Indigenous wisdom, science, and story create a vision that can heal us.
Dr. Kimmerer at home. Image: Bryology (MOSS)
There is a book which heals your heart, raises your spirits, and makes you wise. If enough people were to read it, if it were taught in schools and studied in churches, it could save the world.
The book is Braiding Sweetgrass. The author is Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Native American (Potawatomi) botanist, teacher, storyteller, poet, mother, and wise woman. The subtitle is “Scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants,” and every chapter braids those three ways of seeing the world.
This book changed my life and keeps me going. I’ve read it through five times, and now it lives on my bedside table. I look through the table of contents most mornings to pick out a story that will speak to where I am that day. It always helps.
If you haven’t read Braiding Sweetgrass yet, you are missing something very important in your life. If you have read it before, I will say from many people’s experience, read it again. Once is not enough. Unless you are already very wise and knowledgeable, twice is not enough. You will get more out of it each time, because there are innumerable layers and facets to it, as there are to reality. Readers will gain insights into politics, science, spirit, history, human relations, Nature, and their own feelings.
Here are six reasons to read it again. I could have easily made it twelve or 20, but I’ll start here..
1. Learn how to live sustainably, to take from Earth without destroying it. In a chapter called The Honorable Harvest, Kimmerer explains Indigenous practices of taking Earth’s gifts in ways that foster more life. As animals, we can’t avoid taking life in order to eat and to make things. She teaches indigenous ways of hunting, harvesting, and building that allow all of life to flourish.
As in all the chapters, this one gives science that confirms her people’s traditions, which come from thousands of years of living on the land, observing Nature and learning through hard experience what works year after year and what doesn’t.
This learning includes ’take only what is given, ‘never take more than half,’ ‘always give thanks,’ ‘find ways to give back’ and many other instructions. She tells how the Ojibway of Minnesota harvest wild rice each year to feed themselves, but they always leave half untouched.
European settlers saw this and thought the Indians were lazy, not industrious like them. In reality, the Natives were sharing with other creatures who also needed rice, including the ducks they caught in the Spring. They were ensuring that there would be seeds to grow more rice next year. Their way is sustainable; modern society is not.
Kimmerer writes pages on her efforts to be honorable in a society and economy based on shopping. At the supermarket, we often have no idea where the products we buy come from or what they’ve been through. She describes her frustrating experience, which I found quite relevant to my own.
This chapter is full of fascinating people she has met and interviewed, including hunters and fur trappers. Even a Canadian sable trapper shows how he lives sustainably and honorably. This man works as a fishing guide in summer, saves all the fish guts his clients clean from their catch, and freezes them. Then in winter, he laboriously sets up feeding stations in trees where the sables (usually called martens while they are alive) live and periodically leaves the animals food. As a result, the marten population is growing.
In an honorable harvest, we give thanks and we act to give life to those who feed us. There’s a difference between food grown with chemicals that poison all surrounding life, and the same food grown through regenerative agriculture. A factory farmed hamburger is never honorable, but a free range steer on land that is cared for might be.
2. Learn to give and receive — Kimmerer starts from the undeniable truth that everything we have in life is a gift from someone: from the sun, the plants, the soil, the rivers, the animals, or from each other. By putting money value on every item in our lives, we make it easier to exchange things. We get at stronger economy, but we lose out on the mutual relationships that come from gift.
In a chapter called The Gift of Strawberries, she explains that a gift creates a relationship. The receiver feels called on to reciprocate the gift or to pass it on. When you buy something, you hand over your money or your credit card, and the relationship ends. You are enriching your country’s GDP numbers, but you are not enriching your life.
Economies where people share and give each other things existed long before the money economy. They enable people to survive hard times much better than our private property system, in which those without money may wind up homeless and hungry
Most of our gifts come originally from the Earth, and there is a relationship there, too. Kimmerer tells of her childhood finding tiny wild strawberries in the forest and collecting them for her father’s birthday treat. Wild berries are a gift and so much tastier than big commercial ones you can buy covered in plastic at Trader Joe’s. They also gave her the experience of combing carefully through the forest: kneeling, smelling, touching, seeing, feeling a part of the life force.
3. New ways to experience nature — If you ever get out in Nature, you might marvel at chapters where Kimmerer wanders through a spruce forest in a rainstorm or investigates the mosses and lichens growing on rocks in the Adirondack Mountains. She draws lessons from each of them, but even without paying attention to their teachings, there is so much more to experience in the wild than most people normally do. We’re too busy thinking or doing, but Braiding Sweetgrass will open up a whole vista of life that we normally never see.
4. Teaches Gratitude — Many of us know by now that a feeling of gratitude is the key to happiness.. In a chapter called Allegiance to Gratitude, Kimmerer repeats the “Words that come before all else,” sometimes called the Thanksgiving Address. These words are a pledge the Haudenosaunee people, in whose region she lives, recite at the beginning of school or meetings and important occasions, like Americans pledge allegiance to a flag.
It’s kind of a prayer that goes through at least a dozen aspects of nature and of life for which we should be grateful. The moon, the birds, the plants, the bugs, the animals we eat and those we love, and more. It’s a long read and by the end readers realize how lucky we are.
5. Understanding of Science for good and bad — Kimmerer is a leading botanist, and in that role, she was approached by some Native sweetgrass gatherers to settle a question about the best way to pick their plant. Should pickers pull grass up in clumps, or should they carefully select out the strands they wanted and leave the rest undisturbed? They wanted her to find out.
In a wonderful chapter called The Teachings of Grass, she tells how one of her grad students took on the challenge and wrote a proposal for an experiment. Unfortunately, the department rejected her, saying that “everyone knows” that harvesting a plant leads to declining populations. The student and Kimmerer appealed and went ahead anyway, studying the two alternative methods of picking in different plots. A third set of plots went un-harvested as a control group. Her student, although pregnant for much of the study, laboriously tagged each plant and frequently documented how they were doing.
At the end of two years, she reported her findings. Both of the harvesting methods worked equally well; the sweetgrass in those plots was growing happily. The control group was not so healthy. Although no one bothered them, far fewer plants were growing at the end of the study.
The professors had to admit that what ”everyone knew” was wrong. At least in the case of sweetgrass, the honorable harvesting by humans actually helped it grow. The scientific method, practiced with an indigenous mindset, learned a truth that authoritarian, capitalist science couldn’t see. This is the kind of science we need to help restore our Earth.
6. Learn the nature of our enemy — Are the disastrous problems we face the fault of people or of systems? Kimmerer says the best way to look at modern consumer society’s death spiral is through spirit. North Central Plains Indians like the Potawatomi feared an evil spirit they called Windigo.
Windigo (sometimes under a slightly different name) would attack in the cold, hungry months of winter. He is a spirit of pure greed, who only wants to feed himself on anything that lives. He is never satisfied; the more he eats, the hungrier he gets. Anyone he bites turns into a monster like him. The tribes had many practices for avoiding and defeating Windigo. They told children stories about the dangers of taking too much.
Can you think of any such stories you were told? We have very few, because in our culture, the Windigo spirit is celebrated. Take as much as you can and keep seeking more. “Greed is good,” as financier Gordon Gekko famously said in the movie Wall Street.
Windigo is modern capitalism in spirit form. We, or at least the rich and powerful among us are all separate, competing, greedy, disconnected individuals, and no society can survive like that. We need a spiritual change, and Braiding Sweetgrass could help us find it. Kimmerer gives some ideas at the end in story form.
Her book is extraordinarily well-written and entertaining. Please read it many times and share it widely.
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