“How about camas…?!”
These were the fateful words that Brenda Beckwith recalls hearing when she was out for dinner one night with her now friend and mentor Dr. Nancy Turner. It was one year before Brenda moved to B.C. from her native California in order to study with Dr. Turner, one of Canada’s leading ethnobotanists. Dr. Turner had been approached by Coast Salish elders concerned about losing the cultural knowledge of pitcooking camas.
“Prior to this, 1996, no one had really taken on this tremendous highly valued root vegetable before in Canada,” Brenda explained, “so she literally slapped her hand down on the table and said how about camas, and I said sure, and as they say the rest is history.”
A senior scientist and the ethnoecology lead for the West Kootenay-based Kootenay Native Plant Society (KNPS), Brenda has a PhD in Ethnoecology from the University of Victoria (UVic) focused on camas landscapes, which led to a greater understanding of this previously under-researched culturally significant plant. She also holds a MSc in Ethnobotany and a BA in Plant Ecology from California State University in her hometown of Sacramento.
“Growing up in semi-rural California just outside Sacramento I was always surrounded by nature and an awareness that there was a connection between people and plants, so when I started at university, plant ecology was a logical choice,” Brenda said.
It wasn’t until she stepped into her Master’s and began working with her supervisor, Dr. Michael Baad, who was a rare and endangered plant expert that she began to put the pieces together.
“I realized that there are many Native American Tribes in California and we have all these rare plants because of the growing human population and habitat loss. How can I help to recover and protect and restore plants that may have cultural significance, and help Indigenous Peoples revitalize their time-honoured people-plant connections?”
Moving to Canada in 1997 to start her PhD on camas with Dr. Turner broadened her horizons from ethnobotany to ethnoecology.
“If we’re dealing with landscapes, cultural landscapes in particular, you can’t just study a plant species,” said Brenda. “It’s about relationships and it’s also about land use history. How are we going to chart where are we going in terms of ecological restoration if we don’t know where we’ve come from? We need to try to better understand landscape change, in both space and time, and figure out how best to set a particular ecosystem or plant community onto a functional ethnoecological trajectory, taking into account possible future changes as well.”
Following her doctorate, Brenda balanced consulting work for First Nations, BC Parks and others with continuing to teach for the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria for over a decade before uprooting herself again, this time relocating the Kootenays. KNPS had been founded several years earlier by Valerie Huff and Eva Johansson who had been students at UVic and Brenda was already an advisor for their Kootenay Camas Project. After moving to Nelson in 2015, she started teaching at Selkirk College in the School of Environment and Geomatics and worked closely alongside Valerie and Eva on a number of applied restoration projects involving camas, and other native plants as well, through KNPS.
It was while doing this work that the idea for KinSeed Ecologies was born, the native seed and plant and ecological restoration consulting company that Brenda and Valerie founded in 2019.
“We were at the various regional garden fests and people were hungry for plants, they wanted more information. So we started Kinseed Ecologies to provide tangible direct consultation and to get truly native plants and seeds out there,” she said. “There was a void at the time in the West Kootenay; if you wanted native plants you had to go to Kimberley or the Okanagan. We also felt strongly that flowering native plants that support native pollinators were underrepresented.”
Brenda has since stepped back from teaching at the post-secondary level to focus more on KinSeed Ecologies and her work as a senior scientist for KNPS’ Pollination Pathway Climate Adaptation Initiative, a CBT Ecosystem Enhancement program. She works on all parts of the program but focuses most of her time on two sub-projects: the Environment and Climate Change Canada-funded “Riparian Camas Meadows” project and a BC Parks Living Lab project called “Building Climate Resilient Butterfly Habitat” in conjunction with Selkirk Innovates.
“I like to tell people I’ve been learning from camas for about 25 years now and I’m still learning about this remarkable being. Every May, I am delighted to work with local students, largely in School District #20, teaching them about the cultural and ecological significance of camas and its current imperilled state in the B.C. Interior. I encourage them to teach others about this special plant,” said Brenda. “What’s really neat about the Living Lab project is the opportunity to work with local butterfly expert Janice Arndt and restoration botanist Valerie Huff to enhance habitat for butterflies that are at risk or are thought to be climate vulnerable.”
Although her route in life has been largely an academic one, Brenda says she’s always been an environmental educator and loves working with people and plants to help build positive relationships and nurture community-based native plant conservation and advocacy.
“It always comes back to building those connections and helping people understand the ecology of native plants, what we’ve lost but what we can gain back,” she said. “I love seeing the awareness and people’s eyes light up when they start seeing the native plants for who they are. They don’t just have weeds in their yards, they have amazing plants with amazing stories.”
An article co-written by Brenda, Valerie Huff and Eva Johansson titled “Connecting people, plants and place: A native plant society’s journey towards a community of practice” was recently published in the People and Nature journal. Read that article here.
