Recommending Braiding Sweetgrass

I love Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and recommend it to all who haven’t read it yet. I read the short preface and was stunned by the power of her writing and her woman’s voice. “Feminist” didn’t quite feel right and many chapters in, I realized that much of the power comes from her love as a mother to nourish good things.

In the preface, she explains that the book is a braiding of three strands: the perspective that her indigenous background gave her, the perspective that her formal training as an ecology professor gave her, and her experiences trying to synergize them together.

A cliche about writing is “show, not tell.” I could summarize the book down to its main word, reciprocity, and tell you what she means by that but it would be such a pale, feeble shadow of what she’s exploring. Each chapter is an essay unto itself with its own unique structure. However, over and over again, after spending more than half the chapter presenting interesting stories and information, she suddenly starts braiding them to reach an unforeseen depth that stirs my soul over and over again.

I’ve written before https://roamingupward.net/home/the-best-of-cairns/climate-change/ about a snowstorm that broke thousands of branches around our homestead. For half a year, broken trees were felled, branches were sawed, and slash was chipped. Afterwards, the woodland around us looked much more open, more park-like and “beautiful.” That stirred up a reaction of thoughts. Where does this standard of “beautiful” come from? Should that be a measure of one’s management work?

In the two years following, I’ve focused on reducing the fire danger around our house. I am amazed at how much dead wood had accumulated around us. Managing for hardening against fire also led to a more open, beautiful woodland. As the woodland’s canopy opened up, more understory shrubs appeared (including poison oak).

There is a chapter in Braiding Sweetgrass where one of her doctorate students investigates the impact on plots of sweetgrass being harvested by indigenous people (for whom it is a special plant) compared to plots not being harvested. The plots of harvested sweetgrass thrived and expanded but, surprisingly, the unharvested plots weakened and diminished. This example of reciprocity (the sweetgrass gives its gift to the harvesters and the harvesters give their gift to the sweetgrass) is similar to the feedback spirals I call Upward Spirals.

That changed how I thought of the woodlands I work with. The book made me realize that I had been operating for decades with a somewhat antiquated National Park Service image of preserving a place unshaped by people. I was complacent with doing very little except for weed-eating the drying grasses before the fire season. But her book has gotten me thinking about how do I enter into reciprocal relationships of gratitude with the natural world around me? (I am grateful for what the world is creating and the world is grateful for what I am creating.) Spreading the runoff is one way but there are more if I observe with the perspective of reciprocity.

I got the book from the library but ended up buying a copy for Alysia’s Mothers’ Day present.