My friend Emma Cooper, who recently qualified as an ethnobotanist, has launched a virtual book club focused on plant culture, traditional agriculture, and related ethnobotanical topics. Emma and I have worked together before — in fact, our conversations contributed to research for her thesis — and I’m pleased she’s created a space where readers can explore these subjects more deeply.
The club meets online every two months to read and discuss a selected book. Each cycle gives members enough time to read thoughtfully and to prepare comments and questions for the discussion. The format is intended to be inclusive and conversational, welcoming anyone with an interest in plants, food traditions, indigenous agriculture, or the human relationship to plant communities.
The first selection, scheduled for January 2014, is Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden by Gilbert L. Wilson. This book documents Hidatsa (also spelled Hidatsa or Hidatsa) agricultural practices as recounted by Buffalo Bird Woman (Maxi’diwiac), the mother of Wilson’s interpreter. It offers a detailed, personal account of traditional Native American horticulture, seed-saving, and garden management—material that remains important for researchers, gardeners, and anyone interested in traditional ecological knowledge.
I look forward to reading this book and hope some of my blog readers will join the conversation on Emma’s blog. For details about how the virtual book club works and how to participate, see Emma’s original post on her blog. The post explains the schedule, how discussions are organized, and how to submit commentary or questions for the group.
To make it easier for participants to access the text, I converted a freely available University of Pennsylvania edition of Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden into a PDF. You can download that PDF and save it for offline reading. To save the file, either click the link to open it in a new tab and then use your browser’s save option, or right-click the link and choose “Save Link As.”
Download: Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden (PDF)