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

Citation

Kimmerer, R. W. (2020). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Penguin. (First published 2013 by Milkweed Editions.)

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and professor of plant ecology and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The book is a collection of essays that the author describes as a braid of three strands: Indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinaabe scientist trying to bring them together. Its central argument is that a wider ecological consciousness requires acknowledging and celebrating a reciprocal relationship with the living world: plants and animals are treated as teachers and as givers of gifts, and the fitting response is gratitude, care and a gift in return. The essays are arranged in five sections named for stages in handling sweetgrass, and the sequence is meant to work as ceremony as well as natural history. The British paperback cited here is the 2020 Penguin edition.

Part One: Planting Sweetgrass

The opening section sets the book's terms. "Skywoman Falling" retells the Potawatomi account of Skywoman's arrival on Turtle Island and uses it to contrast a story of the earth as a gift with a story of the earth as a resource. Other essays in this part include "The Gift of Strawberries," "An Offering," "Asters and Goldenrod" and "Learning the Grammar of Animacy," which looks at how language that treats other beings as persons, not objects, shapes the relationship.

Part Two: Tending Sweetgrass

The second section is about relationships that need attention over time, with essays such as "Maple Sugar Moon" and "Witch Hazel." It ends with "Allegiance to Gratitude," which discusses the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, printed with the permission of Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, as a model of daily thankfulness.

Part Three: Picking Sweetgrass

Here the focus turns to taking from the land. The section includes "Epiphany in the Beans," "The Three Sisters" on growing corn, beans and squash together, "Wisgaak Gokpenagen: A Black Ash Basket," "Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass," "Maple Nation: A Citizenship Guide," and "The Honorable Harvest," which sets out principles for taking only what is needed and giving something back.

Part Four: Braiding Sweetgrass

The fourth section, which has the most essays, considers how people can belong to a place. It opens with "In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place" and includes "The Sound of Silverbells," "Sitting in a Circle," "Burning Cascade Head," "Putting Down Roots," "Umbilicaria: The Bellybutton of the World," "Old Growth Children" and "Witness to the Rain."

Part Five: Burning Sweetgrass

The final section turns to damage and repair. "Windigo Footprints" uses the Anishinaabe figure of the Windigo, an insatiable consuming spirit, to name the greed that drives environmental harm. The section also includes "The Sacred and the Superfund," "Collateral Damage," "People of Corn, People of Light" and "Shkitagen: People of the Seventh Fire," and ends with "Defeating Windigo."

Epilogue: Returning the Gift

The epilogue returns to the book's theme of reciprocity and the obligation to give back for what has been received.

Key Concepts

Parts One and Two

• Gift economy and reciprocity: the earth and its beings are gifts, and receiving them creates obligations to return something.
• Grammar of animacy: a way of speaking in which other beings are grammatically alive, so that language does not treat them as objects.
• Thanksgiving address: a practice of naming and thanking the elements of the living world, presented as a model for daily life.

Parts Three and Four

• Honorable Harvest: a set of principles for taking from the land with respect and restraint.
• Three Sisters: the planting of corn, beans and squash together as an example of cooperation among species.
• Becoming indigenous to place: developing responsibility for, and knowledge of, the land one lives on.

Part Five and Epilogue

• Windigo: an Anishinaabe figure of consuming greed, used to describe destructive economic behaviour.
• Seventh Fire prophecy: an Anishinaabe teaching about a choice between two paths.
• Returning the gift: restoration and gratitude as the response to receiving from the earth.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A form that carries the argument. The braid of story, science and Indigenous teaching is also the book's thesis, so how it is written supports what it says. The order of sections, from planting to burning, adds a second layer of structure.
• Scientific training is used, not set aside. Kimmerer writes as a plant ecologist, so the essays contain botanical observation and research alongside Potawatomi and Haudenosaunee teachings, which makes the comparison between ways of knowing concrete.
• Essays that can be read singly. Each essay is short and has its own subject, a plant, a ceremony or a place, so the book can be sampled or assigned in portions.
• A wide and positive reception. It won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award in 2014 and reached the bestseller lists in 2020. Reviewers in Native Studies Review and the Journal of Germanic Studies and in Library Journal praised its combination of natural history and cultural teaching.

Limitations

• It is not a systematic ethical argument. The ethics of reciprocity emerge from narrative and example, not from stated premises, so readers looking for the analytic argument found in Singer or Cochrane will have to draw it out for themselves.
• The vantage point is particular. The teachings come mainly from the Potawatomi, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee, as told by one Potawatomi scientist, and the book does not claim to speak for all Indigenous knowledge.
• The central claim is meant to be felt as much as proved. Reciprocity is presented as an attitude to cultivate, so the book offers fewer tools for deciding between competing moral claims in policy or practice.

Where It Fits in the Course

In a course on applied and animal ethics, this is the book that widens the question from animals to plants, land and the human place in the living world. Singer's Animal Liberation and Regan's Empty Cages ask what we owe to sentient animals, and Cochrane argues that only sentient beings can have rights; Kimmerer starts from a relationship to plants and places and does not draw a line at sentience. Singer's Ethics in the Real World includes a short essay titled "Plant Liberation?", which makes a useful contrast. Carol Adams's Neither Man nor Beast also argues for an ethics grounded in relationships, from the standpoint of feminist theory, and these two books can be read as parallel challenges to rights-and-interests approaches.

It is the most literary and least analytic of the course readings. Read it for perspective rather than as a set of arguments to be assessed against the others.

How to Use This Book

The book is written for general readers and needs no philosophical background. It suits an undergraduate course as a counterweight to argument-driven texts. You can read it straight through, which is how the five sections are designed to work, or sample it: "Skywoman Falling" and "Learning the Grammar of Animacy" for the main ideas, "Allegiance to Gratitude" and "The Honorable Harvest" for the ethical practices, and "Windigo Footprints" and "Defeating Windigo" for the account of what goes wrong.

When using it in a course, ask what the author's practices imply about obligations to plants, animals and places, and set them against the arguments in Singer, Regan and Cochrane. Keep note of where the book describes a practice rather than gives a reason, and consider what reasons could be offered for it.