Center for Native Peoples and the Environment
Who We Are

 

CNPE Advisory Board

The Center is guided by an advisory board consisting of Indigenous environmental leaders. Members include:

• Henry Lickers, Director, Environment Division, Mohawk Council of Akwesasne
• David Arquette, Director, Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force
• Jeanne Shenandoah, environmental leader, Onondaga Nation
• Wendy Gonyea, environmental leader, Onondaga Nation
• Richard Hill, Indigenous Knowledge Center, Six Nations Polytechnic
• Barbara Walls, Professor of Indigenous Language and Culture, Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies
• Freida Jacques, environmental leader, Onondaga Nation 

Staff

Neil Patterson Jr., Executive Director

Email

My work has been to celebrate, restore, and build relationships between indigenous communities and their aboriginal territory. This space still creates language, tradition, and story of human interaction for several thousand years. The pragmatic way in which indigenous people have co-evolved within their landscapes provides the most sublime template for re-imagining and creating sustainable food, material, and energy systems.

Robin Kimmerer, Director Emeritus

Website

Dr. Kimmerer is a mother, plant ecologist, writer and SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. She serves as the founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. Her research interests include the role of traditional ecological knowledge in ecological restoration and the ecology of mosses. In collaboration with tribal partners, she and her students have an active research program in the ecology and restoration of plants of cultural significance to Native people. She is active in efforts to broaden access to environmental science education for Native students, and to create new models for integration of indigenous philosophy and scientific tools on behalf of land and culture. She is engaged in programs which introduce the benefits of traditional ecological knowledge to the scientific community, in a way that respects and protects indigenous knowledge.

Dr. Kimmerer has taught courses in botany, ecology, ethnobotany, indigenous environmental issues as well as a seminar in application of traditional ecological knowledge to conservation. She is the co-founder and past president of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge section of the Ecological Society of America.  Dr. Kimmerer serves as a Senior Fellow for the Center for Nature and Humans. Of European and Anishinaabe ancestry, Robin is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. Dr. Kimmerer is the author of numerous scientific papers on the ecology of mosses and restoration ecology and on the contributions of traditional ecological knowledge to our understanding of the natural world. She is also active in literary biology. Her essays appear in Whole Terrain, Adirondack Life, Orion and several anthologies. She is the author of “Gathering Moss” which incorporates both traditional indigenous knowledge and scientific perspectives and was awarded the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing in 2005. She has served as writer in residence at the Andrews Experimental Forest, Blue Mountain Center, the Sitka Center and the Mesa Refuge.  Her latest book “Braiding Sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants” was released in 2013.

 

 

Tusha Yakovleva, Assistant Director

Website

Tusha's work revolves around growing reciprocal relationships between land and people. Her ethnobotanical knowledge is rooted in family practices from her home in the Volga watershed of Russia, where tending to uncultivated plants and mushrooms is common practice, and is shaped by many years of living and working in the northeastern temperate forests of Turtle Island. Tusha’s efforts to strengthen respectful relations between plants and people have included teaching ethnobotany, working with food sovereignty and biocultural land justice organizations, directing a wild foods share program, ​ cultivating seeds and understory perennials, and sharing the gifts of weeds. At the Center, Tusha coordinates community outreach programs, youth programs, and land justice initiatives. 

Kyle Artelle, Faculty Co-Director

Faculty Profile

My group contributes to conservation, management, restoration, and stewardship approaches that support people, other species, and places. Much of this is in collaboration with First Nations communities and governments in an area now commonly referred to as the Great Bear Rainforest of Coastal British Columbia, Canada.

kaartell@esf.edu 

 

 

 

Research areas include:

• Ecology and stewardship of culturally important species, including wolves, black bears, and grizzly (brown) bears
• Place-based stewardship in support of people and biodiversity including the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) First Nation-led Xvíɫm̓ístaƛ h̓ákq̓áṃ qṇtxv bákvḷásu (“Our food will return”) program restoring multiple linked marine and intertidal species and ecosystems throughout their territory
• Inquiry into conservation and management approaches at scales from regional to continental 

Current or upcoming opportunities include:

• Coastal wolf and biodiversity monitoring project that combines camera trapping, autonomous recording units (audio recordings), and non-invasive genetic materials (hairs and scats) 
• Stellar sea lion integrated management, involving both sea lion demographics and population monitoring as well as potential human health dimensions of restoring sea lion food harvest

• Herring transplant restoration project

• Restoration clam beds of economic, ecological, and cultural importance impacted by a recent oil spill and an invasive European Green Crab invasion 
• Broader-scale wildlife ‘management’ and conservation-focused questions 

Maddy Nyblade, Faculty Co-Director

Faculty Profile

Maddy is an Environmental Studies professor in the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY ESF. She is a settler originally from central Pennsylvania, but has since lived in Minneapolis, MN and now Syracuse, NY. In 2023, she completed her PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences, with a graduate minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.  She is passionate about studying the hydrologic impacts of climate and land cover change on culturally important plants, especially Manoomin/Psiη (wild rice), in partnership with Indigenous Nations. 

Catherine Landis, Science Advisor

Website

Catherine recently finished her doctorate at SUNY ESF. Her dissertation focused on the historical ecology of the Onondaga Lake watershed, including a broad look at Indigenous subsistence patterns. A major Superfund site, Onondaga Lake is also sacred to the Haudenosaunee as the place where the Peacemaker came to unite the warring nations and facilitate enduring peace through the Great Law. Dr. Landis earned a Master's Degree also at ESF, where she studied riparian plant establishment along an urban stream. She currently assists with the Center's efforts to enhance NYS DEC's capacity to engage Indigenous communities and incorporate biocultural resources and restoration into land planning.

Erica Wood, Plant Program Manager

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sophie Brown, Postdoctoral Researcher

Sophie Brown is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry. Her work as a researcher centers on Indigenous language restoration, decolonial studies of place, and frameworks for allyship, with recent focus on the directionality of knowledge extraction and return, as well as on the critical re-framing and disassembling of settler narrative within landscape. She holds a doctoral degree in Environmental Science from SUNY ESF, a master’s degree from SUNY ESF, and a certificate in Iroquois linguistics from Syracuse University. Sophie also teaches at SUNY ESF as a visiting instructor in fields of environmental and sustainability studies, environmental justice, and the environmental humanities. She grew up in and resides on unceded land in Hodino̱hsho:nih territory, near what is called Ithaca, NY, where she grows plants, takes care of pets, and writes and illustrates, and near what is called Syracuse, NY, where she studies and works.

Beyond our staff and advisory board, our community at CNPE includes faculty, staff, and current and past students across the SUNY ESF campus.