Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Product Information

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is a 2013 nonfiction book by Potawatomi professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, about the role of Indigenous knowledge as an alternative or complementary approach to Western mainstream scientific methodologies. Equally enjoyable was her experience taking a group of botany students on a week long camping trip so they could experience the wonders and gifts of nature first- hand. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.

Each time I picked up this book, I sank into the world of plants and meaning, the slow vegetable world, seen jewel-bright from the underside.There is hope for a sustainable earth on the other side of climate change and the fall of industrial civilization. Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings--asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass--offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. And even then, I do not believe that 7+ billion people can live sustainably on this planet, no matter how devoted to the earth each person may be. Beautifully written collection of meditations on plants, wildlife, indigenous teachings, and our relationship to the earth.

The Written Review This is a gorgeous book all about nature and science - what more can a girl ask for? I appreciated Robin Wall Kimmerer’s perspective on giving back to the land considering how much the land gives to us. I want to also talk a little bit here about the quality of the prose, of the author’s ability to enchant the reader and capture the essence of the natural world through playing on every sense is of the highest quality.Then I would find myself thinking about something the author said, decide to give the book another try, read a couple of essays, etc.

Indigenous people of North America have been using sweetgrass traditionally for religious ceremonies as well as therapeutic purposes. It’s a book absorbed with the unfolding of the world to observant eyes—that sense of discovery that draws us in. But I found myself particularly bothered in this case, because there is an attitude pervading this book that the degradation of nature is their fault. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item.The other direction is the realm of harmony with nature, the inhospitable realm of minimal impact, where I cannot visit Milwaukee unless I want to spend a week walking there; where I can't eat bananas because they're shipped from central America; where I might afford one or two pairs of clothing; where gas furnaces do not exist. Once again, speaking with my students, I pointed out that if someone from my tribe lived next door to Hazel, she would have described Hazel as “that white woman from next door. e. knowing does not build a culture of caring, an " indigenous worldview"), and further contrasts the "practice of science" from the "science worldview" (i. Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders.

It has me rethinking my own relationship to consumption and the land, and what that means as someone living in an urban center. The reader is compelled to act and change their view of the environment as the book "challenges the European immigrant ecological consciousness" through "Native American creation stories and details of sustainable, traditional, ecological management practices of Native Americans. It has been a challenge balancing this deconstruction with the social imagination for healing and reconstruction.Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the special edition ofBraiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions,. Which is another part of my experience: I read all this deep hope and wisdom and meaning at a particularly hopeless and idiotic time. Consequently, when she preaches against the evils of consumer culture, trying to convince her suburban middle-class, college-educated, predominantly white readers to curtail their compulsive consumption of luxury goods, she seems oblivious to how little financial or material wealth Indians possess in the first place. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).