Basil Harper Introduction – BIOL F190: Intro to Alaska Flora

Hi all! My name is Basil Harper, I’m in the last stretch of my OEC in Ethnobotany at UAF. I live in Shawnee, KS, a suburb of the Kansas City, MO metro area, and I’m excited to learn more about the flora in my area this semester. My main focus with my ethnobotanical studies is on bringing traditional ecological knowledge of the Grain Plains bioregion to early childhood education. I also babysit in my free time and work a day job making pizzas. I just turned 20 (yesterday as of writing this) and this school year was my first college experience, so I’m really glad to have picked and school and program that I did. Also, I’m a huge nerd. I think that’s all of the important information about me, but feel free to drop a comment if you have any questions. I look forward to learning with you all this summer.

Author: Basil Harper

Hi! I'm Basil Harper (they/them). I live in Kansas City, and I grew up here on the Missouri side, but I now live on the Kansas side of the city. I'm very interested in urban foraging, as it can be difficult to find large areas of nature in the city I live in. I got into ethnobotany through learning about different types of spiritualism in early high school, which led me to learn more about plants and their historical associations, which in turn led me to herbal medicine, which I found to be far more interesting. From there, the jump to ethnobotany was pretty logical to me and I am excited to learn more about indigenous plant knowledge.

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One comment

Stefanie Ickert-Bond

June 20, 2024 at 9:56 am 5 months ago

Welcome Basil,
glad you are part of this course. Sounds like you have a good idea where you want to go with your education, I think that is wonderful. Starting out with your OEC is a great way to accumulate ethnobotanical knowledge and practices to perhaps later share these practices in your own classroom.

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Author: Basil Harper

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