Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass
Book Review by Helen Haug
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, a student, a citizen of the Potawatami nation, a scientist, a writer, and a professor. All of these come into play as she tracks down and recovers pieces of her Indigenous culture, stolen from her grandfather's generation. Her memories of each revelation and its place in the larger understanding of family and relationships comprise the stories that make up each of the eight chapters.
Given that she's using storytelling—an indigenous teaching method—and that she's a good storyteller, this should be an easy read. Indeed, I got hooked in the first chapter. But this is not a can't-put-it-down page-turner; it is too evocative. There are so many hooks that act on me like those red letter links in a Wikipedia article that I kept having to pause for thought and take stock of what I'd just read and the places where it led me.
Kimmerer cites Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift, which powerfully impacted my own thinking in the '90s when I first encountered his descriptions of gift economies. Kimmerer's book shows how the gift economy is embodied in her native culture, replete with rituals of thanksgiving and reciprocity, asking permission of plants and four-legged relativess in their own language.
Then there's language. I love linguistics, the study of how language works and how we use it and how it shapes how we think. Kimmerer is trying to learn a foreign (to her) language that only a few native speakers are keeping alive. It is this Potawatomi language that unlocks the door and opens the window to her native culture and its tradition of relationships, respect, gratitude, and reciprocity. ASL, the language of Deaf people, had a similar effect on me when I had to learn about the culture in order to begin to learn the language. ASL taught me that language is not about vocabulary, but a whole worldview—what Kimmerer is learning through her indigenous language.
Science, to my delight, is woven through her storytelling. From the rising of sap in a maple tree designed to pit capillary action against gravity when the night- and daytime temperatures are just right, to the march of salamanders back to their natal pool to breed guided by the magnetic field and then by smell, when the nighttime Spring rain falls at just the right temperature. Kimmerer is a botanist teaching her children and students that the real teachers are their plant relatives.
The book opens with the legend of Sky Woman and the creation of Turtle Island [so-called North America], and closes with the legend of Windigo, the cannibal boogeyman of famine and insatiable greed. With her stories, the legends take on a plausible reality. It is a good read.
Braiding Sweetgrass is also available as an audio book.