VPR Lecture – Dr. Rosalyn LaPier
Land as Sacred Text: How Climate Change Will Impact Indigenous Spirituality
For most Indigenous peoples changes in the natural world impact their ability to practice their religious beliefs. This is because Indigenous peoples rely on the land and landscape, its seasonal cycles of weather, plants, and animals as part of their liturgical or religious calendar. Over the past 150 years setter-colonial societies such as the United States suppressed and marginalized Indigenous religious practices. Now climate change creates another challenge for Indigenous peoples and their ability to practice their religions.
Join us on Monday, April 18th
2:30pm – Reception
3:00pm – Lecture
RSVP Below by Monday, April 11th
LaPier, an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Metis, is an award-winning Indigenous writer, ethnobotanist and environmental activist. In addition to traditional training for ethnobotany, she also learned ethnobotany and traditional ecological knowledge by apprenticing with her maternal grandmother Annie Mad Plume Wall and her aunt Theresa Still Smoking for more than 20 years.
She received a Bachelor’s in Arts degree in physics and a doctorate degree in environmental history. She works within Indigenous communities to revitalize Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge to address environmental justice and the climate crisis. She has written two award-winning books, two Blackfeet language lexicons, and dozens of articles and commentaries that have appeared in The Conversation, High Country News, The Montana Naturalist, and the Washington Post. She is currently working on her third book.
Prior to joining the University of Montana, LaPier worked at Piegan Institute, a private nonprofit on the Blackfeet reservation working to revitalize the Blackfeet language. She raised more than $4,000,000 for their programs. She also previously taught at NAES College, a private Native-controlled college.