Gilbert Whiteduck
Gilbert W. Whiteduck has been a trailblazer for Indigenous social justice and education during a long and distinguished career in public service. Whiteduck excelled in the field of social work and graduated with an honours Bachelor of Social Work from Carleton in 1997. Before that, he received a Bachelors of Education from the Université du Québec a Chicoutimi in 1985 and a Master’s of Education from the University of Ottawa in 1991. “Carleton’s School of Social Work energized my conviction that there was a tremendous need to fight for Indigenous social justice,” he says. “This was, and continues to be, what drives my passion to bring about culturally based visionary changes for this and future generations.” A committed educator, he has served as a teacher, guidance counsellor, school principal and director of education during 33 years in the education system.
Whiteduck also played a pivotal role in his Kitigan Zibi Anishinabe community as a long-serving band council member and as chief from June 2008 to April 2015. He has supported First Nations education through his service as a senior education advisor with the First Nations Education Council and as president of the First Nations Confederacy of Cultural Education Centres. He is presently serving as the Treatment Co-ordinator at the Wanaki Treatment Centre, providing help to First Nations and Inuit people with addiction issues.
Steven Martyn
M.A. (traditional plant use), B.F.A. honours, herbalist, artist, farmer, wildcrafter, builder, teacher, writer, visionary.
Steven has more than thirty years experience living co-creatively with the Earth, practicing traditional living skills of growing food, building and healing. Steven created Livingstone & Greenbloom in 1986, Toronto’s first green landscaping company.
In 1996, he created the Algonquin Tea Company, North America’s premiere bioregional tea company. He has given talks and run workshops internationally for more than twenty years and taught plant identification and wilderness skills at Algonquin college for 11 years, and at the Orphan Wisdom School for eight years. In 2014, Megan and Steven started the Sacred Gardener Earth Wisdom School. Steven released his first book The Story of the Madawaska Forest Garden in 2016, Sacred Gardening, in June 2017 and The Roundhouse in 2022.
www.thesacredgardener.ca
Luce Bélanger
Luce Bélanger was born in a small town in the province of Québec, a space of mountains, lakes and the majestic River St-Maurice. The connection with nature, hunting, fishing and working with the land are part of her important family values. She is a woman with mixed origins: Algonquin and European. She offers different training like: drum making, indigenous culture awareness, medicinal plant initiation. She leads talking circles and many traditional ceremonies. She is a Sweat Lodge keeper and a sacred Pipe Carrier. Throughout twenty years, she deepened her indigenous ancestral knowledge, meeting and walking beside Elders promoting intercultural harmony and the respect for the environment like Grandfather Ojigkwanong William Commanda, Spiritual Leader and Algonquin Elder, Abuela Margarita Nunes Spiritual Leader in Mexico and member of the Indigenous Elders Council of America, Thunderchild Kenny Awasis, Cri Elder of British Columbia. She walked beside these Elders for hundreds of ceremonies. Their desire to share ancestral knowledge and contribute to unify humanity are for her the most precious gift she was offered. She shares knowledge that she has received from Elders, some of her personal life and ceremonial experiences with the goal to unify and reconnect the human to self. At the same time, to unify the self to everything that surrounds us on Mother Earth and also remember the ancestors that always walk with us. For continuity.
Mama
Mama is a member of the Ewe tribe, born in the village of Dagbamete in the Volta Region of Ghana in West Africa. The daughter of a village priest who was a prominent traditional psychic herbalist, Mama moved to Canada to join her husband in 1996. She is greenhouse manager of Richters Herbs in Goodwood where she lives with her husband and raised her three grown children. In 2013, Mama was installed as Queen Mother of her village in Ghana by the elders in an elaborate ceremony. “Mama” is her honorific title as Queen Mother.
Abrah Arneson Cht RH
Abrah Arneson has been practicing herbal medicine for 18 years. Abrah has worked in a hospice to support the dying, trained as doula to hold women while they labour, travel to all continents on this planet and spend a year in retreat in the Yukon wilderness. Abrah’s practice of herbal medicine has nourished this question and deepened her understanding of transformation from illness to health, from despair to hope and from disconnection to connection. Abrah is the author of The Weaving: Plants, Planets and People, The Vessel: Women, Plants and Contraception, The Herbal Apprentice: Plant Medicine and The Human Being and the Herbal Apprentice Workbook. She is passionate about sharing all that plants have taught her on her journey as a herbalist.
www.abraherbs.com and on Facebook at Abrah Herbalist in the Woods
Kayoki Whiteduck
Kayoki Whiteduck is anishinaabe horticulturalist, farmer, environmentalist and herbalist originally from Kitigan Zibi, Quebec. He has been gardening since he was 15 and working with herbs since he was 20. He has studied horticulture, western herbalism and he took a course to become a tea sommelier. In 2016 Kayoki started a business where he grows his own brand of herbal teas called Kayo-Tea. Kayoki is passionate about plants, gardening, medicine, food security and protecting the water and biodiversity..
​
Alberto Carbo Cht RH
Alberto Carbo is a people person - someone who loves to connect with fellow human beings to talk, share, joke, laugh, and learn. At some point, in his desire to connect with others through the sharing of food, Alberto sowed seeds in the Earth, and tended to a vegetable garden, not knowing that this was the beginning of his relationship with Plants. Extensive travels, with lots of time spent in farms and rural areas, solidified his bond to the natural world, and after personally experiencing and witnessing the power of Plant medicine in the Amazon, Alberto realized that the influence of the Plants had unequivocally changed him.
Today, Alberto is a practicing clinical Herbalist in Ottawa, serving his community in English and Spanish, and utilizing his abilities to connect with others as a bridge for those who could benefit from connecting with the Plants.
Dr. Hemant Gupta
Dr. Hemant Gupta’s extensive expertise of 40 years in Ayurveda medicine and holistic health continues to attract people of all cultural and lifestyle backgrounds. Since he received his MD degree in Ayurvedic Medicine, Surgery, and Internal Medicine, and a D.N.M. degree in Natural Medicine, Dr. Gupta has been consulting with and treating patients, conducting research, publishing professional articles, lecturing and teaching internationally on his findings. 15 years back, he established the Holistic Ayurveda Institute and Wellness Centre in Ottawa, and as director is providing a full range of Ayurvedic Knowledge from free lectures and certification courses to clinical consultations and panchakarma treatments.
Jennifer Gillean
Jen supports people willing and wanting to learn how to nourish their mental, emotional, physical & spiritual health for enhanced vitality in their daily rituals, rhythms, and relationships. As an Orphan Wisdom Scholar, Birthing from Within Facilitator, Sacred Gardener and Morning Altars Practitioner,
Jen’s work often weaves narrative and plant-based medicine with self-care and self-regulation skills through embodiment, mindfulness, and earth-based practices in multilayered and personalized ways to help orient folks in their bodies and in their communities.
With a BEd and specialized training in Birth & Bereavement as well as Yoga Therapy, Jen brings a wealth of experience when working with folks experiencing grief, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, addiction, and persistent pain. Jen is committed to supporting people working through the consequences of sexual, birth, and pelvic-related trauma to restore a sense of well-being and wholeness. Trained as a Clinical Herbalist, she loves making medicinal teas and tinctures at her home along the Gatineau River in Chelsea, Quebec.
​
Dominique Charpentier
Dominique Charpentier est une herboriste thérapeute située à Gatineau en Outaouais.
Elle est propriétaire de l’herboristerie Gaïa dans le village de Buckingham où elle donne des ateliers sur la découverte des herbes médicinales et la transformation de celles-ci. Dominique concocte aussi plusieurs préparations médicinales personnalisées, à base de plantes de son jardin, de sa cueillette sauvage ou d’agriculture biologique pour les besoins spécifiques de ses clients. Sa mission est de partager ses connaissances acquissent aux courants de ses années d’études et d’expériences et de redonner autonomie à la communauté car c’est pour elle la médecine du peuple.
Dominique est entièrement engagée dans sa pratique et lorsque vous ne la trouvez pas à la boutique, vous la rencontrerez certainement près de ses jardins ou dans la forêt pour cultiver et faire grandir son amour pour la nature! Ou tout simplement profiter de la vie en famille.
Mariane Desjardins Roy
Mariane Desjardins Roy is passionate about regenerative agriculture, the local economy and especially the return to the land and self-sufficiency. After graduating as a herbalist in 2011, she founded the project she had been dreaming of for several years: Herboristerie La Fée des Bois, a unique business that produces all the medicinal plants used to make herbal teas, tinctures, body products and agri-food products produced on the farm. Since then, she has worn many hats: farmer, entrepreneur, herbalist and new mother and participates in conferences on agriculture. At the farm, she gives herbalist workshops, offers consultations and trains interns in herbalism.
In addition to being an educational agro-tourism destination for the whole family, now offering lodging, the farm is also a micro-farm, where a mixture of vegetable crops are grown for the purpose of self-sufficiency for the farm's residents and where animals are raised, including chickens and sheep, for the regenerative farming aspect in addition to the autonomy that the animals offer.
​
www.herboristerielafeedesbois.com
Diane Perazzo
Diane Perazzo is a writer, poet, tarot reader and eco witch. She has been growing and working with herbs, foraging and observing local plant allies for more than 30 years. She is a trained legacy writing facilitator and in her professional practice she supports community groups and organization to communicate about social and health issues. Her creative writing focuses on crafting poetry and stories that strive to echo the magical and mythic voices of the living land and her beings. You can read some of her creative writings on her website:
www.dianeperazzo.com
Penelope Beaudrow
Penelope Beaudrow is a Registered Herbalist and recognized herbal elder who has devoted over the past 30 years to helping others foster deep and resilient connections with the living intelligence of the natural world and the regenerative, healing forces of plants and the medicine they carry. Penelope earned her Diploma from Dominion Herbal College in British Columbia. She is head of Product Development and Herbal Community at Richter’s Herbs and previously was at Faunus Herbs for over 28 years. She is also deeply engaged in the field of herbal education, including in depth work with the Association for the Advancement of Restorative Medicine and The Ginkgo Tree Herbal Course.
Penelope is deeply concerned with regenerative ecology as an integral component of the health and wellbeing of the earth and all of its inhabitants. She works diligently to reintroduce a wide variety of native, at risk and endangered plants at her sanctuary and farmstead and is engaged in significant re-wilding efforts. She has been a fierce advocate for herbal medicine as the people’s medicine and has successfully spearheaded a team that has worked to stop the traditional herbal tonic – Fire Cider – from becoming a trademarked commodity in Canada. The work that Penelope is engaged in every day aims to lay the foundations for a verdant, thriving, and viable future that upholds and works alongside the brilliance of nature. The path of earth stewardship has as its goal harmony, health and the peaceful coexistence for all beings. The transformations that Penelope has, and continues to witness through her careful and patient partnership with the green world have far exceeded her hopes and expectations; when the plants begin to speak, it’s always best to listen, for the marvels that will unfold are sure to be beyond our wildest dreams.
​
theginkgotree.ca
Erin Whittingham
Erin Whittingham began studying, growing, and working with herbs in 2018 and has not been able to stop. She is fascinated by how plants work in the body, and is in awe of both the plant’s and body’s intelligence. Erin is currently completing level two of the three year Herbal Apprenticeship with Abrah Arneson, and is working towards becoming a clinical herbalist. She looks forward to supporting her community in Aylmer, Gatineau.
Tori Lubbers Cht RH