Vesper Meadow

Working in and around his Takelma ancestral homelands, Joe collaborates with Jeanine Moy and Stasie Maxwell-Worley at the Vesper Meadow Education Program revitalizing Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge in the region. Through a partnership between the Traditional Ecological Inquiry Program and Vesper Meadow, Joe works to teach children, youth, and adults about healthy ecosystems, first foods, and traditional lifeways. Joe puts emphasis on the need for Cultural Fire to tend the health of soil and water, as well as our plant, bird, insect, and animal relatives who rely on them. The Vesper Meadow – TEIP partnership now hosts an annual Cultural Fire Inquiry Days camp, where Indigenous youth spend a weekend learning, teaching, and working with good fire.

 “Vesper Meadow is comprised of two interconnected upland wet meadows surrounded by mixed conifer forest in the southern Cascades in Oregon. Situated on the high divide of the Cascade-Siskiyou ranges, they are headwaters for two major Pacific Northwest Coast watersheds: the Rogue River and Klamath River basins. The Vesper Meadow Education Program honors the people of the land on which it works: Latgawa, Takelma, Shasta, and Klamath, and recognizes the legacy of federally sponsored genocide and forced removal” – (Vesper Meadow)