Description
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants is poised to be a classic of traditional knowledge writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer draws on her life as an Indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, and shows how other living beings such as asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass, offer readers gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a plant ecologist, mother, writer, and professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.