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Maggie O'Knapp

 

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Builder, butcher, tinker, tailor, carver, crafter, and professional squirrel. My repertoire of hobbies and skills is ever a-changing, but always revolves around things I can do with my hands and ways to engage with the wild—making food, medicine, crafts, and mischief. I’ve been growing gardens and building forts since I was a kid and still at it—just slowly building bigger forts. I’m in love with the many landscapes of California and with the slow, subtle cultural transformations that emerge from deep relationship with the land and with each other. I love climbing mountains, smelling wildflowers, making gourmet roadkill meals, intuitive building, playing card games by candlelight, and getting carried away with ever-more obscure skills...

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I bring to the Quercus Collective an intimate knowledge of the Sierra Nevada from my 30 years roaming its slopes and putting just about everything in my mouth. I've studied social forestry with Hazel aka Tom Ward, contemporary indigenous burning with the Yurok Tribe & Nature Conservancy, and restoration ecology at University of Victoria. I've read extensively about ethnobotany and indigenous land management systems of the west coast, and engage the Quercus platform as an opportunity to practice regenerative land management practices while bringing others into deeper relationship with our bioregion. I am deeply grateful to live under magnificent oaks and to have life-long relationships with sites from which we gather plants for some of the medicines we make.

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