Braiding Sweetgrass

This book took a while longer. It's the kind of book that shifts your mind in gentle ways with each sentence you read. I usually take a break after every chapter, hoping their lessons sink in that day.

Reminders in an ever abstracting world to not only look forward, but back, and around us. Our teachers have come before, and are here right now. Nature, expressed in forgotten poetry—captivating stories only if we listen.

It's a lovely book.

This was great - The author really takes it time and builds understanding of the natural world and science. This explains well the information perspective of land in particular.
This book is indeed a beauty and one of my favorite reads for the summer.

Beautifully written and hard and thought provoking. Will make you take action to save the earth but also to remember not to despair.

So much information. I want to go back and read it again in a few months.

I've been waiting to read Braiding Sweetgrass for more than a year until my book club read it together, but the wait was worth it...What a book! Robin Wall Kimmerer uses her Native American traditions and her scientific knowledge of plants to offer up ways for people in the world to step back from our wasteful and destructive ways and to save our planet. And all of this, she tells us, can be done by taking one small step at a time.

Kimmerer focuses on healing through gratitude and reciprocity. I am fascinated with these concepts and I love the idea of applying them to everything we do in the world.

I have so many quotes from this book that I love.

“If we want to grow good citizens, then let us teach reciprocity. If what we aspire to is justice for all, then let it be justice for all of Creation.”

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (pp. 116-118). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

‘I looked around at the garden and could feel her delight in giving us these beautiful raspberries, squash, basil, potatoes, asparagus, lettuce, kale and beets, broccoli, peppers, brussels sprouts, carrots, dill, onions, leeks, spinach. It reminded me of my little girls' answer to “How much do I love you?” “Thiiiiiiiis much,” with arms stretched wide, they replied. This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.'

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 122). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

“I spend a lot of time thinking about our relationships with land, how we are given so much and what we might give back. I try to work through the equations of reciprocity and responsibility, the whys and wherefores of building sustainable relationships with ecosystems. All in my head. But suddenly there was no intellectualizing, no rationalizing, just the pure sensation of baskets full of mother love. The ultimate reciprocity, loving and being loved in return.”

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (pp. 122-123). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

“The old teachings recognized that Windigo nature is in each of us, so the monster was created in stories, that we might learn why we should recoil from the greedy part of ourselves. This is why Anishinaabe elders like Stewart King remind us to always acknowledge the two faces—the light and the dark side of life—in order to understand ourselves. See the dark, recognize its power, but do not feed it.”

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 306). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

‘We are all complicit. We've allowed the “market” to define what we value so that the redefined common good seems to depend on profligate lifestyles that enrich the sellers while impoverishing the soul and the earth.'

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 307). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

“The fear for me is far greater than just acknowledging the Windigo within. The fear for me is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable.”

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 308). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

“For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from someplace else.”

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 345). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

‘It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a “species loneliness”—estrangement from the rest of Creation.'

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 358). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

‘“You might not get to be around those other fires very often,” he says, “but there's fire you must tend to every day. The hardest one to take care of is the one right here,” he says, tapping his finger against his chest. “Your own fire, your spirit. We all carry a piece of that sacred fire within us. We have to honor it and care for it. You are the firekeeper.”'

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 364). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

“...I believe the answer is contained within our teachings of “One Bowl and One Spoon,” which holds that the gifts of the earth are all in one bowl, all to be shared from a single spoon. This is the vision of the economy of the commons, wherein resources fundamental to our well-being, like water and land and forests, are commonly held rather than commodified. Properly managed, the commons approach maintains abundance, not scarcity. These contemporary economic alternatives strongly echo the indigenous worldview in which the earth exists not as private property, but as a commons, to be tended with respect and reciprocity for the benefit of all.”

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 376). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

“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.”

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 383). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

“The moral covenant of reciprocity calls us to honor our responsibilities for all we have been given, for all that we have taken. It's our turn now, long overdue. Let us hold a giveaway for Mother Earth, spread our blankets out for her and pile them high with gifts of our own making. Imagine the books, the paintings, the poems, the clever machines, the compassionate acts, the transcendent ideas, the perfect tools. The fierce defense of all that has been given. Gifts of mind, hands, heart, voice, and vision all offered up on behalf of the earth. Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world. In return for the privilege of breath.”

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass (p. 384). Milkweed Editions. Kindle Edition.

This was a difficult book to read for a few reasons.

1. I felt that the language was poetic and beautiful, but there was too much of it. Sometimes I craved plain-old exposition so we could move the story along.
2. The story really didn't move along. I didn't understand it was a collection of essays, thinking it was a memoir because they listed it as one at our library (and Goodreads). But memoirs need a story arc and some personal growth.
3. As a collection of essays, she grouped them well in their commonality, but as a novel, that was its downfall. They were too similar. I wanted a bit of difference in each chapter to distinguish them from one another so I could appreciate and remember each. As it is, I remember the chapter her daughter wrote most of all.

Had I gone into reading this with the understanding they were essays, I might have come away feeling good about my book choice. As it was, I found it hard to read more than a couple chapters in a row and it took me more than a month to get through. I'm happy I read it, but wish I'd had a happy-easy book to read alongside it to break up the chapters and make me come back for more.

Excellent and highly unusual balance of spiritual and scientific wisdom, honoring both sides of the truth, in which artistic and rational methods are not in opposition but complement and complete one another. It's both/and, not either/or! If only more scientists would start to think this way, we might actually have a future.

I was only disappointed that Kimmerer is too dismissive of Western tradition and its contributions. Nothing is gained by categorically devaluing the Judeo-Christian worldview, in spite of the atrocities done in its name. It doesn't have to be that way. (Eve was an indigenous woman too!)

My favorite book; certainly in my top 5. Incredible writing, and an absolute masterpiece.

At the ASLE conference earlier this summer I heard this book referenced in a number of sessions.

And now, having read it, I realize why.

Braiding Sweetgrass is a rich collection of essays about plants and animals, indigenous and scientific awareness, and our tenuous relationship with nature. But more than that, it is the story of one woman's journey, from a childhood of conflicting cultures to a scientific career of conflicting world views.

Along the way, Kimmerer, teaches us about how native cultures understood and interacted with nature and one another, contrasted against our current society, and its shortsightedness and recklessness.

She contrasts the Pledge of Allegiance her children were compelled to recite with the Onondoga Nation Thanksgiving Address and finds the Pledge of Allegiance sadly lacking:

As I grew to understand the gifts of the earth, I couldn't understand how “love of country” could omit recognition of the actual country itself. The only promise it requires is to the flag. What of the promises to each other and to the land? What would it be like to be raised on gratitude, to speak to the natural world as a member of the democracy of species, to raise a pledge of interdependence?” And, later: “In the Thanksgiving Address, I hear respect respect toward all our nonhuman relatives, not on political entity, but to all of life. What happens to nationalism, to political boundaries, when allegiance lies with winds and waters that know no boundaries, that cannot be bought or sold?

My favorite essay is titled Learning the Grammar of Animacy and it concerns languages and how languages both reflect culture and reinforce it. In the essay, she is struggling to learn the Potawatomi language. She writes:

English is a noun-based language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things. Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70 percent. Which means that 70 percent of the words have to be conjugated, and 70 percent have different tenses and cases to be mastered. European languages often assign gender to nouns, but Potawatomi does not divide the world into masculine and feminine. Nouns and verbs are both animate and inanimate.

And despite the immense challenge of keeping this language alive (there are only 9 speakers left) the effort is well worth it. For the language has much to teach us about how we (Western language speakers) have grown up seeing and interacting with the world.

In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kingship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are family.

And this applies not just to nonhuman animals but any living thing.

When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.” If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. if a maple is a her, we think twice.

Kimmerer writes that “English doesn't give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy.” Indeed.

In an essay about her adventures as an instructor, it's fascinating and frustrating to follow her field trip with a group of students (some of whom do not believe in global warming, let alone evolution) and her efforts to open their eyes to nature. She is the sort of hands-on, passionate and playful teacher that every student should have the benefit of knowing.

There is also great sadness in this book, in remembering the violence done to people and land, in our society's seeming indifference to the mistakes we could so easily learn from. And yet she documents example upon example of people who are doing their very best, against great odds, to right the wrongs, to turn this sinking old ship around.

I did find one essay, titled The Honorable Harvest, curiously inconsistent. In it, Kimmerer profiles an animal trapper and fishing guide who is (to be fair) more humane and conservation-minded that most anyone around. But to call what he does honorable is a disservice to animals. True, he (and others) do protect land and animals, but must we sacrifice a portion of animals in return? I don't see honor in killing animals, no matter what emotional or philosophical counterbalance is employed. Kimmerer is an excellent wordsmith which is why I find it odd to see “honorable harvest” used in place of a more accurate phrase, “sustainable slaughter.”

But I must admit that if most people were to read and embrace the lessons of this book that this planet and its creatures would be so much better off.

I can see why this book came up in so many ASLE sessions, because it touches on so many issues — family, native peoples, land stewardship, our conflicted relationships with animals and one another.

While so many nonfiction books I read these days lead me from one bleak conclusion to another, this book left me feeling hopeful. Because the author is hopeful, and stubborn, and smart and one hell of writer. Robin Wall Kimmerer doesn't just point out the many challenges we face as a planet but she points a way forward.

NOTE: This review was first posted on EcoLit Books.

This book is meant to be read outside in the spring or summer, and I saved it until then for maximum effect. And it worked, sort of.

At first I was really in tune with everything that the author was saying, and feeling very inspired. But a large part of the book is spent showing how mainstream American and European cultures destroy the natural world, how they put humans on a pedestal and sacrifice all other forms of life for their own needs - which I totally agree to be true. And the book made me realize that there is no way this will ever change because it would cause inconvenience and suffering to humans. Soulless monoculture fields are the only way to feed 7 billion+ humans, even though it means destroying habitats for thousands of other species. This cold hard truth solidified with every page that I read, and by the halfway point I was so depressed I couldn't go on. I'm putting this book aside for the rest of the year, and will pick it back up next Spring. Judgement (star rating) withheld until the finish.

“Imagine raising children in a culture in which gratitude is the first priority.” This is a sublimely beautiful work, an important one. A precious gift. Kimmerer writes of gifts and responsibilities, scarcity and abundance, greed and gratefulness. Of awareness. She weaves together scientific and native knowledge gracefully and without woo; building a path for our future based on respect and humility.

If you care about our future, you need to read this. Then pass it on.