Book Notes: Braiding Sweetgrass

For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place. But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore?

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

This book hit me in all the soft places. It made me weep in every chapter. It made me weep as I was reviewing my highlights. It made me weep as I edited these notes.

Braiding Sweetgrass is a lovely book, part memoir, and part exhortation to love our non-human neighbors – plant and animal – as we love our human families. It is filled with hope and a spunky perseverance. The overall impression is one of profound love, unwavering despite all the heartache. A practical “how to save the planet” this is not. If we all related to nature as Wall Kimmerer does, no how-tos would be necessary.

Wall Kimmerer weaves her science, her ancestry, her neighbors, her experience, her family, into a beautiful story about the interconnectedness of human lives and those of plants and non-human animals. She writes about what right relationship with the land might look like, about the urgency of recognizing that we have options other than either “exploiting” or “staying away from” the land. She writes about the role of settlers and natives. She writes about reciprocity and gratitude and hope and grief.

I was delighted to find Wall Kimmerer writing about the importance of language and how it shapes our thinking. She reflects on the awkwardness of learning the language that the boarding school took away from her grandfather, and also of the life-saving importance of doing so – both for her own healing, and to move ever closer to a way of feeling that recognizes plants and non-human animals not as resources, but as our equals. She tells us:

So in this book as in my life, I break with those grammatical blinders to write freely of Maple, Heron, and Wally when I mean a person, human or not; and of maple, heron, and human when I mean a category or concept.

Anyway. You should read it.

Book Highlights

These are not “instructions” like commandments, though, or rules; rather, they are like a compass: they provide an orientation but not a map. The work of living is creating that map for yourself.

For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.

That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.

If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

The botany I was taught was reductionist, mechanistic, and strictly objective. Plants were reduced to objects; they were not subjects.

My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek the threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide. But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer.

Back to the questions that science does not ask, not because they aren’t important, but because science as a way of knowing is too narrow for the task.

To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.

Puhpowee, she explained, translates as “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. You’d think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.

[…] while there are several words for thank you, there is no word for please. Food was meant to be shared, no added politeness needed; it was simply a cultural given that one was asking respectfully. The missionaries took this absence as further evidence of crude manners.

A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa —- to be a bay -— releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive.

Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being?

The outlet from my pond runs downhill to my good neighbor’s pond. What I do here matters. Everybody lives downstream.

Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.

Imagine raising children in a culture in which gratitude is the first priority.

Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness.

Gardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking. That’s hard for scientists, so fully brainwashed by Cartesian dualism, to grasp.

Just about everything we use is the result of another’s life, but that simple reality is rarely acknowledged in our society. What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect?

For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place. But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore?

Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention.

Rather than to greed, prosperity here gave rise to the great potlatch tradition in which material goods were ritually given away, a direct reflection of the generosity of the land to the people. Wealth meant having enough to give away, social status elevated by generosity. The cedars taught how to share wealth, and the people learned.

And we think of it as simply time, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story.

Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It’s not enough to grieve. It’s not enough to just stop doing bad things.

Tentatively sending out rhizomes through the sludge, slender tillers marching bravely away, sweetgrass is a teacher of healing, a symbol of kindness and compassion. She reminded me that it is not the land that has been broken, but our relationship to it.

Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration.

Nature herself is a moving target, especially in an era of rapid climate change. Species composition may change, but relationship endures. It is the most authentic facet of the restoration.

Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land.

Joanna Macy speaks of the Great Turning, the “essential adventure of our time; the shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.”

We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers.

Language is our gift and our responsibility. I’ve come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land.

If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.

We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying.

So in this book as in my life, I break with those grammatical blinders to write freely of Maple, Heron, and Wally when I mean a person, human or not; and of maple, heron, and human when I mean a category or concept.