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

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My grandfather passed away and I wonder who has the knowledge of the herb that cured my mother's asthma. At the beginning I was genuinely pleased with this book, it is poetic, it is beautifully written, it mixes science, and auto-biography, and botany and it was a pleasant read. It divorces our mental calculations from our intuitive, emotional, and biological embeddedness in the matrix of life That split allows us passively to acquiesce in the preparations for our own demise. As we struggle to imagine a future not on fire, we are gifted here with an indigenous culture of reciprocity with the land, revived and weaved together with the science of ecology.

Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass , reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. In the end, if Kimmerer thinks that her book is in any way going to help white Americans become Indigenous, which is the implication of the chapters in part four, Braiding Sweetgrass, she’s fooling herself, not to mention her readers. Don’t get me wrong, I like the way thoughts and stories interrupt the narrative but structurally speaking it is a little bit messy and needs some editing. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She brings these frameworks of understanding together in original ways, taking "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.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). Through Kimmerer, I have learned to be more present with plants, with mosses—to learn from and with them. 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. Kimmerer draws on her own experiences as a botanist and an indigenous woman to meticulously craft this book of essays about the importance of nurturing ecological awareness and developing a relationship with the natural world.

She is a realist with a unique perspective that provides more than just dos and don'ts for 'fixing' our climate crisis. So maybe I just began hearing about Robin Kimmerer when I commissioned an article for the magazine I was working at in 2009: Tracy Basile’s “Saving Sacred Species”. Kimmerer offers us a way to look back to our ancestral kinship with “other” lives and a way forward to respect and intimacy with our brother species. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science.The descriptions of Native American myths and traditions as well as the beauty of nature are beautiful. 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). The author has a flowery, repetitive, overly polished writing style that simply did not appeal to me. She blends the mind, body and soul in a holistic perspective that celebrates the beauty of the natural world and warns against the continuing destruction humans are waging on it. A graceful, illuminating study of the wisdom of the natural world, from a world-renowned indigenous scientist.

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings - asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass - offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. What would it be like to be raised on gratitude, to speak to the natural world as a member of the democracy of species, to raise a pledge of interdependence?

Recreation is obtained using electronics (destructive mining), cars (more destructing mining, carbon emissions, roadkill, war, land misuse), airplanes (ibid), books (deforestation, chemical runoff) etc. Because I do agree with her general point in this book: that our society has strayed far, far away from the relationship we should have with the natural world. There is acknowledgement that the previously ignored indigenous cultures and knowledge are absolutely essential. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).