Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings

"This book is several things at once: a primer on truth, an innovative Anishinabe-English language text, a grand discussion of what has been already written about Anishinabe use of plants, and a delightful act of love. Decolonized knowledge of the world allows a person access to the entire range of human experience of nature — from use to song to dream to dance. This work is eye-opening and joyous. And it is one of my favorite books of the year." — Louise Traditional Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Chippewa) knowledge, like the knowledge systems of indigenous peoples around the world, has long been collected and presented by researchers who were not a part of the culture they observed. The result is a "colonized" version of the knowledge, one that is distorted and trivialized by an ill-suited Eurocentric paradigm of scientific investigation and classification. In Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive, Wendy Makoons Geniusz contrasts the way in which Anishinaabe botanical knowledge is presented in the