Braiding Sweetgrass

By Robin Wall Kimmerer

Milkweed Press     2013

384 pages     Essays

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a PhD botanist, a professor, and a member of the Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of two books. Braiding Sweetgrass has become a word-of-mouth sensation. My church spiritual growth book group read it over the course of two months and two meetings. We were completely enthralled and had vibrant discussions both months. I cannot tell you how much this book has meant to me.

Kimmerer “eloquently and beautifully uses the indigenous cultures’ sacred plant, sweetgrass, as a poetic metaphor to explain the origin of plant, animal, and human life on Mother Earth, their intertwined respectful and reciprocal relationships with each other, the loss of this reciprocity, and the hope of ecological restoration to return the gifts of Mother Earth and the balance that once was.”

The book is divided into several parts: planting sweetgrass, tending sweetgrass, picking sweetgrass, braiding sweetgrass, and burning sweetgrass. In each of these sections, Kimmerer poetically relates her experiences with her family, her students, and her heritage—all intended to show our relationship to the world around us. In one poignant section, she tells about teaching a botany class at an small Christian university. Instead of teaching botany as science, she attempted to teach the students the relationship between them and botany—the total interrelationship. They camp for a week; in the beginning the students are resistant to this interrelationship, but by the end of the camp session, they have become new beings. In another chapter, she and her children attempt to save salamanders as they cross the road to breed. The most poignant chapter for me concerned the lake by her house that had become filled with algae because of runoff from factories. In all of the chapters, the science of nature, botany, and ecology becomes personal stories and fill the reader with the same wonder with which Kimmerer faces the world.

This is how I read the book. I read a chapter a day and tried to find ways to relate the chapter to the world around me and what I was seeing and living. One day while reading the book, my grandchildren and I went for a walk. They found hundreds of milkweed pods. They decided that if they took some of those pods to my woods, they might be able to make milkweed grow in our woods. Not sure that it will in that environment, but the children were indeed trying to establish a reciprocal relationship with the plant and nature.

 Today, on our vacation in Orange Beach, AL, we walked in an area that had been greatly impacted by last fall’s hurricane. On that walk, I found several places where plants and trees were trying to rejuvenate themselves. It was quite inspiring. I am sure that I would never have noticed that reciprocity if I had not read Braiding Sweetgrass.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better.” Truly, reading Kimmerer’s book has helped me look deeper into nature than I have ever looked. I will never be the same.