Passing along the gifts

Braiding Sweetgrass

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

by Robin Wall Kimmerer


I felt honored to have been allowed to read this book.

We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.

Ms. Kimmerer's writings remind us that mankind is not always a force of evil--he can restore almost as much as he can destroy. We dwell so often on the havoc man wreaks that we forget, sometimes, the great beauty he can facilitate. The land saved in nature preserves--the silted-over pond that she restores--the salamanders lifted over the highway on a dark night. They are tiny steps but huge--they show what is possible if people work with nature, not against it.

If you want to read only one essay in this collection, read The Teachings of Grass. To her graduate student Laurie, she suggested a thesis project of the study of Sweetgrass.(Hierochloe odorata, if you're scientific, or wiingaashk in the language of the keepers of the grass).  The experiments were designed to determine if traditional harvesting methods could actually benefit the population, when according to modern wisdom, "Anyone knows that harvesting a plant will damage the population."  She would compare two methods of harvest--pinching off the stems one-by-one at the base versus pulling up a portion of the plants root and all.  She also left some plots unharvested, for controls.
After two years,

The surprise was that the failing plots were not the harvested ones, as predicted, but the unharvested controls. The sweetgrass that had not been picked or disturbed in any way was choked with dead stems while the harvested plots were thriving...Picking sweetgrass seemed to actually stimulate growth. 

And both methods seemed equally good.

It is odd that the study was even needed. One only needs to look at a prairie dog town to see that that grass likes to be nibbled.  Look at the grass farmer in The Omnivore's Dilemma--his grass feeds his animals, but the animals keep the grass healthy.  He shifts his chicken cages on a regular, but carefully monitored, schedule, and the grass stays healthy and growing.

Ms. Kimmerer's book is about a lot more than grass, of course. It's about the Windigo, Superfund sites along Onondaga Lake, the making maple syrup at home, rebuilding a pond just because you want to, making baskets from black ash, the author's father, ....  Just a whole heck of a lot of stuff.

This book belongs right up at the top of nature writing, and it's staying on my shelf for sure. And it will come down frequently.