Milkweed Books
1011 S Washington Avenue
Suite 107
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
This event is free and open to the public. RSVPs requested but not required.
Join Milkweed Books as welcome Wendy Johnson to talk about her new book, Kinship Medicine: Cultivating Interdependence to Heal the Earth and Ourselves. Wendy will be joined in reading and conversation by local author and founder of The Red Nation, Nick Estes.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Our modern way of living is incompatible with our survival. Most of us intuitively know this truth, but almost everything in our society encourages us to ignore it. Dr. Wendy Johnson confronts this undeniable fact and breaks down how we think and act every day in ways that undermine our individual and collective well-being.The antidotes to many of the causal factors of poor health—loneliness, industrial diets, systemic inequality, fear of death, profit-based healthcare—are relational, with each other and with the living earth. Through evidence from public health, sociology, anthropology, human ecology, and her experience as a family physician, Dr. Wendy Johnson will show you how: what you ingest and where you live can reinforce or upset your body’s delicate balance, eliminating one organism in an ecosystem can affect all the others, how rekindling our relationships to non-human life is essential to our well-being, and more.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Wendy Johnson is a family physician, public health professor, activist, and writer who has spent her life actively working for a world where everyone can live long lives in equitable communities. Her career includes stints scaling up HIV treatment in Mozambique, overseeing an urban public health department, and, most recently, directing a community clinic in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has a Master’s in public health from Johns Hopkins and holds faculty appointments at the University of Washington and the University of New Mexico. Dr. Johnson has been a vocal activist on many progressive issues both locally and globally and is a two-time TEDx speaker.
Nick Estes is an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an Assistant Professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. He studies colonialism and global Indigenous histories, focusing on decolonization, oral history, U.S. imperialism, environmental justice, anti-capitalism, and the Oceti Sakowin. Estes is the author of the award-winning book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (2019), which places the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline into historical context. He co-edited with Jaskiran Dhillon Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement (2019), which draws together more than thirty contributors, including leaders, scholars, and activists of the Standing Rock movement, for a reflection of Indigenous history and politics and on the movement’s significance. Estes co-hosts the Red Nation podcast and is the lead editor of Red Media, an Indigenous-run non-profit media organization that publishes books, videos, and podcasts. Estes is also a member of the Oceti Sakowin Writers Society (formerly Oak Lake Writers Society), a network of Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota writers committed to defend and advance Oceti Sakowin sovereignty, cultures, and histories. He is also an award-winning journalist whose writing has been featured in the Guardian, The Intercept, Jacobin, Indian Country Today, The Nation, NBC News, The Funambulist Magazine, High Country News, and the New Yorker.