Linda Black Elk

Linda Black Elk is an ethnobotanist and food sovereignty activist specializing in teaching about culturally important plants and their uses as food and medicine. Linda works to build relationships and ways of thinking that will promote and protect food sovereignty, traditional plant knowledge, and environmental quality as an extension of her work as a gardener, forager, fisher, hunter, and gatherer. Linda and her family spearhead a grassroots effort to provide organic, traditional, shelf-stable food and traditional Indigenous medicines to elders and others in need. She has written numerous articles, book chapters, and papers, and is the author of Watoto Unyutapi, a field guide to edible wild plants of the Dakota people, which is now out of print. Linda proudly serves as the educational programs and community engagement director at NATIFS, a Native-led nonprofit in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She also sits on the board of Makoce Ikikcupi, a reparative justice project on Dakota lands on Mnisota Makoce. When she isn’t teaching, Linda spends time with her husband and three sons, who are all members of the Oceti Sakowin—the Seven Council Fires of the Lakota.