Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Written by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Published in 2013 by Milkweed Editions

 

The story of our relationship with the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did. Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to the land. We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers. All stories are connected, new ones woven from the threads of the old.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, is a scientist, professor, and the founder of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Her book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, is a collection of essays that Kimmerer describes as a braid “woven from three strands: Indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most.” Her intent is to offer a “braid of stories meant to heal our relationship to the world”. Kimmerer is a powerful storyteller, weaving together reflections on life, motherhood, and being an Indigenous woman navigating the world of science. She regards science and traditional knowledge as a reciprocal pair, like purple and yellow on the colour wheel.

The collection combines the genres of memoir, Indigenous storytelling, and scientific writing. It is divided into five sections: Planting Sweetgrass, Tending Sweetgrass, Picking Sweetgrass, Braiding Sweetgrass, and Burning Sweetgrass. Topics include living in reciprocity with the earth, the honourable harvest, the grammar of animacy, the legacy of residential schools, and the devastating impact of a “consumption-driven mind-set” toward natural resources. Kimmerer reminds us that:

we are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth.

 

Introducing the Author:

Read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s author bio and visit her website.

Learning More About the Book:

Read these reviews of Braiding Sweetgrass:

Kirkus

Muskrat Magazine

Coloradsxo State University Center for Literary Publishing

Read this interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Listen to this interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Listen to a discussion with Robin Wall Kimmerer for the On Being Project.

 

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