This is the ninth article in my series about our changing Earth from interviews with Native Americans shared in We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth (USA 2022). My presentation does not follow the order of the interviews.

#9: Melissa K. Nelson, PhD (Anishinaabe, Métis, Norwegian [Turtle Mountain Chippewa])
      (Chapter 14, pp. 210-228)

Melissa K. Nelson, PhD is an ecologist, writer, editor, media-maker, and Indigenous scholar-activist. Of Anishinaabe, Métis, and Norwegian descent, she is a proud member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa. After earning her BA in Ecology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, she obtained her PhD in Native American Environmental Studies from the University of California, Davis. She first served as Professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University (2002-2020) before taking up her current position as Professor of Indigenous Sustainability at Arizona State University.

In 1993, Melissa became the first Native American executive director of The Cultural Conservancy (TCC), a nonprofit organization in San Francisco focused on Cultural preservation. She has spent the past 20 years as part of the Native American food movement and has been an international Indigenous food sovereignty activist.

Dahr and Stan asked Melissa to address how humans arrived at this point of converging crises—climate change, ecological disasters, and the COVID-19 pandemic (at the time of the interview)—how we could move forward in the best way possible, what stands in our way of moving forward, and how we might comport ourselves.

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