Book Report: Can we weave the world back together?

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Botany professor at SUNY in Syracuse who just happens to also be an indigenous woman. She skillfully weaves the strands of native knowledge, beliefs, and practices with what science has learned. It turns out they are not as separate or contradictory as you might think. The weave is strong. She braids the concepts of gratitude, reciprocity, and an honorable harvest throughout the book.

Language is the key to culture

Language denotes the values of the people. For example, “English is a noun-based language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things. Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70 percent.” Actions are more important than things. Also, in English, “…you are either a human or a thing.” Everything that exists in accord has life. She asks, “Wouldn’t things be different if nothing was an it?”

Now, imagine the cultures that were lost when entire populations were forced onto unfamiliar lands, with unfamiliar environments, plants, and animals. Or when Indian children were forced into Indian schools, far from home, and forbidden to speak their own languages. Only now are indigenous communities trying to rebuild those traditions and teach their languages.

On mothering Mother Earth

The author spent years restoring an overgrown pond on her Upstate New York property.

“The pond has shown me that being a good mother doesn’t end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn’t end until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish. There are grandchildren to nurture, and frog children, nestlings, goslings. Seedlings, and spores, and I still want to be a good mother.”

“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. 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.”

On the Pledge of Allegiance

As a child, the author “…couldn’t understand how ‘love of country’ could omit recognition of the country itself. The only promise it requires is to a flag. What of the promises to each other and to the land?”

“I love my country too, and its hopes for freedom and justice. But the boundaries of what I honor are bigger than the republic. Let us pledge reciprocity with the living world….our mutual allegiance to the democracy of species.”

The Honorable Harvest

Kimmerer offers a few guidelines for harvesting the earth’s bounty—its natural resources–in a sustainable manner. No surprise, they come from indigenous practices. Here are a few.

• Never take the first. Never take the last.
• Take only what you need.
• Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
• Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
• Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
• Share.
• Give thanks for what you have been given.
• Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is also a poet and it shows. She beautifully uses story and metaphor to render pictures of the living world, its suffering, and its healing. For example, basketmaking takes a whole, breaks it into parts, and weaves them back to wholeness.

“A basket knows the dual powers of destruction and creation that shape the world. Stands once separated are rewoven into a new whole. The journey of a basket is also the journey of a people.”

Furthermore—

“Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own.”

“Other beings are known to be especially gifted, with attributes that humans lack. Other beings can fly, see at night, rip open trees with their claws, make maple syrup. What can humans do? …we have words. Language is our gift and our responsibility. I’ve come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones, stories that bring science and spirit back together…”

Some final hopeful words—

“Each of us comes from people who were once indigenous. We can reclaim our membership in the cultures of gratitude that formed our old relationships with the living world.”

Braiding Sweetgrass is long and deep, but the writing is evocative and richly rendered. The audiobook is narrated by the author and would make an excellent companion on your next road trip. But if you’re walking in the woods, I think Kimmerer would hope you’d listen to what the birds, the creek, and the wind have to say. Recommend.