Promoting a Priceless Gift
A Teaching Program
“The Land Speaks” serves as an interactive teaching program designed to educate, encourage and inspire children and adults to develop a deeper desire to connect, conserve and communicate with nature.
The Naturalist Indigenous Exhibit is the program that Lucia Lucas, founder of The Land Speaks, can provide at your location.
Surrounded by Community
All of Creation is alive. Each creature and plant communicates their own story, if we listen, look, and ask questions. God has designed each specimen as unique with a created purpose and beauty in our natural world. Science has shown through research and investigation that the forest is a living community. And all living things like big trees or small earthworms are interdependent.
Discovering the Gift
Nature surrounds us in our yards, parks, farmland, creeks, rivers, oceans and mountains. The outdoors encompasses trees, rocks, animals, water, plants, birds, bugs just to name a few. We live in an incredibly diverse and beautiful world and nature invites us to hike a mountain, walk on a sandy ocean beach, and meander to a river bank or just a casual trail walk in a park.
Going Deeper
When we intentionally explore our environment, we exercise and expand our body, mind, and soul. One can more deeply experience the cycles and seasons of nature when we take the time to look and listen.
Seeing, Touching, Learning
The program gives to children hands on experience with some of the specimens: such as furs, bugs, bones, stones, artifacts, shells, feathers, seeds, etc. I have incorporated flash cards and artifacts as learning tools. These demonstrate to the students and others the interconnectivity of the specimens, photographs, and artifacts.
Topics
The exhibit covers a broad range of subjects related to natural history, indigenous culture, entomology, botany, zoology, geology and other related topics.
Lucia Lucas, Founder
The Land Speaks
I was born in Alexandria, Virginia and lived my first 3 years with my family and grandparents on their dairy farm. Then our family moved to the city of Fairfax, where we lived for 6 years and today that home is a block from George Mason University. The land where the college now sits was my woodland playground and the beginnings of my love affair with the land and all creatures big and small.
We moved from there in 1962 to a small town in southeast Virginia called Courtland and here pigs, peanuts and corn dominated the land. My summers were filled with garden and yard work, canning and freezing, sleeping outside, and time on the dairy farm in Fairfax. I always found time to explore the woods, creeks, ponds and trees. Today, I would describe these places as a sacred sanctuary for me during those years.
I attended James Madison University and graduated with a B.S. degree in Public Health. In 2006, I was diagnosed with Lyme’s disease and other tick-borne infections. My Naturalist Indigenous Exhibit touches on prevention and I have health department brochures for parents and teachers as a resource. It’s important to understand the health dangers of tick bites, but more importantly ways to prevent them, so we can all continue to enjoy exploring nature.
The Naturalist Indigenous Exhibit is committed to motivating children and adults alike to put technology aside and then look and see into this wondrous world that’s been gifted to us. I have been collecting my Exhibit specimens for several years and some of the items have been donated by family members and also friends of the exhibit.
An important part of my motivation in creating this exhibit, is to share my relational understanding and appreciation of the natural world that I have gratefully received from my Native American ancestors.
Insightful Quotes
Tree roots extend a long way, more than twice the spread of its crown. So the root systems of neighboring trees inevitably intersect and grow into one another with a few exceptions. For usually there are fungi present that act as intermediaries to guarantee quick dissemination of news. These fungi operate like fiber optic internet cables. Their thin filaments penetrate the ground, weaving through it in almost unbelievable density. One teaspoon of forest soil contains many miles of these “hyphae.”
The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben
Of all the wise teachers who have come into my life, none are more eloquent than these, who wordlessly in leaf and vine embody the knowledge of relationship. Alone, a bean is just a vine, squash an oversize leaf. Only when standing together with corn does a whole emerge which transcends the individual. The gifts of each are more fully expressed when they are nurtured together than alone. In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship. This is how the world keeps going.
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer