In honor of the 2026 Resistance 250+ festival, a celebration of how Native people have not only survived in the wake of the 250 year colonial history of the United States but thrived, IndigiPalooza MT is pleased to welcome the mighty ROBIN WALL KIMMERER back to Missoula. Among many wonderful things, Robin will in particular be talking about her latest global initiative, “Plant Baby Plant,” a mission to build a grassroots movement of people taking meaningful, regenerative action to care for the Earth, a direct action of resistance to the destructive, extractive nature of “Drill, Baby, Drill.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. Robin’s newest book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, is a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

Robin tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015, she addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and 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. In 2022 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.

IndigiPalooza MT – organized by Anna East of Chickadee Community Services, Selya Avila of the Missoula Public Library, and Little Shell Chippewa citizen and former Montana poet laureate Chris La Tray – is a grassroots-funded effort created to celebrate and educate our vast, intertribal community in all the ways Indigenous people and communities don’t merely exist, but thrive.