25
5pm
Join us for the Annual Meeting of the Friends of the Library where you can meet your fellow Library supporters, and hear from the Friends Board of Directors and the Monroe County Public Library Director, Grier Carson. We welcome guest speaker, David Stringer, for a talk on Bird Songs, Flower Signs, and Star Stories: Indigenous Knowledge of the Changing Seasons.
In many Indigenous cultures, people correlate the behavior of animals, plants, or stars with their own planting, harvesting, gathering, hunting, or fishing. The encoding of such knowledge in language allows people to pass on vital guidance to new generations regarding food, medicine, and spiritual relations with other species.
Free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided by the Friends Hospitality Committee.
David Stringer was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He has studied Latin American literature, Anthropology, and Linguistics, has taught in multiple countries, and is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Second Language Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. His main research areas are language acquisition, bilingualism, and environmental linguistics. As an extension of his course Language Hotspots and Biodiversity, he has initiated an outreach program in local elementary schools with an aim to encourage a sense of wonder at the linguistic and biological diversity of life on earth and to raise awareness of efforts to create sustainable systems of development.
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5:45pm - 7:15pm