Book Review: Braiding Sweetgrass

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

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Tags: memoir, wisdom, transitional tools

Book Cover Summary: As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. 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).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as 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. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Reinventurer's Book Review: This book was a pleasant surprise. Written as creative nonfiction, this memoir tells parts of one woman's life journey as a mother, professor, botanist, and indigenous keeper of ecological wisdom. I am always taken aback by how our personal stories mirror the mythical pathways of the hero's journey and reflect back to us the wisdom we need to hear in the moment of our reading.

I had been studying the theory of collective unconsciousness, trying desperately to wrap my mind around Carl Jung's definition: a collection of memories, images, knowledge, and stories that everyone is born with due to ancestral experience. This collective is supposedly stored within our unconscious minds as primitive and possibly instinctual thoughts that cannot easily be retrieved and yet can be observed as behavioral dispositions all humans share.

Still wondering what kind of mind could come up with such a concept, I read a chapter in Kimmerer's book on pecan trees. These trees, similar to aspens, have an underground communication network made up of mycorrhizae fungi that can pass nutrients and chemical signals across statewide underground networks. Buried beneath the surface, these collective, hidden pathways are responsible for the same observable nature of all pecan trees, i.e. they all bear the pecan fruit at the same time. Somehow, this made the idea of the collective unconscious more plausible to me.

Braiding Sweetgrass is full of such surprises. Kimmerer makes our connections to each other and our environment undeniable as she provides one example after another of the inexplicable ties between individuals and groups of species in a complex dance of reciprocity that has been ignored by Western society for far too long.

Kimmerer's book can be read as a warning, a scolding, a call to action, or a love poem to plants. It spurred me to purchase indigenous tomato seeds for my garden this year. As mother earth angrily sent hail and wind and high waters through my garden, I covered the seedlings, replanted them, fertilized and pruned their puny, broken, and disfigured branches with no real hope they would survive, let alone thrive. I gave them all I had and in return those indigenous plants are now laden with heavy fruits. Reciprocity, the collective unconscious, and our ancestral dispositions worked side by side on my hero's journey to an abundant harvest.

Questions to Ponder and Discuss

“Plants tell their stories not by what they say, but by what they do.” What is the story of your favorite plant?

Kimmerer describes how her experiences in academia are influenced by her indigenous heritage. What experiences have you had where your background, beliefs, or values are at odds with your work, school, etc.?

How could the practice of reciprocity change your immediate environment?

What positive relationships between people and the environment have you observed?

In what ways might we encourage people to positively interact with nature?