Douglas Deur

Douglas Deur has been gathering native plants his whole life. He serves as a cultural ecologist for Native peoples of the western United States and Canada, documenting enduring plant use practices as well as the rituals, values, and technologies that have shaped traditional resource harvests and traditional understandings of the land. He is an associate research professor in the department of anthropology at Portland State University. He has also served as a senior research scientist in the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit in the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and as an adjunct professor of environmental studies at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Much of his research is supported by the U.S. National Park Service and is used in the peaceful resolution of land-use disputes, as well as in land-use planning that serves to protect and restore culturally significant natural resources. Doug’s writings have appeared in books, academic journals, and alternative newspapers. With Nancy Turner, he coedited Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America, the first book-length treatment of Native American plant cultivation traditions in the Pacific Northwest.