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

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

“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.”

In her illuminating collection of essays, Robin Wall Kimmerer lays out in crystalline prose how the Earth, the mother of all mothers, the living, breathing, nurturer on which each of us depends in order to exist, must be understood and truly appreciated before it can get the love and gratitude it so richly deserves.

A scientist as well as member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer, a recent recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, is also, and perhaps primarily, a powerful storyteller. Her ability to convey complex scientific material, in a spellbinding style, a characteristic of Indigenous story-medicine, is designed to compel the reader to see the world in a profoundly different way; a view that’s antithetical to how we’ve been taught to regard our precious planet as something we own.

Sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata) is an aromatic perennial that is hardy and grows very tall with graceful, silky, supple stalks. Native Americans cultivate it for weaving sturdy baskets, making healing medicine and creating smudge sticks for clearing people and places.

Elegantly structured, Braiding Sweetgrass, is organized around the steps involved–planting, tending, picking, braiding and burning–in the preparation of sweetgrass for its ultimate use.

Kimmerer, a DIstinguished Professor at SUNY’s New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in some chapters shares with readers what she teaches her students in the classroom and the work and research she conducts with them in the field. Other chapters are devoted to her Indigenous roots and the ingenious ways she has woven her rigorous scientific training with her ancestral teachings. She writes about the ways of her forebears whose intimate, reciprocal and respectful relationship to Mother Earth and all of her Creations is a template for humankind for moving forward and evolving a conscious, collective and caring relationship within our ecological and environmental systems, while we still can.

After the 27th Conference of the Parties recent conclusion in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt–with rich countries agreeing to establish a historic loss and damage fund, but failing in phasing out fossil fuels and restricting the massive expansion of the carbon market–Kimmerer’s message, in a book published nearly a decade ago, is even more timely and urgent. As the hundreds of protesters at COP27 succeeded in illustrating and highlighting, despite harsh and restrictive tactics used against them and concerted attempts at keeping their voices from being heard, our climate catastrophe is well underway and there can not be any further delay in comprehending the current reality and taking immediate restorative-justice actions, beginning with grieving for the treatment of our natural resources–glorious abundance from Mother Earth herself–seeking forgiveness and making amends.

Without grieving the loss, Kimmerer writes, it’s not possible for someone to truly fathom the scale of how much of our gifts have been taken away from us through various brutal means: extraction, drilling, blasting, polluting and ongoing vast destruction on a global scale.

In “Shkitagen: People of the Seventh Fire,” Kimmerer writes of the prophecy handed down over generations, “Our elders say that we live in the time of the seventh fire. We are the ones our ancestors spoke of, the ones who will bend to the task of putting things back together to rekindle the flames of the sacred fire, to begin the rebirth of the nation…[T]hat all the people of the earth…must make a choice in their path to the future…[w]e do indeed stand at the crossroads…close to the tipping point….Biologists estimate that we would need seven planets to sustain the lifeways we have created.”

Like the wise elder she is, Kimmerer, in her finely-crafted words, interspersed with her ancestors’ native language, shines her elucidating light to reveal our only possible direction if we want to survive. How we must learn to decipher the signs and messages the natural world is trying to convey to us. If only we would pay attention and listen closely.

For this is how we move toward a deepening love for our ailing planet: by connecting to its universal heartbeat and tuning-in; learning to interpret our Earth Mother’s extensive, subtle, nuanced and vital languages which hold the answers for those willing to engage.

As Kimmerer notes, despair is not an option. We must practice radical gratitude, for all the earth has given to us, that gives us courage, “...to refuse to participate in an economy that destroys the beloved earth to line the pockets of the greedy, to demand an economy that is aligned with life, not stacked against it. It's easy to write that, harder to do.”