“If we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it it will go away. If you don’t give it respect it will leave us.”
Robin Wall Kimmerman’s “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge” impresses this lesson upon us through a multitude of lenses, because our relationship to nature is one that affects all aspects of our lives. Kimmerman uses all facets of her personal identity to make this system clear. She uses her experience as a woman, a mother, as a member of the Anishinaabe indigenous community as well as her experience as a professor of forest biology to
Kimmerman’s novel is everything at once, part-autobiography, part-scientific account of the natural world, poetic in her retelling of Ashinaabee stories as well as factual in her explanations of complex organisms and ecosystems. Through all this we learn to appreciate the rich history and lessons that nature’s interconnected system provides us with.
Each chapter grounds our understanding of a natural resource or environment in culturally significant stories from Kimmerman’s community to her own personal life experiences, weaving in her scientific knowledge with indigenous knowledge in a way that allows readers to better understand the interconnections of these separated perspectives on nature.
Her chapter, “The Teachings of Grass”, focuses on her experience of attempting to bring indigenous knowledge into the scientific world. Studying how the disappearance of Sweetgrass might be linked to different types of harvesting allowed for the realization that traditional harvesting methods are actually beneficial to a locale’s Sweetgrass population. Sweetgrass is considered sacred grass by the Ashinabee people and used for a variety of cultural traditions. Practical usage of this plant is also centered around its use for basket weaving. Through a long-term study in collaboration with the local basket weaving community, Kimmerman and her friend are able to provide evidence that shows how sustainable harvest actually helps the Sweetgrass population. This section also connects her experience as a woman scientist to the difficulties of presenting indigenous knowledge to scientific literature.
Each story gives us a new way of interpreting nature’s own life struggles within the context of the human struggles reminding us that the world outside our own body is in its own way alive.
“Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge” offers a complex look into how the human and nature aspects of life meld together in all facets of our identity and history as people. Kimmerer’s ending does not leave readers with concrete policy answers to how we can combat non-mutualistic economic relationships to our usage of natural resources, rather she asks us to look inward if we are to change how we treat the natural world.
“Gratitude for all the earth has given us lends us courage to turn and face the Windigo that stalks us, to refuse to participate in an economy that destroys the beloved earth to line the pockets of the greedy, to demand an economy that is aligned with life, not stacked against it.” Our applications of this book’s relationship to nature extend beyond Renewing our sense of gratitude towards a living nature and therefore altering how we interact with it respectfully is a process that Kimmerman proves is not a simple one throughout her book but one that is applicable to all aspect of protecting and using nature.