Exploring Our Place in Nature: Autumn Book Club

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“Exploring Our Place in Nature” is a free community book club hosted by Algalita available to all in Long Beach and surrounding areas looking to rediscover our place, as humans, in our world ecosystem. Every other month, we come together in-person at Bel Canto Books in Long Beach, California for a book discussion, activity, and potluck. Our intention is to bring the community together, get deep in discussion, and create a safe space for everyone to feel open to contribute to the conversation.We’ll explore a variety of topics including ecology, environmental justice, traditional ecological knowledge, climate change, plastic, and much more. This book club will get inspiration from the traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous tribes throughout the world whose teachings encourage being in deep relationship with the natural world.

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AUTUMN SESSION MEETING DATES

Meeting 1 Discussion: Wed, Sept 18 at 7pm @ Bel Canto Books on 4th Street

Meeting 2 Discussion: Wed, Oct 9 at 7pm @ Bel Canto Books on 4th Street

Meeting 3 Activity: Still being planned**

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For the Fall session, we will be reading by Diane Wilson. Diane Wilson is a Dakota writer, educator, Goldman Prize winner and a leading activist in the plastic pollution movement. A haunting novel spanning several generations, The Seed Keeper follows a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most. Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakota people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn’t return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato—where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they’ve inherited. On a winter’s day many years later, Rosalie returns to her childhood home. A widow and mother, she has spent the previous two decades on her white husband’s farm, finding solace in her garden even as the farm is threatened first by drought and then by a predatory chemical company. Now, grieving, Rosalie begins to confront the past, on a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. In the process, she learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron—women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools. Weaving together the voices of four indelible women, The Seed Keeper is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.

Purchase your copy of The Seed Keeper at at either their 4th Street or location.

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Host or Publisher Algalita Marine Research and Education