NCW Libraries

"Reclaiming the Commons: In Defense of Biodiversity, Traditional Knowledge and the Rights of Mother Earth lays out the scientific, legal, political, and cultural struggle to defend the sovereignty of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. Corporate war on nature and people through patents and corporate Intellectual Property Rights has unleashed an epidemic of biopiracy resulting in important legal battles fighting efforts to patent the rights to many...

"Native American Ethnobotany is a comprehensive account of the plants used by Native American peoples for medicine, food, and other purposes. The author, anthropologist Daniel E. Moerman, has devoted more than 25 years to the compilation of the ethnobotanical knowledge slowly gathered over the course of many centuries and recorded in hundreds of firsthand studies of American Indians made over the past 150 years. This research has yielded a treasure-trove...

What do we learn from plants when we listen to them speaking? Indigenous plantsman Nicholas Hummingbird calls on the legacy of his great-grandparents to remember how one drop of rain, one seed, one plant can renew a cycle of hope and connection--for him and for each of us.

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, the author has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to the Americas, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In this book, she brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what it means to see humans...