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

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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is a 2013 nonfiction book by Potawatomi professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, about the role of Indigenous knowledge as an alternative or complementary approach to Western mainstream scientific methodologies. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put into the universe will always come back.

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. Beth Dooley arrived in Minnesota from New Jersey with preconceptions about the Midwestern food scene. Perhaps some readers may be turned off by the way she can anthropomorphize the environment, but her background as an indigenous woman and respect for her tradition brings a new light to how we—or at least I, as a white male—view the world. Learn to listen, really listen, which means learning about the Maple Nation and all the other Nations, not romanticizing them as "Mother Earth" without doing the work of becoming intimate with the land you are, after all, a part of. In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tackles everything from sustainable agriculture to pond scum as a reflection of her Potawatomi heritage, which carries a stewardship ‘which could not be taken by history: the knowing that we belonged to the land.The reader is compelled to act and change their view of the environment as the book "challenges the European immigrant ecological consciousness" through "Native American creation stories and details of sustainable, traditional, ecological management practices of Native Americans. I spoke to my friend who recommended this to me about how much I hated it and she admitted to only being 25% of the way through. But when he encounters a golf ball there, hit from a nearby course, he wonders if he should remove it.

Kimmerer begins with the myth of Skywoman, adapted from oral tradition, that explains "where we came from, but also of how we can go forward. The very visceral idea that the thing, the being, they love so deeply actually truly loves them back explodes their (and my own) notions of existence. Those who value the indigenous teachings of gratitude to the earth for all it provides would also find this book worthwhile. Which is another part of my experience: I read all this deep hope and wisdom and meaning at a particularly hopeless and idiotic time. Here is someone who drives a car, presumably a lot, because she lives in a rural area, complaining about oil companies, chemical runoff, and road kill, preaching that we should realign our lifestyle with that of the indigenous Americans who gave and took with respect for the world around them.Kimmerer blends her scientific background as an ethno-botanist with Potawatomi Tradition Ecological Knowledge in an astonishingly poetic book. Check out this great Guardian interview to read more about the book and for Wall Kimmerer's thoughts on the pandemic. She reminds readers that we are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep.

In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. The book the President should read, that all of us who care about the future of the planet should read, is Robin Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a bookmark ribbon, a deckled edge, and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson; this is a book you are going to want to gift - either to yourself or those you love.Here, it’s the merger of science, art, linguistics, memoir and religion to show a different way of seeing the world.