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

Braiding Sweetgrass makes for good reading about all of the topics listed in the subtitle. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes engagingly, drawing the reader in. The book is full of information about Native American connections to plants. Because the author is a biologist, the scientific relationship to her Indigenous background is always made clear. Kimmerer is a member of the Potawatomi nation and a professor of environmental and forest biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

She weaves the title elements together with her life as the mother of two daughters in a series of loosely connected essays. Her main themes are gratitude and responsibility, qualities valued highly among Native American peoples, values she argues are necessary if we are to save our planet from climate change and especially from our own greed. No one will find saving plants important enough to make sacrifices, she insists, unless they have a relationship with those plants.

Each chapter combines essay with narration. For instance, in “Maple Sugar Moon” she begins by telling an Anishinaabe creation story about Nanabohzo, the Original Man, diluting the sap of the maple tree, which originally had come directly from the tree as syrup. Now many hours of boiling down are required to make the same syrup. He did so as punishment after people became lazy and had not expressed gratitude or acted responsibly toward nature’s gifts.

Then Kimmerer tells how she had her daughters collect many buckets of maple sap and spend hours boiling them down, using Native American methods – a lot of very hard work. She believes part of being a good mother was teaching the girls their heritage through this work. Mixed into her narrative Kimmerer explains scientifically how the tree creates sap and how the process benefits the tree. She is blending the elements of gratitude, to the tree for producing sap, and responsibility, the work of making the syrup for people to enjoy.

Kimmerer doesn’t expect her non-Indigenous readers to follow her own practices of asking plants’ permission before harvest or giving them a tobacco offering in gratitude. By including these practices, she does illustrate ways of developing human-plant relationships. With her students, described in other chapters, as with her daughters, she shows that by taking them into nature she can help them make those connections. The rest of us will have to find our own paths, perhaps using her examples as models. This book makes a convincing case that those connections are necessary for the future of the plant world and therefore of our own.

Published in The Leaflet, March 2021, Volume 8, Issue 3.