All week, I’ve been reading Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and crying. It’s the strangest thing. I’m not a big cryer, ordinarily, but every couple of chapters or so, I well up with big, silent tears that roll down my cheeks for a few minutes and then stop. Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and a botanist and ecologist. Braiding Sweetgrass is subtitled Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants, but as far as I’m concerned, it should be subtitled How to Heal Fucking Everything, Including Yourself, and Get Ourselves Out of This Mess.
The book combines her vast scientific knowledge of plants and ecosystems with an indigenous understanding of not just the natural world, but a way of interacting with it, and with each other, that feels so gentle and right to me that I just want to build a big, soft nest in it and lie down there to rest for a while.
There’s so much in the book that I don’t even know where to start. I’ve only just finished it, and I already want to go back and read it again. But the thing that I think kept setting me off especially was the idea of a reciprocal love with the land and with nature. Patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism have combined to create a nasty cultural stew of abuse, entitlement and domination, that affects not only how we treat each other but also every…
