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

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?

For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.

above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.

as much protein as if they’d had a stringer of catfish. Nuts are like the pan fish of the forest, full of protein and

especially fat—“poor man’s meat,” and they were poor. Today we eat

and vitamins—everything you needed to sustain life. After all, that’s the whole point of nuts: to provide the embryo with all that is needed to start a new life.

would be given, not sold, I decided I could do without. It’s funny: Had all the things in the market merely been a very low price, I probably would have scooped up as much as I could. But when

Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit.

exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.” If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.

assume that we’re the only species that counts as ‘persons’?” The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.

We spill over into the world and the world spills over into us. The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us

I wonder if she gets tired, old Mother Earth. Or if she too is fed by the giving. “Thanks,” I whispered, “for all of this.”

Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now let us bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one.*

You can’t listen to the Thanksgiving Address without feeling wealthy.

What if our leaders first found common ground before fighting over their differences?

What if Western scientists saw plants as their teachers rather than their subjects? What if they told stories with that lens?