Leelanau Conservancy docents, along with guest docent, Michelle Leask, Anishinaabe Ikwe, Leelanau County resident and citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewas, are pleased to offer a series of three hikes that explore ecological values highlighted in the work of pioneering educator, Robin Wall Kimmerer. Dr. Kimmerer, who holds a PhD in botany and is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, employs both lenses to investigate the natural world, using them together to ask us to reconsider our relationships with the natural world.
Join docents on one or all of these exploratory hikes! Dates, times and themes are listed below. You may sign up for one hike or for the series, but please know that advance registration is required and space will be limited. All hikes will take place on trails at Palmer Woods Forest Reserve. These hikes are moderate in difficulty with some elevation gain involved.
Hike #1: Developing Our Understandings (July 19, 2025 | 10 a.m.-12 p.m.)
This hike investigates how language influences our understandings. We’ll learn about elements of the area’s ecology through the lens of western science as well as through an indigenous perspective, combining them to find ways to communicate that achieve meaningful synthesis.
Hike #2: Names and Power (August 2, 2025 | 10 a.m.-12 p.m.)
We’ll review some of the ways we acquired knowledge in Hike #1, but will focus on investigating how we see ourselves inhabiting our ecosystem. Establishing identity is the backbone of science and is useful to underpin understanding. But what if we allow for multiple identities, if we look at the natural world through a different world view?
Hike #3: Liminal Spaces (August 23, 2025 | 10 a.m.-12 p.m.)
In Leelanau, we live in a verdant and complex ecosystem. Can we use multiple perspectives to thinking about the long-term sustainability of this environment? How might we put things together in ways that highlight a plethora of possibilities when it comes to utilizing, preserving and honoring the land, the water and each other?
All of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s books are available at Bay Books in Suttons Bay, which is generously donating 10% of Kimmerer’s book sales to the Leelanau Conservancy.
