My friend Emma Cooper, who recently qualified as an ethnobotanist, has launched a virtual book club. I’ll share more about Emma’s studies another time — we were even included as a case study in her thesis — but for now I want to explain how the club works.
The idea is simple: members read a selected book over a two-month period, then meet online to discuss it. Each reading cycle encourages thoughtful conversation about plants, peoples, and traditional practices.
Details about participation, the schedule, and how discussions will take place are available on Emma’s blog post about the project.
The first selection, for January 2014, is Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden by Gilbert Livingston Wilson. The book documents the agricultural traditions of the Hidatsa people (whose name means “willows”) as recounted to Wilson by Maxi’diwiac, the mother of his interpreter. It’s a valuable firsthand account of Native American horticulture and foodways.
I’m looking forward to reading it and hope some of my readers will join the conversation on Emma’s blog.
To make the text more accessible, I converted the free copy hosted by the University of Pennsylvania into a PDF you can download. Click the link to open the file in a new tab, then save it to your computer. Alternatively, right‑click the link and choose “Save Link As” to download directly.
Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden (PDF)