By Robin Wall Kimmerer, PhD, Spring | Summer 2016
Fifth Annual Conference at the United Nations on Harmony with Nature

Shaapodaske Gizhgokwe, my name in my ancestral language, refers to light shining through sky onto the face of Mother Earth and I carry the responsibility for that name, but I never would have dreamed that responsibility would lead me here. For you see, a little more than one hundred years ago, my grandfather was taken away from his family in Indian Territory to a government run boarding school where the policy was to wipe away every trace of the indigenous worldview from our people and replace it with the western settler mindset. It is a miracle that today his granddaughter has been invited here to speak of our worldview at a time of accelerating climate change, as we enter the Age of the Sixth Extinction, when the world now has need of the wisdom that was very nearly driven to extinction.