Branford Land Trust Annual Film Series Highlights Afro-Indigenous Relationships to Land – Inhabitants: Indigenous Perspectives on Restoring Our World
Join the Branford Land Trust on Sunday, January 11 from 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. at the Blackstone Memorial Library for a screening of the award-winning documentary Inhabitants: Indigenous Perspectives on Restoring Our World. The film will be followed by a conversation with Clan Mother Shoran Waupatuquay Piper, Courtney Cucinotta, and Jesse Rose to integrate, learn, and deepen our relationship with the story.
Inhabitants: Indigenous Perspectives on Restoring Our World follows five Native American communities as they restore their traditional land management practices in the face of a changing climate. For millennia Native Americans successfully stewarded and shaped their landscapes, but centuries of colonization have disrupted their ability to maintain these processes. From deserts, coastlines, forests, mountains, and prairies, Native communities across the US are restoring their ancient relationships with the land. The five stories include sustaining traditions of Hopi dryland farming in Arizona; restoring buffalo to the Blackfeet reservation in Montana; maintaining sustainable forestry on the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin; reviving native food forests in Hawaii; and returning prescribed fire to the landscape by the Karuk Tribe of California. As the climate crisis escalates, these time-tested practices of North America’s original inhabitants are becoming increasingly essential in a rapidly changing world.
Clan Mother Shoran Waupatuquay Piper is the tribal leader of the Golden Hill Paugussett Nation in Connecticut, a state-recognized tribe. She is dedicated to preserving sacred traditions like song, dance, stories, and spirituality. She is also the author of Red Road: Traditional Voices of Afro-Indigenous America.
Jesse Rose (she/they) walks with the wisdom of their Schaghticoke Tribal Nation ancestors. A medicine woman, teacher, and practitioner of land-based healing, Jesse Rose is the founder of Gathered Waters Medicine, a living offering of Indigenous wisdom, earth-based healing, and plant spirit Nebizon (medicine) for those walking the path of remembrance.
Their work braids together herbalism, sacred movement, flower essence therapy, sound, and ceremony. Jesse Rose holds space for both personal and collective healing, rooted in the awareness that connection to Earth, Body, and Spirit is a path to cultural and spiritual survival.
Through Gathered Waters Medicine, Jesse Rose is cultivating an Indigenous-led nonprofit rooted in land-based healing, cultural reclamation, and ecological stewardship. With ceremony, education, and medicine gardens, it honors Mother Earth and all our living kin. This is both a sanctuary for Indigenous resurgence and a place for all to return to our Earth, as a call toward cultural resurgence, land rematriation, and embodied sovereignty.
Courtney Cucinotta is an Indigenous woman of Nipmuc and European descent. She is a clinical herbalist who graduated from Rocky Mountain Center for Botanical Studies in Boulder, Colorado more than 20 years ago. Courtney’s education is rooted in traditional Western /Native American herbal medicine, deeply intertwining with her ancestor’s traditions of using plants to help people heal. She currently works at Talking Stick Herbal Therapies in North Branford where she shares knowledge of traditional plant remedies to help people reconnect to their Spirits and to invite healing.
In addition to her herbal work, she has spent years working to bring awareness of Indigenous People’s, their way of life and their history to her community, promoting the inclusion of Indigenous People’s Day in the curriculum and to be put on the calendar of the North Branford School system to help us remember the Totoket people of this land. She hopes to continue to bring awareness of our Indigenous relatives and their ways of life to our community, believing that sharing their Sacred stories is long overdue.
This event and our upcoming Winter Speaker Series events are free and open to the public. It will be held in-person at the Blackstone Library (758 Main St, Branford).
The upcoming Branford Land Trust Winter 2026 Speaker Series includes these events: Marie Comuzzo, “Singing and Listening with Whales: Exploring Human and More-Than-Human Musicalities” on February 24; Two Coyotes Wilderness School, “Raising Our Future Ancestors” on March 24; and Tom Cleveland, “Fish Ladder, 25th Anniversary, History, Stories, and How It Came To Be{ on April 28, and our Annual Meeting in May.
