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Learning, Sharing, Adapting with Plants
March 2 @ 11:30 am - 3:00 pm
Free
Enjoy a hands-on science activity fair for all ages, followed by an exploration of the ways plants and Indigenous peoples have lived and thrived together for thousands of years, as part of the 2025 Jean Andrews Plant Biology celebration.
Schedule
- 11:30 a.m. – 2 p.m. in the Great Hall: Enjoy demos and activities at an all-ages science-themed fair, celebrating discovery and the natural world.
- 2 – 3 p.m. in the Auditorium: “Learning, Sharing, Adapting: Indigenous Peoples’ Ethnobotanical Knowledge in Northwestern North America,” a talk by world-renowned expert, Nancy Turner.
About the Talk
This talk 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 plant 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?
This event is part of UT’s Texas Science Festival.
Nancy Turner
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.
