Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer
Kindle & Audible: US or CA
Morning Readers & I hope you are having a great weekend!
I’m trying to catch up on my posts a bit this weekend and I just absolutely had to share Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer. I’ve listened to it before on Audible, but I wanted to do a ‘re-read’ it and do a formal review because it is simply one of my favourite books and a must-read for everyone.
I don’t care if you’re young, old, rich, poor, single, married or a purple elephant, this book is for you!
“As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers….The awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the world.”*
Robin does an astounding job weaving between native teachings, scientific study, human emotions and common sense. She approaches her teachings and lessons head on, while maintaining a descriptive, lyrical writing style and a truly inspiring, poetic outlook on life as a whole.
I think one of the most poignant discussion points in the book is the impact of language on our perception of the world around us and how that dictates our interactions with it. One example was how many native languages refer to other living beings as ‘people’ with their own pronouns. ie. There’s a mouse in your shoe, you say ‘who’s in my shoe?’, not ‘what’s in my shoe?’ and trees are often referred to as the ‘standing people’. I love this, as it shifts our focus from living things being items of use and into living creatures that deserve our respect. Alternatively it’s funny how our English culture often gives pronouns to things of value ie. a ship is often considered a ‘she’, cars are often named, cottages or second homes get their own terms of endearment, and as it turns out, we often show ourselves to be a culture that values ‘things’ over the environment.
I think this really showcases the idea that how we speak affects how we think, and in turn, how we act.
A few other quotes that just blew me away:
“Maybe it was a low year for pecans when the Indian agent came again, looking for skinny brown kids who had no prospect of supper. Maybe that was the year Grammie signed the papers. Children, Language, Lands, almost everything was stripped away. Stolen when you weren’t looking because you were trying to stay alive.”
“Something is broken when the food comes on a styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic. A carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life, it’s a theft. How in our modern world can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?”
“People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, plant a garden. It’s good for the health of the earth, and it’s good for the health of people.”
“What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge. What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say, Wouldn’t you dance it, wouldn’t you act it out, wouldn’t your every movement tell the story?”
“The honorable harvest, take only what you need and use everything that you take”
“It’s not just changes in policies that we need, but also changes to the heart… each of us comes from people who were once indigenous”
Another couple of my favorite discussion points include ‘species isolation’ (becoming estranged from the world around it because you were not taught to know it) and artificial market scarcity. Robin has such an astounding amount of grounded insight I can’t sing her praises highly enough and will absolutely be reading her next book, The Service Berry.
I hope you all are having a great weekend and Happy Reading!
-Anna R.
*As always if you purchase through any of the links in this post, or throughout this blog, a small commission comes back to help support the page & what I do here!
Kindle & Audible: US or CA
The Weekend Readers 
Leave a comment