Stephanie Cowherd (she/her/izdzán)
Portland, Oregon
Stephanie Cowherd (she/her, San Carlos Apache) is Forests and Community Program Director at Ecotrust. Cowherd leads projects related to forestry and natural resource planning, education, and community outreach and engagement. Her most recent work taps into her lived and professional experience in working alongside Tribes and Indigenous communities to apply Indigenous Knowledge System frameworks to forest and natural resource planning that centers the community’s values, needs, and goals.
She enjoys working with communities to bring vibrant storytelling about forests, foods, and fire to life through a variety of mediums including videos and experiential field tours. Cowherd’s work grounds itself in authentic relationships and accountability between organizations, Tribes, and other BIPOC communities and organizations. She dreams of cultivating spaces for healing in community with all our relations. She is at heart a writer and you can find her work published in places such as Toyon, Osiyo, Journal of Forestry, Tlaa: A Collective of Indigenous Expression.
When she’s not hanging out with her dog Lu, she’s working on a small, chapbook of poetry named Salt. Cowherd has a Sustainable Forest Management, Master of Forestry from Oregon State University; she also holds degrees in English from Humboldt State University (MA) and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (BA).