Food as Medicine

Date: April 10, 2024
Time: 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Location: The Good Acre, 1790 Larpenteur Ave. W., Falcon Heights, MN 55113
Teacher Name and Titles: Linda Black Elk
Black Elk, Linda

Description: Come learn about some of Linda Black Elk’s favorite edible medicinal plants. She will share stories, personal experience, and other information about ways to work with plant relatives as both food and as medicine. She’ll also share some of her go-to recipes!  Please RSVP to nchgbod@gmail.com to secure a spot as space is limited. Carpooling is also highly encouraged, as there are fewer parking spaces at the venue than seats in the room, and we are expecting a big turnout!

Speaker Bio: Linda Black Elk is an ethnobotanist and food sovereignty activist specializing in teaching about culturally important plants and their uses as food and medicine. She is eternally grateful for the intergenerational knowledge of elders and other knowledge holders, who have shared their understandings of the world with her, and she has dedicated her life to giving back to these peoples and their communities. Linda works to build ways of thinking that will promote and protect food sovereignty, traditional plant knowledge, and environmental quality as an extension of her work as a gardener, forager, fisher, hunter, and gatherer. Linda and her family spearhead a grassroots effort to provide organic, traditional, shelf stable food and traditional Indigenous medicines to elders and others in need. Thus far, they have fed and healed thousands of people. She has written numerous articles, book chapters, and papers, and is the author of “Watoto Unyutapi”, a field guide to edible wild plants of the Dakota people, which is now out of print. Linda proudly serves as the Educational Programs and Community Engagement Leader at NATIFS, a Native-led nonprofit in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  She also sits on the board of Makoce Ikikcupi, a Reparative Justice project on Dakota lands in Mnisota Makoce. When she isn’t teaching, Linda spends her time living in a traditional Dakota earthlodge while foraging, hiking, hunting, and fishing on the prairies, woodlands, and waters of Turtle Island with her husband and three sons, who are all members of the Oceti Sakowin – the Seven Council Fires of the Lakota.

Linda Black Elk