Ryan Hellenbrand
Ryan Hellenbrand
Lecturer - The Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the American Indian & Indigenous Studies Program, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Autochthony and Forestry: Two Models of Place-Making Amongst the Trees
October 02, 2025 - 12:00 PM
The College of Menominee Nation – Sustainable Development Institute places “autochthony” at the center of their theoretical model, emphasizing the importance of Menominee relationships with the forests of their homelands. The arrival of German settlers in America brought intellectual systems like forestry, which similarly rested on assumptions of a unique German connection to forests. This presentation outlines the political-ecological implications of settler claims to autochthony as the axiological engine driving the implementation of forestry in the U.S. during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Speaker Biography
Ryan Hellenbrand – Lecturer, The Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the American Indian & Indigenous Studies Program, The University of Wisconsin–Madison
Ryan Hellenbrand earned his PhD in Environment and Resources at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2025. Hellenbrand was a lecturer in American Indian and Indigenous Studies and Environmental Studies. His dissertation, Into the Woods and Back Again: An Environmental Kin Study of German Settler-Ecologies in the Upper Midwest, is a comparative landscape auto-ethnography of German modes of monumentality: the Endres Chapel at Indian Lake County Park, Wisconsin, the Hermann Monument in New Ulm, Minnesota, and the implementation of forestry across the Northwoods. Hellenbrand's individual and collaborative scholarship can be found in Journal of Austrian Studies, Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community and Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities.
Hellenbrand's transdisciplinary work continues through ongoing research in Ecological Knowledge Systems and Indigenous Environmental Studies, practicing land care through ecological restoration and forestry, and teaching at the Center for Agricultural Education and Research in Raumberg, Austria.
Recommended Reading
Grignon, J., & Wall Kimmerer, R. (2017). Listening to the Forest. In G. Van Horn & J. Hausdoerffer (Eds.), Wilderness: Relations of People and Place (pp. 67–74). essay, The University of Chicago Press.