Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants in Reading with Style

Dec 06, 2014 Chinook is currently reading it

I just started reading this and just finished the chapter on pecans. I really enjoy how she writes and I think this will be a quick read. It flows really nicely. So far I'm particularly struck by the way pecan trees reproduce. I'd never heard about that kind of reproduction. Nature is fascinating.

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The chapter on strawberries brought to mind two things. First, it made me think about the wild spaces of my childhood. I grew up in a small town in a very suburban looking neighbourhood. But it I just started reading this and just finished the chapter on pecans. I really enjoy how she writes and I think this will be a quick read. It flows really nicely. So far I'm particularly struck by the way pecan trees reproduce. I'd never heard about that kind of reproduction. Nature is fascinating.

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The chapter on strawberries brought to mind two things. First, it made me think about the wild spaces of my childhood. I grew up in a small town in a very suburban looking neighbourhood. But it hadn't expanded much yet and there were ravines to play in and access (I'm fairly certain we were trespassing, in retrospect) to a campground that was only used in the summer. I spent most of my summer at our family cottage, on an island which was reservation land. Lots of wild spaces to explore. And there was my grandmother's backyard - full of strawberries and raspberries - that wasn't terribly large but there was a hill that took you out of sight of the house - and so the grown ups. Secondly, it made me contemplate why small local businesses matter so much to me. The are a mix of market and gift economies. Yes, when I visit the local cloth diaper store, I pay for the product. But I've been gifted with the knowledge of the women who work there and a sense of community too, as they have LLL meetings and craft meeting and sponsor families for Christmas presents. The shop has spaces for common use - places to breastfeed and change babies and for children to play. Maybe this sort of mixed economy is closer within our grasp.

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"But their rhythm made me feel at home and the ceremony drew a circle around our family."

I like that quote a lot. Ceremony does focus on making a circle around a group of people. Traditions too. And I like the idea of the mundane becoming more over time.

I also really liked the way she talks about the goldenrods and asters as being like the two ways of thinking - science and indigenous. I studied archaeology in university and it could be done as either a BA or BSc. The best of the classes were the ones that merged both together.

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Sep 18, 2017 Kathleen (itpdx) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: lwv-book-group, non-fiction

Robin Wall Kimmerer describes herself as "an ecologist, a writer, a mother, as a traveler between scientific and traditional ways of knowing". This is a collection of her essays that weave all of these together. I especially enjoyed a couple of the pieces. "Learning the Language of Animacy" describes her experience trying to learn the language of her grandfather. She says that 70% of the words in the language are verbs. That certainly calls for a different way of experiencing the world. "Witness ...more

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Sep 28, 2021 Kim rated it liked it

Shelves: history, libby, wfauthor, non-fiction, memoir-a-b, indigenous, plants, nature

3.5/5.0 - It's hard for me to review this book. I am surprised at how high a rating it has after >39K people have read it. I'm not saying that it's bad, just that it might be the highest rated book (4.56) I've read (with that many ratings). What I liked: the philosophy of the indigenous people, their history, stories about the plants and the respect for the earth. What I didn't care for was the way the book jumped around, both in subject matter and timeline.
Compared to The Seed Keeper by Diane ...more

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