Practices in Gratitude for the Earth

Join us for an afternoon of learning, reflection, and creation, organized by Isabelle Woodruff-Madeira, American Studies Major and Imagining America Intern.

When: Wednesday June 4, 2025, 4:30-5:45pm  
Where: Carolee Shields White Flower Garden and Gazebo, UC Davis Arboretum and Public Gardens (access this space from Visitor Parking Lot 55 off Garrod Drive, across from the UCD Arboretum Teaching Nursery at 1046 Garrod Dr, Davis, CA 95616)

We invite UC Davis students, staff, faculty, and Davis community members to join us in an event practicing gratitude for the Earth. The land we are on today has been stewarded by the Patwin/Wintun peoples for generations, just as land and nature across the world has been protected by Indigenous peoples. Let us follow the guide of Indigenous instructions and appreciate the gifts of the Earth and the importance of giving back to it. The land provides all that we need to sustain ourselves and when we build reciprocal relationships with it, we build pathways to sustainable futures. As we face increasingly fascist policies and uncertainty, practicing collective gratitude for our greatest ally, the Earth, can also help ground us in community. 

In this event we will listen to clips from the IA Hubbub podcast on art, ecology, and public scholarship featuring Patwin/Wintun culture-bearer Diana Almendariz, read excerpts from Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future, and collectively create cut-up poems reflecting on our ideas and practices of showing gratitude for the Earth. 

About Imagining America

The Imagining America consortium (IA) brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues. By dreaming and building together in public, IA creates the conditions to shift culture and transform inequitable institutional and societal structures.