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

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She is the author of the New York Times bestselling collection of essays Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Olson Nature Writing Award for her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The idea that plants have a mind of their own has been a prominent feature of some Indigenous narratives, literary works, and philosophical discourses. And you may want to mark it up; I bought it a few pages into a library copy because the impulse was overwhelming. Kimmerer begins with the myth of Skywoman, adapted from oral tradition, that explains "where we came from, but also of how we can go forward.

I can’t remember where I started seeing all the glowing reviews, but it was settled for me when I saw one by Mexie (PhD grad in political economy, find her on YouTube). I would read a couple of essays, find my mind wandering, and then put the book down for a couple of weeks. The words "Mighty Ape" and the Ape device are registered trademarks of Mighty Ape Limited in New Zealand and Australia.In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book-gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred-and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is about botany and the relationship to land in Native American traditions. And if, like me, you’re into nature writing then this is certainly the book for you; it’s one of the best in the genre I have ever read because of the way it captures the essence of what our role (as humans) should be in the natural world: we are here to protect and nourish, not destroy and overuse. What would it be like to be raised on gratitude, to speak to the natural world as a member of the democracy of species, to raise a pledge of interdependence?

It happened when botanist/ecologist/professor/mother/Potawatami Native Kimmerer wrote an utterly sensible chapter about the notion that if I love the Earth, the Earth may love me back. Instead, Kimmerer tends to conflate her references to Potawatomi—mostly she refers more broadly to the Algonquin tradition, sometimes Ojibwe—with her life in Upstate New York. But I believe it is my job to walk as close to this latter world as I can without destroying my relationship with the former world. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she takes us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise.Her writing about the importance of maintaining indigenous language and culture also elicited feelings of tenderness and sadness from me.