Speakers

Maggie Baker Conklin

Maggie grew up in Saugatuck, Michigan, where she lives today. She moved away to go to college in St. Louis, Missouri where she graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a B.A. degree. After graduation she worked for two years managing the oldest health food store in St. Louis where she worked closely with a naturopath and soon realized that she had a calling to work as an ND herself.
Maggie is a Board Certified Doctor of Traditional Naturopaty and Board Certified Master Herbalist. She owns her own practice, LadyHawk Nutrition LLC in Saugatuck, Michigan, where she enjoys enlightening clients about their own health and nutrition, and especially likes watching each person’s journey towards health. In this practice she uses many types of nutritional therapies, and has learned how to discover the causes of disease, and then offer her clients options to address those causes. In this way they are able to remove the sources of disease which allows the body to heal.
Frustrated with being able to help only one person or one family at a time, she leapt at the offer from Darryl Patton to help him start a school of natural health. She is comforted by the number of people who can acquire the secrets of nature and healing from Heirloom Academy of Healing Arts, and how they in turn will spread that knowledge around the world.
She also leads impromptu and informal “herb walks” when the Michigan weather allows. Maggie is just as comfortable teaching one-on-one as she is in a small group or in front of a crowd of hundreds. The end results are the same; she teaches others and they in turn teach her.

Classes: Raising ADHD and Autistic kids, plant walks, and Easy Things You Can Do to Be Healthy.

Cusi Ballew

Cusi Ballew is a citizen of the Pokagon band of the Potawatomi. He works as the cultural sustainability lead at the Pokagon Center for History and Culture. He is a plant person at heart and has been as long as he can remember. He is more familiar and comfortable with plants that grow wild, but has been learning to grow plants. He is an avid composter, and hopes above all to contribute more soil than he inadvertently damages in his lifetime.

Keynote Speaker:
Seeds of change: How indigenous principles of relationship, reciprocity, responsibility, and respect can reframe how we respond to a changing climate

Classes: Keynote Speaker, Cordage from plants, and old-world hominy making.

George Hedgepeth

George Hedgepeth was born and raised in Michigan and has many fond memories of picking poke salad and yellow root with his older relatives in Alabama.

He became interested in ethnobotany while in college and has been studying people’s traditional interactions with plants seriously for over 35 years. He learns something every time he goes into the woods.

Classes: The Benefits of Bushcraft; Plant uses other than for medicines (building, hunting, fishing, tools, etc.); Practical foraging.

Matt St. John

Matt St. John is a Naturopathic Doctor and herbalist, founder of St. John’s Nutrition, and natural medicine researcher and formulator. He enjoys spending his time educating others about health and wellness through conducting seminars, writing, participating in radio shows, and making television appearances. He and his wife Debra have a television program called “Truth, Health, and Wellness”. He travels frequently worldwide hunting medicine and researching indigenous medicine practices of Native Americans, Amazonians, Latin Americans, and Europeans with his wife Debra, who is a Registered Nurse and research scientist. He lives with his beautiful family in the Lookout Mountain region of Alabama and has committed himself to making health and wellness easy to understand while also being readily available to everyone regardless of their economic status, race, culture, or beliefs.
At 16 years of age, Matt met folk herbalist Tommie Bass who lived only a half hour from his home. Upon discovering that Matt had a myriad of health issues, Tommie assisted him in getting well so that he could start a new life focused on health and wellness. This new life quickly became engrossed in learning about and incorporating natural medicine, not only into his life, but helping others do the same. Matt would visit Tommie often where he began to learn about specific formulations and concepts of natural medicine. From this time, Matt met Tommie’s understudy and friend, the renowned herbalist Darryl Patton, and trained under various wellness experts and practitioners for decades.
Matt has opened over 20 health food stores and clinics across the Southeast, has taught hundreds of classes across the world, conducts weekly health and wellness radio shows, has traveled extensively around the globe studying natural medicine, and is the founder of St. John’s Nutrition in Oxford Alabama, the nation’s only non-profit natural products company and healing center. He and his wife Debra are also the creators and coordinators of St. John’s Amazon Wellness in Tamshiyacu Peru, a non-profit healing, education, research, and rescue center located on the Amazon River.

Classes: Parasites; God’s cancer medicine; Amazing Amazon herbs.

Becky Deckard

Becky lives in her hometown of Alexandria, AL with her husband Chris, their young son Kevin, two dogs and three cats. She was raised around gardening and a self-reliant mindset, introduced to plant medicine by her grandparents. Shortly after graduating with her Bachelor’s degree from Jacksonville State University she attended her first plant walk with Darryl Patton, which she says “stoked an inextinguishable fire.”

Becky earned her Herbalist I and Herbalist II certifications from Darryl’s Deep South Center for Herbal Studies, where she continues to study. She is also currently enrolled in the Doctor of Naturopathy (N.D.) program under Maggie Conklin at Heirloom Academy of Healing Arts.

At Darryl’s encouragement, Becky began taking on a teaching role in 2018. “I never saw myself being a teacher but I have enjoyed growing into it. I hope to give people the confidence to step into the challenging parts of medicine making.”

Becky enjoys how herbal medicine can combine centuries of effective, natural remedies with scientific research and modern medicine. “I thrive on being able to identify, forage and grow the herbs I use and then see those remedies work for myself and others.”

In 2023, she launched her business by the name “Heritage Herbal Medicine.” She operates out of her herb shop beside her home, which she and Chris spent over a year meticulously customizing for research, medicine-making, and consultations.

Classes: Herbal Sleep Aids, Salve Making (Bring home a small jar of salve).

Brittany Oseland

Brittany Oseland a homesteader, forager, and herbalist. Growing up in the forest she has been foraging, gardening, and raising animals for most of her life, even before she realized her passion for homesteading and herbal medicine. As a child, she took great joy in leading what she would later realize were foraging walks with her friends, having them try different flowers and leaves she knew to be edible. Brittany still lives in the Allegan Forest where she grew up, played, and learned about nature and caring for a homestead from her mother and father.

For the past 10+ years she has been studying herbal medicine. She enjoys being able to go to the garden or pantry to help minor ailments rather than taking a trip to the store or pharmacy. She continues to learn new things about plants and their unique qualities every chance she gets.

Brittany is the owner of Oak Grove Homestead where she and her husband and son enjoy raising chickens for eggs and meat. They take pride in growing and foraging as much of their food as possible, and are looking forward to adding to their menagerie of animals. They have a small farm stand where they sell plants, veggies, and locally foraged herbs. She also helps run the West Michigan Ladies Homesteading group where she can teach others, and she is always excited to learn something new.

Classes: Herbal Teas 101, Everything Lavender.

Lila Young

Lila Young grew up on 35 acres where she, her friends, and her siblings could play outside all they cared to. They gardened and canned and ate a few wild foraged foods such as fiddle head ferns, mints, and lilac infused water. They foraged wild raspberries to make jam and cordials (for the adults). As a teen she moved to a farm where she liked to nibble on the clover while bailing hay, and she spent a lot of time admiring many of the “weeds”.

Her son married a lovely Chinese woman who liked to take walks after dinner with them. She would often ask which plants they could eat as they ambled along the trails. Lila was more than delighted in their shared interest in wild edibles.

About this time she discovered books by Theresa Marrone and Sam Thayer, and she enlarged her wild food pantry. Then she started following Maggie Conklin around on her herb walks and realized that so many of these plants are medicinal as well.

Lila has a small garden as well as larger wild areas where she’s sown seeds and transplanted weeds to harvest as food and medicine.

Classes: Marshmallow root candy; “Drink it up” bitters, syrups, and mocktails; Garbling Foraged Herbs.

Dayton Bournique

Dayton Bournique is a 17-year-old Survival and Tactical skills instructor from Central Indiana. He is homeschooled and has a strong thirst for attaining knowledge. Dayton has taught at several conferences throughout the country over the last few years. His favorite classes to teach include: Restraint Breaching/Escape, Fire, and Lock-Picking. Dayton is also an aspiring knife-maker and blacksmith. You can connect with Dayton on YouTube/Facebook/Instagram page @Ballistic Mischief.

Classes: Restraint Escape; Pick Your “Alone” TV Show Gear.

Maria Albright

Maria Albright is a fifth-generation farmer and has lived her entire life understanding how to care for crops and farm animals. She loves all aspects of farm and field life, including cooking, canning, preserving, knitting, and too many other things to list.

She worked with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources for three decades and specialized in forest management and prescribed burning.

She is an avid hunter and fisher, and would love to talk to you at length about her exploits.

Classes: Cooking With and Caring for Cast Iron.