Book Review: Braiding Sweetgrass

A long time has passed since a book has moved me quite as much as Braiding Sweetgrass. The author advocates for nothing less than a profound paradigm shift — a transformation of values, attitudes and lifestyle. The fate of our planet hangs in the balance, but Kimmerer's book elides maudlin pleas to preserve biodiversity, safeguard the polar ice caps and save the rainforest. Instead, this book promotes a psychological renewal, or a treatment that happens to bolster our ecological inheritance as it actually saves our very lives from meaninglessness, commodification, and alienation.

Braiding Sweetgrass reads like a series of essays, spiraling around a tight central theme illuminating the need to combine indigenous wisdom and scientific thinking. This theme is borne out in different contexts, with an emphasis on unique aspects of both schools of thought.

In other words, rather than a narrative through line, this book coalesces around a central idea — namely, that indigenous perspectives have something vital to offer and enhance the natural sciences and so-called “Western” commodity-driven culture.

For one, Kimmerer challenges the conventional wisdom that Nature thrives optimally when humans avoid interfering with it. On the contrary, Kimmerer asserts that the dichotomy between human civilization and Nature is baseless within the indigenous perspective. Moreover, her and her students' research supports the claim that many species (including the eponymous sweetgrass) only reach their full potential when carefully harvested by humans.

This idea of the "Honorable Harvest" is an important takeaway. To partake in this tradition, you must not take the first targeted plant you find, you must not take more than you need, and you must leave at least half of the available bounty. It's also customary to ask permission to harvest — a kind of spiritual ritual, or a plaintive prayer — and to leave an offering (e.g., tobacco leaves) as a gesture of reciprocity and gratitude.

Kimmerer stresses reciprocal relationships as the basis of our connection with the physical world. These relationships, though, are elevated by a sense of equality, as the Old Ways imbue both living and non-living Nature with full personhood. Thus, we humans do not really discover knowledge of the world as much as we listen to and translate the wisdom of other beings.

Finally, Kimmerer stresses the significance of ritual, celebration, and gratitude to continually ground us in intention and the spiritual wisdom of indigenous philosophy. I'm particularly inspired by her description of a harvest dinner featuring dishes from the three sisters crops: squash, pole beans, and corn.

Yet, this book is cognizant and wary of inadvertently promoting appropriation of Native American cultural practices. Kimmerer invites us to engage in the difficult and necessary task of renewing our cultural understanding of connectedness and human immersion within Nature while building new practices and rituals; hopefully, these habits will take hold in and enliven our families and communities wherever they may be.