Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the… (urspr publ 2013; utgåvan 2020)

I loved this book. I was fortunate enough to listen to it on audio, read by the author. Kimmerer is a member of the Potawatomi Nation and is a scientist. I so appreciated her melding of science and the indigenous way of seeing the world and being in the world. Listening to her read the book felt like poetry, hearing her say tribal words for plants (and other things) as well as Latin names of plants and animals. I wanted to soak this book in through my pores. ( )

[Braiding Sweetgrass] by [[Robin Wall Kimmerer]]

Braiding Sweetgrass is a collection of essays exploring Indigenous relationships with plants and the earth. Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and also a botanist who teaches at traditional American universities. She explores the differences in how her Indigenous culture and the typical American culture teaches interaction with their environments. This book flipped a lot of narrative for me; even from our earliest origin stories, our cultures have a different relationship with the world. The Christian origin story of being shut out of the garden of Eden and of having the earth provided for our comfort and use is a huge contrast with the reciprocity involved in most Indigenous origin stories. My writing of that is hugely over-simplified, so please don't take offense. There isn't any culture-bashing here, even when the author takes a hard look at choices we've made as a nation. Kimmerer takes 385 pages to provide context and examples of how we can all treat our earth better - benefitting the plants and animals here and also benefitting ourselves in a reciprocal relationship. She has many essays on specific plants and how, seemingly by design, our responsible use can benefit both the plant and the human. I learned so much about sweetgrass, maples, strawberries, leeks, and many more native plants.

I highlighted hundreds of passages in this book. Some books change your point of view and thinking for the better and this one definitely verbalized a perspective that I was ready to hear. I loved Kimmerer's sentiment that everyone is Indigenous to some land. As a nation of immigrants in the U.S. and Canada (her focus areas) we should strive to create an indigenous mindset to our current land by learning about our national landscape and how we can live in a reciprocal relationship with the mutual environment that we share with plants and animals.

Certainly, there aren't easy answers here. We are a transient population. It's hard to connect with the land when you move through multiple diverse regions. It's hard to connect with the environment when you live removed from green spaces. It's hard to connect with plants when they are endangered from our actions. I think it's best to look at this book as a way to inspire a desire to connect with our environment. By spending time in it, I think most people will naturally want to protect it. I will say that one of the few highlights of this pandemic has been the incredible amount of time I've spent in our local woods behind our house with my two young boys. We've spent countless hours hiking through barely navigable paths, splashing in our creek, scrambling over rocks, looking at mushrooms and weird bugs. And they've spent countless more hours playing - masked :-) - with a small group of friends creating a whole world back in the woods. I feel lucky that we ended up living in an area that is both incredibly suburban and beautifully wooded.

I highly recommend reading this book. It's a slow book, a challenging book, and an uncomfortable book at times, but it really challenged my perspective in a good way and the ideas will definitely now make up a part of my worldview.

Original publication date: 2015
Author’s nationality: Citizen Potawatami Nation
Original language: English
Length: 385 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars
Format/where I acquired the book: library kindle
Why I read this: came up in searching for books on Indigenous culture ( )

Absolutely profound. How to connect to the land we live on while showing respect for the past, present and future. Highly recommend this work. ( )

This is a spiritual nature book. I don't normally do well with nature books; and when this one devoted an entire chapter to lichen, or the different sizes of drops of water depending on their tannic content, I was glazing over. I read it for the Native American spiritual aspect, which offers some beautiful perspectives.

The best one of all came right in the introduction:

"Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow's edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world by standing silent in the sun." Such a beautiful thought! In snow-covered February in particular.

Here is another: what the earth gives to us is a gift, and consider how differently we often feel about an object when we have received it as a gift. Kimmerer tells of a dream where she walked through a vivid Andean outdoor market, and picked up a fresh bunch of cilantro. When she went to pay, she was gestured away. It turned out everything in the market was being given away as a gift. She found herself being careful not to take too much; and she found herself wondering what presents she might bring to give to the (non-)vendors the next day. We should view the earth that way.

Then there is the chapter "Learning the Grammar of Animacy". Her ancestral language, Potawatomi, uses "he/she" pronouns for almost everything, certainly all plant and animal life; the "it" pronoun is reserved for things that truly and beyond a doubt have no life, like a piece of plastic. How might we feel differently if we called the trees "he" or "she" instead of "it"? She asked how one would feel if someone referred to her grandmother as "it". "It is making soup. It has gray hair." It would be kind of funny, and definitely disrespectful. It certainly makes me feel funny just to think about it. It's wrong. She feels it is just as wrong to call a tree an "it"! Try thinking about it next time you wander and ponder outdoors. How might we be treating the earth differently if our language called the trees and plants and all growing things "he" or "she"?

The Potawatomi language is also very heavy on verbs. There's a verb for "to be red." "To be a hill." And her favorite, "To be a bay." Very frustrating to learn! But notice how it animates everything.

It may seem off topic, but things are converging to bring me closer and closer to a vegetarian lifestyle. I ponder her sentence, "I wish I could photosynthesize... doing the work of the world." Plants do the work of the world. What parasites on them the rest of us are - without plants, we are doomed! What a gift to have so many plants to eat. To eat any higher on the food chain, to eat not the plants but the things that eat the plants... seems very, I don't know, out of tune and needlessly complicated and far removed from the "work of the world."

I find myself taking this to heart, the 'gift economy' that is the bounty of the earth, the animation of all things, and I find myself nightly thinking back over the day and, silly as it sounds, saying thank you, oats and banana... thank you, apple and grapes... And with 32 days till spring equinox, I long to see the plants return and do the work of the world; I'm sure I will see them with new eyes. ( )

Wonderful and powerful. Somehow heartbreaking to surface at the end of the book and realise it was written in 2013 and the world has had 7 more wasted years. A refreshingly different perspective, both when practicing science and the viewpoint of indigenous peoples who are already in a post-apocalyptic situation. I shall keep this on my bookshelf and dip into it again and again. ( )