Stephanie Morningstar on Plant Wisdom

Across forests and movements, there are already blueprints for how people get each other through hard times. Morningstar’s lecture moves between Indigenous food and plant knowledge, stories of resistance, and the strange genius of the more‑than‑human world to ask what it means to stop waiting for a singular savior and start acting like we are responsible for one another. Skunk cabbage making its own heat under snow, hemlock reishi turning dead wood into medicine, ramps appearing only to those who know how to look, and the Haudenosaunee Dish with One Spoon treaty- a commitment to share land, ask consent, and leave enough for others- all become guides for friendship, collective care, and remembering those who have been lost. Alongside them stand human examples: women who braided seeds into their hair before crossing an ocean, grandmothers leading round dances in shopping malls, micro‑communities that feed each other and hold each other through grief while refusing the colonial status quo.

Free and Open to the Public

This program is co-sponsored by Goethe Institute

Stephanie Morningstar is Mohawk with her mother’s ancestors rooted in Six Nations of the Grand River Territory (Schuler/Hope/Powless) and her father’s ancestors from Western and Eastern Europe. Stephanie’s passion and skill lie in the regeneration and restoration of native plant species and the practice of biocultural re-storyation, reviving the intertwined ecological and cultural relationships that sustain life. She has been at the forefront of land justice and rematriation work as co-founder of the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, guided by the principles of reciprocity, cultural revitalization, and right relationship. She is also a dedicated herbalist and small-scale herb grower, tending medicine gardens that nourish both body and spirit, adnd has completed doctoral coursework and research into Biocultural Re-storyation at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. In addition to her ecological and governance work, Stephanie is a skilled land-based mediator who co-created and actively uses the Indigenous Dispute Resolution framework. This culturally grounded approach addresses and heals intergenerational trauma in Indigenous communities, as well as within organizations and collectives stewarding land.

Photo: Hemlock Reishi