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

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We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. Each time I picked up this book, I sank into the world of plants and meaning, the slow vegetable world, seen jewel-bright from the underside. Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a bookmark ribbon, and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson.

Kimmerer is a botanist of Potawatomi descent who wrote this book to assuage her guilt at going to college to study botany (the "wrong" way to understand plants) and at not being fluent in the Potawatomi language. Braiding Sweetgrass blew my head apart, and along with that, decimated the carefully constructed guard walls around my heart. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she takes us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise. In quite a unique and compelling way, Kimmerer weaves together three distinct, and sometimes seemingly opposed, worldviews: that of indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teaching of plants. I read this book on the night of the election and the morning after, and many moments in the weeks that have followed, a tonic against waves of despair.

Kimmerer blends her scientific background as an ethno-botanist with Potawatomi Tradition Ecological Knowledge in an astonishingly poetic book. My grandfather passed away and I wonder who has the knowledge of the herb that cured my mother's asthma. 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.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise (Elizabeth Gilbert). The texts interpret the theme broadly - from the ways that humans mind and unmind plants to the mindedness or unmindedness of plants themselves. Indigenous people of North America have been using sweetgrass traditionally for religious ceremonies as well as therapeutic purposes. I can’t remember where I started seeing all the glowing reviews, but it was settled for me when I saw one by Mexie (PhD grad in political economy, find her on YouTube).I felt euphoric inhaling the intense fragrance, and truly understood why the author would name a book after this plant.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert). Kimmerer has said about the book that, "I wanted readers to understand that Indigenous knowledge and Western science are both powerful ways of knowing, and that by using them together we can imagine a more just and joyful relationship with the Earth. Kimmerer was told in college that her reason for wanting to be a botanist was aesthetic rather than scientific.Based on the anecdotes she shares about her background, she definitely comes across as not growing up Indian, as much of what she recounts signifies an abundance of white privilege. Numerous times, I found myself thinking, “if I were reading this, I’d be highlighting this passage”. 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.

In fact, Kimmerer recounts her father’s ritual for greeting the sunrise, during family camping and canoeing trips, using the name Tahawus (p 34). Kimmerer combines her training in Western scientific methods and her Native American knowledge about sustainable land stewardship to describe a more joyful and ecological way of using our land in Braiding Sweetgrass.

Our PM isn’t that great with environmental issues or indigenous issues, so this is one book I would recommend this book to him if he's not too busy meeting panda bears ( http://www.