Heid Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. She is astoundingly multi-talented and is a prolific and award-winning poet, cookbook author, storyteller, artist, curator, and educator. She co-founded and lead the Turtle Mountain Writing Workshop, co-founded The Birchbark House (a fund to support indigenous language revitalization efforts), and was the director of Wiigwaas Press. Her efforts have helped to better center Indigenous voices and narratives across a broad range of conversations including many about sustainability.

In this episode, Heid and I talk about: improving access to institutions, climate change, the impacts of colonization, reclamation of Indigenous food and lifeways, and the importance of stories and storytelling for identity and culture.

Links: http://heiderdrich.com/ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/heid-e-erdrich https://poets.org/poet/heid-e-erdrich

Note: There are some sound quality issues with this episode. I recorded Heid on a handheld recorder in her office on a particularly windy day in the Fall of 2019. Though this isn’t the first episode of Just Sustainability, Heid was the first person that I recorded for the show and I was still learning about how all the equipment worked. So, there are some issues with volume fluctuations (I tried very hard to even those out in production but there was only so much that I could do) and sound artifacts (the wind was captured by the recorder so from time to time it sounds like there’s someone sitting over our shoulders breathing heavily into the mic). That noted, Heid offers a great number of wonderful insights during our conversation, so I hope that you can look past the bad sound and learn something from our conversation.