Our keynote speaker for the 2026 Wildflower Show is Kat Anderson, the renowned author of Tending the Wild  and I Sing to the Earth and She Sings Back Join us for her insightful talk at 1:00 PM in SM 3. Attendance is free, and seating will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Kat will also have a table set up at the show where she will be signing copies of her books from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM and again from 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM. You can buy copies of her new book, I Sing to the Earth and She Sings Back, but please bring your own copy of Tending the Wild if you wish to have it autographed. Below, you will find a description of her presentation.

How can we deepen our relationship with wildflowers today?

California wildflowers were widely and deeply appreciated for their beauty by white people in the late 1800s and these vast wildflower displays were assumed to be part of California’s natural heritage but were in fact, in large part, the product of Native American resource management. I will contrast this colonial aesthetic view with describing Indigenous people’s use and stewardship as part of a very different perspective on wildflowers that included a much broader sense of what wildflowers meant—for foods, medicines, habitat for varied wildlife, and as kin in the web of life. Put in historical context, many of California's ecosystems underwent dramatic changes after settlers of European descent decimated Native populations, seized their land, forbid their key practices, and replaced their nature-is-our-partner worldview with one that is more extractive and human-centered. I briefly explore this history, and its reparation with co-management agreements and land back programs, and end with what Indigenous relationships with wildflowers can teach us today—suggesting possible ways that the human place in nature can be restored without cultural appropriation.

M. Kat Anderson is an ethnoecologist and gatherer dedicated to restoring relationships between people and native ecosystems. She has spent over 25 years learning from Native American communities, integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Western science. As the author of Tending the Wild, she highlights Indigenous stewardship practices essential for biodiversity, climate resilience, and cultural restoration. Her latest work, I Sing to the Earth and She Sings Back, explores how we can reimagine time, embrace reciprocity, and cultivate deep, healing relationships with the earth.