I’m a researcher, agroforester, and community organizer living and working in the UNESCO designated Beaver Hills Biosphere, in Treaty 6 territory – the homelands of the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Tsuut’ina (Sarcee), Nakawē (Saulteaux), and Métis nations.

My childhood involved countless hours exploring the vast forests and river systems of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. However, my family moved frequently during my adolescence, and this cultivated in me a relentless curiosity for the unique character of different people, places, and lifeways.

Those interests then led to undergraduate and graduate studies in anthropology and political ecology, focused on the social-ecological dynamics and conflicts involved with resource extraction on unceded Indigenous territory in Northern British Columbia, Canada. This research examined the relationship between local subsistence practices, identity, embodied knowledge of place, and ecological health as impacted by Indigenous stewardship, industrial mining, and settler-colonial state governance.

I eventually left academia to pursue a career in public health and non-profit community services that has now spanned more than 25 years. I have designed and collaborated on numerous projects working with the underhoused, brain injury survivors, people with substance use issues, and at risk youth.

Currently, I serve as the research and restoration projects lead for the Beaver Hills Watershed Stewardship Society (BHWSS), and as the executive coordinator of the Rural Futures Lab – a non-profit research and community development initiative collaborating on locally adaptive responses to the challenges of contemporary rural life.

My family and I also live in and steward a 5-acre organic food forest cultivating a wide variety of perennial foods, fungi, medicinal plants, and climate resilient species of native food trees and shrubs. There may even be a few dogs and a flock of beloved chickens somewhere in that mix.