"Eating the Okanagan"

Exploring change in our local

food systems

Nancy Turner

Emeritus Professor, Nancy Turner is an ethnobotanist whose research integrates the fields of botany and ecology with anthropology, geography and linguistics, among others. She is interested in the traditional knowledge systems and traditional land and resource management systems of Indigenous Peoples, particularly in western Canada. Nancy has worked with First Nations elders and cultural specialists in northwestern North America for over 40 years, collaborating with Indigenous communities to help document, retain and promote their traditional knowledge of plants and habitats, including Indigenous foods, materials and medicines, as well as language and vocabulary relating to plants and environments. Her interests also include the roles of plants and animals in narratives, ceremonies, language and belief systems. Nancy was awarded a Pierre Elliot Trudeau Fellowship in 2015. With this funding she will coordinate and participate in a progressive and focused discussion amongst multiple informed groups on the roles of ethnobotany and ethnoecology in policy, planning and decision-making in the legal and governance arenas around Indigenous Peoples’ land rights and title.  To this end she is preparing a symposium entitled Affirming Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rights with Ethnoecology and Ethnobotany: Strategies for Canada’s Future. Dr. Turner is no longer accepting new graduate students. Dr. Turner has authored, co-authored or co-edited over 20 books (most recently a two-volume book, Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America, and Saanich Ethnobotany: Culturally Important Plants of the WSÁNEĆ People - co-authored with Richard Hebda, a textbook,Ethnobiology (E. N. Anderson, first editor); Plants of Haida Gwaii; The Earth’s Blanket; and“Keeping it Living”: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America – this last co-edited with Douglas Deur), and over 150 book chapters and peer-reviewed papers, and numerous other publications, both popular and academic.