Nancy Turner is an award-winning ethnobotanist and distinguished professor emerita in ethnoecology with the School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. She has worked with First Nations elders and cultural specialists in northwestern North America for over 50 years, helping to document, retain and promote their traditional knowledge of plants and environments, including Indigenous foods, materials and traditional medicines.
The Jean Andrews Smith Centennial Visiting Professorship in Tropical and Economic Botany was established by the Board of Regents of The University of Texas System in 1983, with support from Jean Andrews, Ph.D. of Austin, Texas, a 1944 graduate of The University of Texas at Austin and its College of Natural Sciences.
Location
Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
4801 La Crosse Ave, Austin, Texas