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

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J. Clifton, a psychologist studying human response to catastrophe: “Suppression of our natural responses to disaster is part of the disease of our time. I read this book in a book club, and one of the others brought some braided Sweetgrass to our meeting. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting.

It definitely makes me more aware of my impact on the earth and to consider what I give and take from my environment. e. social reproduction/"carework"/"essential workers" (think COVID19), and of course revaluation of nature (Marxian use-value vs. I thought, though I didn't have the words for it, that it was the flag of what Kimmerer names as the Maple Nation.So, even though she wants to make her visiting daughters this meal that would remind them of childhood meals they made together in spring, she puts them back, tucks them back into the earth, and leaves.

Kimmerer has said about the book that, "I wanted readers to understand that Indigenous knowledge and Western science are both powerful ways of knowing, and that by using them together we can imagine a more just and joyful relationship with the Earth. Here, it’s the merger of science, art, linguistics, memoir and religion to show a different way of seeing the world. But the book that has affected her the most, and the one she has mentioned I need to pick up every time we talk, is Braiding Sweetgrass.

Through her marriage of science and indigenous knowledge (not achieved without ongoing work), Kimmerer teaches her students and us the philosophy of the Honorable Harvest. She uses the example of Plantain, an English plant that came over with the colonists, and soon was found all over the northeast.