2025 | Exhibition Design & Community Engagement with Environmental Themes

In the Roots: Ohio’s Native Plants

Overview and Key Ideas:

In the Roots: Ohio’s Native Plants is a student-led exhibition inspired Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass,which combines western scientific knowledge with Indigenous ways of knowing to understand our increasingly complicated relationships with the natural world. As a a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation and botanist, Dr. Kimmerer proposes that we need to establish sustainable and mutually beneficial relationships with the natural world of plants, animals, and microorganisms around us. Rather than see nature as a commodified resource that humans can extract from, we must learn to see ourselves as a part of a larger web of relationships that sustain life on our planet.

The undergraduate and graduate students who collaborated on this exhibit illuminate the principles of Braiding Sweetgrass to our local environment here in Northwest Ohio. They explore the history of environmental change on our region from Indigenous settlement to the present. Along the way, they offer advice on everything from home gardening to tackling complicated problems related to agricultural and urban run-off into our waterways. As you peruse this site, we invite you to reflect on your personal relationship with nature. We ask you:

What is your first memory of the outdoors? Can you smell the scent of Earth and the renewal of spring? How can we leave a world filled with these same memories for out children and for future generations?