Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer: A Review

Robin Wall Kimmerer

“In the Western tradition, there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top – the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation – and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as ‘the younger brothers of Creation.’ We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn – we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance.”

This thought is what frames Robin Wall Kimmerer’s BRAIDING SWEETGRASS.

Throughout her book, Kimmerer weaves profound insights of Native American culture with botany (she has a Ph.D. in botany and teaches environmental biology).  She is also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

“[T]rees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.”

Kimmerer notes: “A species and culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on generosity to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it. The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences.”

She challenges the materialistic, human-centric Western worldview of the 21^st Century. “If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.”

An interesting piece of this discussion is the English language itself. “English doesn’t give us the tools for incorporating respect for animacy [which Collins Dictionary defines as 'the state of being alive or animate.'] In English you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an 'it'…”

For Kimmerer, this linguistic fact has enormous consequences.

“The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction – not just for Native peoples, but for everyone. Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them intention and compassion – until we teach them not to.” She sums up this thought: “The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.”

As a mother to two daughters, Kimmerer touches upon the concept of Mother Earth, noting that it includes self-reliance, nurturing and a powerful, reciprocal love.

“The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us the gift that we cannot provide ourselves… She gives what we need without being asked. I wonder if she gets tired, old Mother Earth. Or if she too is fed by the giving.”

In recognizing Mother Earth's abundant love, Kimmerer spends a chapter describing the importance of gratitude, beginning with the Thanksgiving Address, part of Onondaga Nation culture.

The Thanksgiving Address includes thanks for the cycles of life, Mother Earth, the waters of the world, fish and plants, berries, medicine herbs, trees, all the beautiful animals of the world, birds, the Four Winds, the Moon, enlightened teachers through the ages, and to the Great Spirit – the Creator.

At the Onondaga Nation School, the day begins and ends with a recitation of the Thanksgiving Address.

“Imagine raising children in a culture in which gratitude is the first priority,” Kimmerer observes. “You can’t listen to the Thanksgiving Address without feeling wealthy. And, while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness. The Thanksgiving Address reminds you that you already have everything you need.”

“The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That’s what good mothers do.”

As Kimmerer describes how black ash baskets are made, she points out, “In weaving well-being for land and people, we need to pay attention to the lessons of the three rows [that make up each basket]. Ecological well-being and the laws of nature are always the first row…The second reveals material welfare, the subsistence of human needs. Economy built on ecology…” with the third row being made up of “respect, reciprocity, All Our Relations. I think of it as the spirit row.”

Taken together all three rows “represent recognition that our lives depend upon one another, human needs being only one row in the basket that must hold us all.”

A few pages past this magnificent explanation, Kimmerer speaks with equal eloquence about botany. “To me, an experiment is a kind of conversation with plants: I have a question for them, but since we don’t speak the same language, I can’t ask them directly and they won’t answer verbally. But plants can be eloquent in their physical responses and behaviors. Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change; you just need to learn how to ask.”

One of the more interesting points that Kimmerer shares is a Native view of time.

“[I]n the popular way of thinking, history draws a time “line,” as if time marched in lockstep in only one direction… But Nanahozho’s [Anishinaabe spirit] people know time as a circle. Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself… If time is a turning circle, there is a place where history and prophecy converge.”

And, to the point, she continues: “After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, ‘The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore... They don’t seem to know if they’re staying or not.’ This same observation is heard from some contemporary scholars who see in the social pathologies and relentlessly materialistic culture the fruit of homelessness, a rootless past… [C]an Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if they were staying?... What happens when we truly become native to a place, when we finally make a home?”

Kimmerer’s BRAIDING SWEETGRASS is full of wisdom, mixed with sorrow for the way things are, and a mother’s strong love that nurtures hope.

She urges us to move from a humancentric focus to include all of nature.                            

“The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.”

And she asks “Can we extend our bonds of celebration and support from our own species to the others who need us?”

Kimmerer relates her own family’s experience with attempted assimilation – which included her grandfather’s time at the Carlisle Industrial School in Pennsylvania. From 1879 for nearly thirty years, Native children were forcibly taken from their families to attend the school. The school’s mission was “to kill the Indian and save the Man.”

“What was stolen at Carlisle has been a knot of sorrow I’ve carried like a stone buried in my heart. I am not alone...”

She then writes about the beauty of old-growth forests – that Western, industrialized culture sees only as products and not living plants.

“Old-growth cultures, like old-growth forests, have not been exterminated. The land holds their memory and the possibility of regeneration. They are not only a matter of ethnicity or history, but of relationships born out of reciprocity between land and people.”

For Kimmerer, part of the answer to this dilemma comes from the particular lens that’s used to examine the challenge of living on a living, breathing planet, where humans are actually a small part of the whole.

“Many [scientists] seem to believe that the intelligence they access is only their own. They lack the fundamental ingredient: humility… It takes humility to learn from other species.”

She makes the observation: “It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a ‘species loneliness’ – estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night.”

And, finally, Kimmerer makes the conclusion that “creating an alternative to destructive economic structures is imperative, it is not enough. It is not just changes in policies that we need, but also changes to the heart. Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance… A deep awareness of the gifts of the earth and of each other is medicine.”

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Braiding Sweetgrass was published by Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit organization based in Bde Ota (Minneapolis), the traditional home of the Dakota people.