Melina Laboucan-Massimo was born in the wilds of northern Alberta, Canada, in a tiny town aptly named Peace River. She grew up in Little Buffalo, an even tinier town about 65 miles to the east, where most of her family still lives. A member of the Lubicon Cree, one of Canada’s First Nations, she was raised on the land like her parents and grandparents: hunting moose and drying the meat, using local plants as medicines, spending summers deep in the boreal forests and muskeg swamps and winters in a village with no running water.