Michelle Dowd PZ ’90 discusses foraging, growing up in a cult at CMC Ath Talk
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With cloudy gray skies and autumn neigh, students flocked to Claremont McKenna College’s Athenaeum on Oct. 16 for Michelle Dowd PZ ’90’s talk “What I Learned from Foraging (And Surviving a Family Cult).” A Pitzer College alumna, Dowd is a writer and professor of journalism, with contributions in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and TIME Magazine. Her talk coincided with the publication of her memoir “Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult.” Dressed humbly in an olive green sweatshirt and knitted skirt, Dowd ascended the stage. She refused to stand behind the podium — it reminded her too much of church, she explained. Dowd spent her childhood in an apocalyptic cult founded by her grandfather. With no formal education, Dowd applied to Pomona College on a whim, but her application was forwarded to the Pitzer Admissions Office. She had written a poem for her personal statement, and was granted a full ride by the committee. “For a decade of my childhood, the mountain was the closest thing I had to a home, and I learned to forage for what I needed to survive on it, my real home wasn’t a place,” Dowd said. “It was an idea, an idea my maternal grandfather turned into an organization. He called ‘The Field’ a closed community.”Dowd pivoted to foraging as the core of her discussion. Foraging was a means of survival, and translated to how she approached life outside of The Field. “8000 years ago, foraging was universal,” she said. “All of you have foraging in your DNA. Your ancestors didn’t survive without it, and you have it inside of you.” Dowd brought out a box filled with leaves, branches and twigs of various sizes and shapes, placing them onto a table on the stage. She asked for a volunteer, and chose Tutu Jereissati CM ’25 from among the few hands raised.
“So everything I picked here, I picked just on my way in, within 20 yards of where we are at the avenue right now,” Dowd said. With Jereissati as her volunteer, Dowd asked her to identify various twigs and berries. Among the items she foraged were wild strawberries, elderberries, sage, and nettles.
“[Nettles are] really good for the tea,” Dowd said. “But the thing about nettles, it’s interesting … they have these stinging properties to keep animals from destroying them.”
Dowd proffered Jereissati a nettle twig to smell, warning her not to let her nose touch the stem. “When you think something’s dangerous, you could also ask yourself, what is it hiding? What is it that it’s holding on to so much to give us?” Dowd asked. Dowd then transitioned to the latter half of her talk. She used foraging as a metaphor for her approach to life: using the resources that are tangible to you, in your immediate surroundings, to survive. Dowd discussed some of the conversations she had with students during the dinner portion of the evening, where she asked seniors about their futures and their life goals. “Many of you have already set up a career path. You set up a guided pathway to get where you want to go. Some of you have been laser focused on it,” Dowd said. “But how many things are you missing because you’re not looking around you and not noticing what doesn’t serve your long term interests?”She went on to describe her own journey to Pitzer, and how her upbringing in a cult and in the mountains ultimately shaped her approach to college and her career. She wasn’t going through the system so much as moving around it.
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