Nancy J. Turner

Nancy Turner is an ethnobotanist and Professor Emeritus at the School of Environmental Studies, at the University of Victoria. She has worked with First Nations elders and cultural specialists in northwestern North America for over 50 years, helping to document, retain and promote their traditional knowledge of plants and environments, including Indigenous foods, materials and traditional medicines. Her book, Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge, represents an integration of her long term research. She has authored or co-authored/co-edited over 135 book chapters and papers, as well as 20 other books, including: Plants of Haida Gwaii, The Earth’s Blanket, Keeping it Living (with Doug Deur), Saanich Ethnobotany: Culturally Important Plants of the WSÁNEC’ People (with Richard Hebda), and Food Plants of Coastal First Peoples. She has received a number of awards for her work, including membership in the Order of British Columbia (1999) and the Order of Canada (2009), honorary degrees from VIU, UBC, UNBC and SFU; and the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences’ Canada Prize in the Social Sciencesfor Ancient Pathways.