pagesofjulia

Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair.

Definitely one of the best of the year, Braiding Sweetgrass is a big serious one that I fear I won’t do justice. In good company, it reminds me of Pieces of White Shell and Soil. The good news is, many more thoughtful than I have also written rave reviews. It’s not a new one (original publication 2013) and the praise has been coming for years.

This is a beautifully written book, with poetry and metaphor and gentle, thoughtful articulations of big, important ideas. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a highly trained scientist – a botanist and a college professor; she is also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, with a background in thinking about the world in very different ways from the standard, Western, materialist, human-centered culture that many of us (including me) are more familiar with. Part of her life story has been the reconciling of those two parts of herself, or the training of them to work in concert, when one did not always welcome the other. But it’s to our great advantage that she’s been working so hard at that intersection, and sharing it here. I’ll characterize that work as the integration of a sense of interconnectedness, and the idea that other-than-human entities hold their own identities and importance aside from what they offer to humans, with modern “hard” science.

I love the structure of this book, which progresses through Kimmerer’s life and perspectives on the natural world and humans’ relationship with it, always with sweetgrass as an organizing principle. The preface, whose first line introduces this review, succinctly describes the importance of sweetgrass to the culture Kimmerer comes from. The braid “is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story–old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.” There follow five sections–“Planting Sweetgrass,” “Tending Sweetgrass,” “Picking Sweetgrass,” and braiding and burning it–each composed of individual essays. The first essay, “Skywoman Falling,” begins with an origin story of North America as Turtle Island, starting with “a great turtle” that holds the earth on his shell, an origin story that holds significance for me; the first few pages of this book won me over completely. And I remained captivated throughout.

Any book about the natural world and human relationships and responsibilities these days is bound to contain some bad news; I find myself shrinking back from some of this reading, while I’m also still drawn toward it, because of the pain I feel at that bad news. But Kimmerer has some real wisdom to offer about the choice between despair and joy, the question of whether we can view hard truths and still find good parts too. “What could such a vision create other than woe and tears?… it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” Thank you, Sweetgrass, for that gift.

Gifts are an important topic throughout, too. The Native American culture of gift-giving, the importance of reciprocity, and the emphasis on giving with a faith that things will come back around applies not only to interhuman relationships but the ones with the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants too. The difference between a capitalist, materialist, consumerist culture and one of gifts and reciprocity is profound. An essay titled “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” in part about language (and the near-extinction of the Anishinaabe languages Kimmerer might have learned to speak as a child, “had history been different,” and which she now studies as an adult), is also about some of these cultural concepts, and the fact that language shapes the concepts we’re even capable of comprehending. Like some of the best books in the world, Sweetgrass is about paying attention, and the importance of the choice of what we attend to.

Individual essays tell stories from Kimmerer’s family life (from childhood through motherhood), from the different communities in which she’s lived, from her experiences as a student and as a teacher. They take place in different parts of Turtle Island, including New York state and the Oregon rainforests, and integrate some pretty serious science with traditional storytelling and Kimmerer’s own. There is so much to learn here, and I love science made accessible by story. I won’t begin to try to tell you what all is available here; I really want you to discover it yourself.

This book might just change the way you look at the world. I hope it does. Please give it a chance.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: creative nonfiction, nature, nonfiction |