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Linda Black Elk

Food Sovereignty Coordinator, United Tribes Technical College

Linda Black Elk smiles into the camera.

Linda Black Elk is an ethnobotanist and food sovereignty activist who specializes in teaching about culturally important plants and their uses as food, medicine, and materials. Black Elk works to build capacity in her community and beyond, to promote and protect traditional plant knowledge and environmental quality as an extension of the fight against extractive industry. She has written for numerous publications, and she is the author of Watoto Unyutapi, a field guide to edible wild plants of the Dakota people. Black Elk currently serves as the Food Sovereignty Coordinator at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota and she spends her free time with her husband and three sons, who are all citizens of the Oceti Sakowin.