Researchers working with Indigenous partners are benefiting from traditional knowledge of the natural world.
Investigating how an extract of the traditional medicinal plant, Sooyaiaiitsi, interacts with cancer cells helped Haley Shade to “walk in both worlds”, bridging her education within Canada’s system with her Indigenous identity. Shade, a Blackfoot woman from the Kainai First Nation in Alberta, Canada, chose to study the plant for her undergraduate honours research at the suggestion of her grandfather. “It was important to me that the research began with my grandfather and learning that oral history, but also bringing it to life with Western science,” she says. Read more in Nature.