I started reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass a while back, but I didn’t take notes, and didn’t finish the book, and although I did enjoy what I read and found it useful, in the course I just finished, it was critiqued as being a romanticized view of Indigenous epistemologies. I was surprised by that, given its popularity—although maybe its popularity is a sign of its romanticism?—and thought that I might return to it to see for myself. After all, I’m interested in plants, particularly plants that are indigenous to Turtle Island (I’m not so interested in introduced weeds, which might be a failing on my part, or a sign that my environmentalism is a precious form of settler colonialism rather than a real engagement with the land as it is, assuming that such an engagement is even possible), so maybe I have something to learn from Kimmerer, who is both Potawatomi and a biologist (as well as a writer).

Braiding Sweetgrass is a long book—almost 400 pages—and it’s going to take me days to get through at the slow rate at which I read and take notes and summarize, but if I don’t do that work, I remember little of what I’ve read. Kimmerer begins, in the book’s preface, with “a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair” and fragrant with “honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth” (ix). Both its scientific name, Hieerochloe odorata, and its Potawatomi name, wiingaashk, suggest that it’s a holy plant. “Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten,” Kimmerer suggests (ix). That sheaf is ready for braiding, something that’s best done in collaboration with someone else, someone who can “hold the end so that you pull gently against each other, all the while leaning in, head to head, chatting and laughing, watching each other’s hands, one holding steady while the other shifts the slim bundles over one another, each in its turn” (ix). Perhaps it’s Kimmerer’s poetic prose that is part of the reason people see the book as romanticized: “Linked by sweetgrass, there is reciprocity between you, linked by sweetgrass, the holder as vital as the braider” (ix). Kimmerer invites her reader to hold the end of the bundle while she braids—and she promises to do the same for her reader as well (ix-x). 

The braid of sweetgrass becomes an image of the book I’m about to read. First of all, we need to understand that sweetgrass—wiingaashk—is not to be given or taken: she “belongs to herself” (x). So Kimmerer offers, in its place, “a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world,” one woven from three strands: “indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most” (x). “It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other,” Kimmerer writes (x).

The book’s first section, “Planting Sweetgrass,” begins with “Skywoman Falling,” an Anishinaabe creation story. She fell through a hole in Skyworld; her fall was broken by flying geese, and the turtle agreed to allow her to rest on his back (3-4). Animals and birds tried to dive to the bottom of the water to retrieve mud, but only the smallest and weakest, Muskrat, was successful, even though he died in the attempt (4). (A Cree narrative tells a similar story.) Skywoman danced on the earth, singing a song of thanksgiving, and the land grew until the whole earth was made (4). “Not by Skywoman alone, but from the alchemy of all the animals’ gifts coupled with her deep gratitude,” Kimmerer writes. “Together they formed what we know today as Turtle Island, our home” (4). “Like any good guest, Skywoman had not come empty-handed,” Kimmerer continues (4). When she fell, Skywoman had grasped at plants, which were still clutched in her hand, and she spread them on the earth until they began to grow: “Wild grasses, flowers, trees, and medicines spread everywhere. And now that the animals, too, had plenty to eat, many came to live with her on Turtle Island” (5).

In Potawatomi stories, sweetgrass was the first plant to grow on the earth, “its fragrance a sweet memory of Skywoman’s hand” (5). It is “a powerful ceremonial plant cherished by many indigenous nations,” and it is used to make beautiful baskets (5). “Both medicine and a relative, its value is both material and spiritual,” Kimmerer writes (5). That complexity is important, particularly for settlers, who might tend to think in binaries, keeping sacred separate from material, or rejecting the possible of kinship with non-human living things. 

Kimmerer returns to braiding the sweetgrass, suggesting that when people braid it, they are “braiding the hair of Mother Earth, showing her our loving attention, our care for her beauty and well-being, in gratitude for all she has given us. Children hearing the Skywoman story from birth know in their bones the responsibility that flows between humans and the earth” (5). And, I suppose, children who grow up hearing the story of Adam and Eve learn something very different: dominion and sin and expulsion and shame and punishment. For Kimmerer, the story of Skywoman holds Potawatomi beliefs, history, and relationships, and it speaks not only of origins, but “of how we can go forward” (5).

Kimmerer has a portrait of Skywoman hanging in her laboratory (5). “It might seem an odd juxtaposition, but to me she belongs there,” Kimmerer writes, because as she does her work, as a biologist and a writer, she is sitting “at the feet of my elder teachers listening for their songs” (6). She teaches a morning class on General Ecology, and she recalls giving her students a survey that asked them to rate their understandings of the negative interactions that take place between humans and their environment (6). “Nearly every one of the two hundred students said confidently that humans and nature are a bad mix,” Kimmerer recalls (6). They knew about climate change, habitat loss, and environmental toxins, and as a result they had decided that there were no positive interactions possible between humans and nature (6). “I was stunned,” Kimmerer writes. “How is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment?” (6). Perhaps they only know the ways humans abuse their environment, and so “[a]s the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of their vision” (6). Perhaps the problem is that they are only looking at the behaviour of humans, rather than the behaviour of the environment: “I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? If we can’t imagine the generosity of geese? These students were not raised on the story of Skywoman” (6).

Instead, those students grew up with Adam and Eve and banishment from a garden, with a story in which the “mother of men” was “instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast” (7). “Same species, same earth, different stories,” Kimmerer writes. “Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation in the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness” (7). One story is about “the generous embrace of the living world,” while the other is about banishment and exile, about “passing through an alien world on a rough road” to our “real home in heaven” (7). Then the offspring of Skywoman meet the children of Eve, “and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories” (7).

“The Skywoman story, shared by the original peoples throughout the Great Lakes, is a constant star in the constellation of teachings we call the Original Instructions,” Kimmerer writes (7). Those instructions are not commandments; instead, “they are like a compass: they provide an orientation but not a map. The work of living is creating that map for yourself” (7). “How to follow the Original Instructions will be different for each of us and different for every era,” she continues (7). She wonders what meaning those instructions have today, when the world is no longer young and “some suspect that we have worn out our welcome by casting the Original Instructions aside” (8). “How can we translate from the stories at the world’s beginning to the hour so much closer to the end?” she asks. “The landscape has changed, but the story remains. And as I turn it over and over again, Skywoman seems to look me in the eye and ask, in return for this gift of a world on Turtle’s back, what will I give in return?” (8). Skywoman was an immigrant, Kimmerer suggests, like most of us living on Turtle Island (8). And like Skywoman, we are also always falling, finding ourselves somewhere new and unexpected (8-9). “Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us,” Kimmerer states (9).

It’s also worth remembering that when she arrived here, Skywoman was pregnant, and she worked to provide a world for her grandchildren, not only for herself (9). “It was through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land, that the original inhabitant became indigenous,” Kimmerer states. “For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your future mattered, to take care of the place as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it” (9). How different this is from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s argument in “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” where any attempt by settlers to change their ways of thinking is dismissed as “conscientization” or worse (19). She suggests that the differences between the stories of Skywoman and of Eve are important, that “we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without ‘re-story-ation’” (9). “In other words, our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories,” she writes. “But who will tell them?” (9).

In Indigenous ways of understanding the world, humans are not the pinnacle of evolution; rather than being at the top of the hierarchy, they are “the younger brothers of Creation,” they “have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn” (9). We must look to our teachers in other species for guidance (9). “Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live,” she suggests. “They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth for far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out” (9). Plants, in particular, live above ground and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth (9-10). When Skywoman scattered her handful of seeds across Turtle Island, “she was sowing sustenance for the body and also for the mind, emotion, and spirit: she was leaving us teachers. The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to listen” (10).

The next chapter, “The Council of Pecans,” takes us to Oklahoma, to skinny boys fishing for their supper in the waters of the Canadian River (11). They discover pecans under the trees, though, and carry them home for supper in sacks made out of their dungarees, the legs tied shut (12). One of those skinny little boys was Kimmerer’s grandfather, before the drought of the 1930s (12). The word “pecan” came to English from an Potawatomi word: pigan, meaning any kind of nut (12). She notes that her ancestors ended up in Oklahoma because their lands on Lake Michigan were taken by settlers, and so her ancestors ended up walking, surrounded by soldiers, on what’s known as the Trail of Death: first to Wisconsin, then Kansas, and finally Oklahoma (13). “So much was scattered and left along that trail,” Kimmerer writes. “Graves of half the people. Language. Knowledge, Names” (13). When the people arrived in Kansas, they found pecan trees, and without having a name for this new food, they just called it by their generic name for a nut, pigan, which entered English as pecan (13). Nuts are excellent food, high in protein and fat, calories and vitamins—“everything you need to sustain life,” which is their point: a nut is the embryo of a tree, and it contains everything that embryo will need to live (13). 

Pecans are related to butternuts, black walnuts, and hickories, and the Potawatomi people carried them whenever they migrated, so that today, pecans “trace the rivers through the prairies, populating forest bottomlands where people settled” (14). “My Haudenosaunee neighbors say that their ancestors were so fond of butternuts that they are a good marker of old village sites today,” Kimmerer writes. “Sure enough, there is a grove of butternuts, uncommon in ‘wild’ forests, on the hill above the spring at my house. I clear the weeds around the young ones every year and slosh a bucket of water on them when the rains are late. Remembering” (14). My grandmother’s yard in southwestern Ontario was lined with butternut trees; she didn’t gather the nuts in the fall, leaving them to the squirrels, who would bury the nuts in the garden and then forget them, leading to volunteer trees my grandmother considered to be weeds. 

A large pecan tree marks Kimmerer’s family home in Oklahoma. She thinks about the story of her grandfather again, and suggests that he was wise to bring home as many nuts as he could find, since pecans don’t make a crop every year (14). Nuts are food for winter, because they keep, and because the protein and calories are needed then, to keep people (and animals) warm (14). Trees make a lot of nuts to make sure that some germinate and produce new trees (15). But that takes a lot of energy, which explains why it takes years for nuts to make enough sugar to bank as starch in their roots—starch that is used to make nuts (or mast) (15). “Forest ecologists hypothesize that mast fruiting is the simple outcomes of this energetic equation: make fruit only when you can afford it,” Kimmerer writes (15). But since some trees grow in better habitats than others, some should make mast more often, but that’s not the case: when one tree fruits, they all fruit, regardless of whether they are growing in full sun or heavy shade (15). “The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective,” she continues. “Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual” (15).

This “communal generosity might seem incompatible with the process of evolution, which invokes the imperative of individual survival,” Kimmerer states, but separating “individual well-being from the health of the whole” is “a grave error,” since “[t]he gift of abundance from pecans is also a gift to themselves”: “By sating squirrels and people, the trees are ensuring their own survival. The genes that translate to mast fruiting flow on evolutionary currents into the next generations, while those that lack the ability to participate will be eaten and reach an evolutionary dead end” (16). “Forest scientists describe the generosity of mast fruiting with the predator-satiation hypothesis,” she continues: if the trees make more nuts than the squirrels can eat, then some nuts will survive to become new trees (16). The squirrels have lots of babies (16). The next year, without the nuts to feed on, the squirrels have to work harder to find food, which exposes them to predators like hawks, and their population drops (16). “You can imagine the trees whispering to each other at this point, ‘There are just a few squirrels left. Wouldn’t this be a good time to make some nuts?’ All across the landscape, out come the pecan flowers poised to become a bumper crop again,” Kimmerer writes. “Together, the trees survive, and thrive” (16).

The chapter is structured through a comparison between the pecans and the federal government’s Indian Removal policies, which “wrenched many Native peoples from our homelands,” “separated us from our traditional knowledge and lifeways, the bones of our ancestors, our sustaining plants—but even this did not extinguish identity” (16). So the federal government started to take children away from their families and cultures, sending them to boarding schools (16-17). Families were punished for not sending their children away (17). “Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren’t looking because you were trying to stay alive,” Kimmerer writes. “In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land” (17). Unlike settlers, who see land as real estate, capital, or natural resources, to Indigenous people, land was everything: “identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold” (17). Land held in common gave them strength, something to fight for—and so, to the federal government, that belief was a threat (17). And so the government demanded that Indigenous peoples stop holding their land in common, and instead accept the notion of private property (18). Kimmerer’s ancestors agreed; they became the Citizen Potawatomi and accepted allotments of land which the government couldn’t take from them (18-19). But if the federal government couldn’t take away that land, the county could, for unpaid taxes, or a bank could, or a rancher could offer money or whiskey for the property—and within a generation, most of that land was gone (19).

Trees, like people, communicate with each other—something Kimmerer’s Elders know, and something science has confirmed more recently (19-20). They emit hormones into the air, and send messages through mycorrhizae, “fungal strands that inhabit tree roots” (21). The trees are generous with their food, “literally giving themselves so that we can live. But in the giving their lives are also ensured. Our taking returns benefit to them in the circle of life making life, the chain of reciprocity” (20). “Living by the precepts of the Honorable Harvest—to take only what is given, to use it well, to be grateful for the gift, and to reciprocate the gift—is easy in a pecan grove,” Kimmerer writes. “We reciprocate the gift by taking care of the grove, protecting it from harm, planting seeds to that new groves will shade the prairie and feed the squirrels” (20-21).

The chapter concludes with a trip to Oklahoma, to see what’s left of her grandfather’s allotment (21). “From the hilltop you can still see pecan groves along the river,” she writes. “At night we dance on the old powwow grounds. The ancient ceremonies greet the sunrise” (21). It’s not just a family trip: other Potawatomi arrive: “The smell of corn soup and the sound of drums fill the air as the nine bands of Potawatomi, scattered across the country by this history of removal, come together again for a few days each year in a search for belonging” (21). I like the word “search”: the belonging isn’t assumed—it is a work in progress. She compares the occasional Gathering of Nations to the pecan trees and their occasional production of mast: “we are beginning to follow the guidance of our elders the pecans by standing together for the benefit of all. We are remembering what they said, that all flourishing is mutual” (21). The chapter concludes where it began, with memories of her grandfather gathering pecans: “He would be surprised to find us all here, dancing the circle, remembering pecans” (21).

The following chapter, “The Gift of Strawberries,” begins with a recollection of the way Evon Peter, a Gwich’in man, a Chief, and an environmental activist, once introduced himself, as “a boy raised by a river” (22). For Kimmerer, the word “raised” is complex here: it could suggest geographical location, or that the river was responsible for teaching him and feeding him, or both (22). “In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields of them,” she writes:

Not to exclude the maples, hemlocks, white pines, goldenrod, asters, violets and mosses of upstate New York, but it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it. Behind our house were miles of old hay fields divided by stone walls, long abandoned from farming but not yet grown up to forest. After the school bus chugged up our hill, I’d throw down my red plaid book bag, change my clothes before my mother could think of a chore, and jump across the crick to go wandering in the goldenrod. Our mental maps had all the landmarks we kids needed: the fort under the sumacs, the rock pile, the river, the big pine with branches so evenly spaced you could climb to the top as if it were a ladder—and the strawberry patches. (22)

She recalls the experience of picking the ripest berries, and says that even now, 50 years later, “finding a patch of wild strawberries still touches me with a sensation of surprise, a feeling of unworthiness and gratitude for the generosity and kindness that comes with an unexpected gift all wrapped up in red and green” (23). And she still wonders about how to respond to the strawberries’ generosity: “Sometimes it feels like a silly question with a very simple answer: eat them” (23).

But others have asked the same questions (23). Strawberries are part of Skywoman’s story. When her daughter died giving birth to her twins, Flint and Sapling, “Skywoman buried her beloved daughter in the earth. Her final gifts, our most revered plants, grew from her body. The strawberry arose from her heart” (23). For Kimmerer, “[s]trawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward: you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears” (23-24). All the recipient of a gift has to do is accept it, “to be open-eyed and present” (24). Her family always made gifts, and her father’s favourite present was wild strawberry shortcake. “As children raised by strawberries, we were probably unaware that the gift of berries was from the fields themselves, not from us,” she writes. “Our gift was time and attention and care and red-stained fingers” (24-25).

“Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate,” she continues (25). To reciprocate the gift of strawberries, she would help the plants’ runners take root (25). She and her siblings would often be hired by neighbouring farmers looking for people to pick strawberries; one of the farmers would warn them not to eat any berries, because they belonged to her (25). “I knew the difference: in the fields behind my house, the berries belonged to themselves,” Kimmerer recalls. “At this lady’s roadside stand, she sold them for sixty cents a quart” (25). That was an early lesson in economics (25).

Kimmerer reflects on how the nature of an object changes if it comes as a gift or as a commodity (26). She feels no inherent obligation to something she has purchased, but if the same object were to come as a gift, that would create an “ongoing relationship” between giver and receiver (26). “Wild strawberries fit the definition of gift, but grocery store berries do not,” she suggests. “It’s the relationship between producer and consumer that changes everything” (26). She would not want to see wild strawberries for sale: “They were not meant to be sold, only to be given” (26). That’s why sweetgrass isn’t supposed to be sold—it’s supposed to be a gift: that’s the essence of its sacredness (26-27). “Sweetgrass belongs to Mother Earth,” she writes. “Sweetgrass pickers collect properly and respectfully, for their own use and the needs of their community,” and they leave a gift in return, as well as tend to the plants’ well-being (27). “The braids are given as gifts, to honor, to say thank you, to heal and to strengthen,” she tells us (27). “Gifts move, and their value increases with their passage,” and the more the gifts are shared, the greater their value becomes (27). 

She thinks about Lewis Hyde’s discussion of the phrase “Indian giver,” suggesting that it comes from a “cross-cultural misinterpretation between an indigenous culture operating in a gift economy and a colonial culture predicated on the concept of private property” (27). Indigenous people gave gifts to settlers, expecting their generosity to be reciprocated, but they often were not (27-28). Gifts aren’t free, because they create sets of relationships; they generate reciprocity (or at least expectations of reciprocity). In contrast, according to “Western thinking, private land is understood to be a ‘bundle of rights,’ whereas in a gift economy property has a ‘bundle of responsibilities’ attached” (28).

Kimmerer recalls a research trip to the Andes—particularly a visit to a local market where the owner of her favourite stall, Edita, was generous to her (28). “I dreamed not long ago of that market with all its vivid textures. I walked through the stalls with a basket over my arm as always and went right to Edita for a bunch of fresh cilantro,” she recalls (28). In the dream, the cilantro was a gift, as was the bread at another stall (28-29). “I floated through the market with a sense of euphoria,” she writes. “Gratitude was the only currency accepted here. It was all a gift. It was like picking strawberries in my field: the merchants were just intermediaries passing on gifts from the earth” (29). This account is lovely, but it might be one point where Kimmerer romanticizes gift giving: after all, Indigenous peoples were traders as well as givers, and that mode of exchange—trading—is left out of this discussion. Nonetheless, she thinks about that dream, about how she was “witness there to the conversion of a market economy to a gift economy, from private goods to common wealth. And in that transformation the relationships became as nourishing as the food I was getting. Across the market stalls and blankets, warmth and compassion were changing hands. There was a shared celebration of abundance for all we’d been given. And since every market basket contained a meal, there was justice” (29). 

But Kimmerer admits that when she speaks of the strawberries giving her a gift, she is speaking in metaphor (29-30). But at the same time, she isn’t: the sweetest, tastiest strawberries will be eaten and their seeds dispersed, so being sweet and tasty can be an evolutionary advantage (30). “What I mean of course is that our human relationship with strawberries is transformed by our choice of perspective,” she continues. “It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal” (30). That means, according to Kimmerer, that a culture that sees the world as a gift and therefore treats it “with respect and reciprocity” will be more likely to survive longer “than the people who destroy it” (30). In other words, “[t]he stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences” (30).

Kimmerer quotes Lewis Hyde’s contention that thinking of things as gifts guarantees they will be plentiful (30). She notes that in the past, when food came directly from the land, it was easier to see it as a gift, but that it’s harder when food comes from the supermarket (30-31). “How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?” she asks. One way is to refuse to buy things that should be gifts, available to all: sweetgrass, water, industrialized food (31) (although it’s so difficult to avoid industrialized food in our world). The market economy is one story we tell ourselves, but it’s not the only possible story, “and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one,” one which “sustains the living systems on which we depend” (31). “We can choose,” she reiterates (31). Perhaps, but it’s very hard to make such a choice in the face of a monolithic market economy, which makes the entire world a commodity.

In the chapter’s conclusion, Kimmerer returns to the fields of wild strawberries of her childhood, and recalls how sometimes she would eat unripe fruit out of impatience. “Fortunately, our capacity for self-restraint grows and develops like the berries beneath the leaves, so I learned to wait a little,” she writes (32). She knows that transformation is slow: “The commodity economy has been here on Turtle Island for four hundred years, eating up the white strawberries and everything else. But people have grown weary of the sour taste in their mouths. A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts” (32). I hope she is right, but I fear she isn’t, and that even if she is, we are running out of time for such a transformation to occur.

The next chapter, “An Offering,” begins with a recollection that the Potawatomi were once canoe people until they were removed to Oklahoma, but states that they didn’t forget the water (33). She recalls childhood summers camping in the Adirondacks and the way her father would offer some coffee “to the gods of Tahawus” (33-34). That ceremony “drew a circle around our family” (34). She notes that Tahawus is the Algonquin name for Mount Marcy, the highest peak in the Adirondacks; the word means “the Cloud Splitter” (34). “My father had been on Tahawus’s summit many times and knew it well enough to call it by name, speaking with intimate knowledge of the place and the people who came before,” she writes (34). He often invoked the gods of the places where they camped, and by doing that, Kimmerer “came to know that each place was inspirited, was home to others before we arrived and long after we left” (34). This taught her family “the respect we owed these other beings and how to show our thanks for summer mornings” (35). In other times, the Potawatomi “raised their thanks in morning songs, in prayer, and the offering of sacred tobacco,” but the songs had been taken away by boarding schools and they had no sacred tobacco (35). However, they had returned to water (35).

Her mother’s “more pragmatic ritual of respect” was to make sure that each campsite was spotless before the family left (35). But these rituals only happened on vacation, not when they were at home in town (35). However, on Sundays her parents would take the family on walks along the river, looking for herons and muskrats, or to look for spring flowers in the woods, or on picnics (35). There, the same ceremonies of respect were performed (35). “And yet, as I grew to adolescence, the offering began to leave me angry or sad,” she writes. “The circle that had brought me a sense of belonging turned inside out. I heard in the words a message that we did not belong because we spoke in the language of exiles” (35-36). But the land didn’t care about that: “The land knows you, even when you are lost” (36). As she grew older her family reconnected to her nation and to their ceremonies, and the circle of respect and gratitude grew larger, and she realized that her family’s ceremonies weren’t second-hand after all (36). “What else can you offer the earth, which has everything?” she asks at the chapter’s conclusion. “What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home” (38).

In the next chapter, “Asters and Goldenrod,” Kimmerer recalls arriving at college to study botany. She told her faculty adviser that she wanted “to learn about why asters and goldenrod looked so good together” (39). He was not impressed; he told her that’s not what botany is about (40). She remembers the autumn display of Canada goldenrod growing alongside New England asters, and her adviser’s words about botany (40-41). “I wanted to know why certain stems bent easily for baskets and some would break, why the biggest berries grew in the shade and why they made us medicines, which plants are edible, why those little pink orchids only grow under pines,” but none of that was botany, according to her adviser (41). Science wasn’t about beauty (41). It was an echo of what her grandfather experienced at boarding school, when he had to leave his family, culture, and language behind: “The professor made me doubt where I came from, what I knew, and claimed that his was the right way to think. Only he didn’t cut my hair off” (41).

“In moving from a childhood in the woods to the university I had unknowingly shifted between worldviews, from a natural history of experience, in which I knew plants as teachers and companions to whom I was linked with mutual responsibility, into the realm of science,” she writes (41-42). Science only wants to know how plants work, not what they can tell us or who they are (42). Plants were thought of as objects, not subjects, and botany didn’t leave much room for someone who thought the way Kimmerer did: “The only way I could make sense of it was to conclude that the things I had always believed about plants must not be true after all” (42).

She wanted to quit studying botany, but she carried on, becoming “mesmerized by plant ecology, evolution, taxonomy, physiology, soils, and fungus” (42). The plants were her teachers, as well as her professors, but “there was always something tapping at my shoulder, willing me to turn around. When I did, I did not know how to recognize what stood behind me” (42). Kimmerer’s natural inclination was to see relationships, but science separates the observer from the observed, and the questions that interest her would violate that objectivity (42). She accepted the scientific method and went on to graduate school and a faculty position (42-43). But while she knew the names of the plants, she was ignoring their songs (43). But a chance encounter with a news clipping about the Louis Vieux Elm began to change her approach: “He was our Potawatomi grandfather, one who had walked all the way from the Wisconsin forests to the Kansas prairie with my grandma Sha-note. He was a leader, one who took care of the people in their hardship” (44). She began “a long, slow journey back to my people, called out to me by the tree that stood above their bones” (44). 

“To walk the science path I had stepped off the path of indigenous knowledge,” Kimmerer continues. “But the world has a way of guiding your steps” (44). She was invited to a gathering of Elders to discuss the traditional knowledge of plants (44). She learned about the depth of that knowledge and realized how shallow her own understandings were (44). “I circled right back to where I had begun, to the question of beauty,” she writes (44). The questions science asks are too narrow and the questions she wanted to ask were bigger than they were (45).

Next Kimmerer explains how we see yellow and purple, the colours of goldenrod and New England aster (plants that grow in our yard here in Regina). Purple and yellow are complementary colours, as different as they could be, on opposite sides of the colour wheel (45). And, while bees see flowers differently than humans do, they tend to see purple and yellow in a similar way (46). That colour combination, the contrast it creates, makes the flowers “the most attractive target in the whole meadow, a beacon for bees,” and so the flowers receive more visits from pollinators than if they were alone (46). “The question of goldenrod and asters was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know,” Kimmerer continues. “It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together” (46).

We need science and poetry, she concludes. She refers to Indigenous scholar Gregory Cajete, who says “that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit” (47). Science privileges only one or two of those: mind and body (47). Now Kimmerer has learned to fly between Indigenous and scientific knowledges, or at least to try to, following the example of the bees, the way they cross-pollinate flowers (47). “That September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity; its wisdom is that the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other,” she writes. “Science and art, matter and spirit, indigenous knowledge and Western science—can they be goldenrod and asters for each other? When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response” (47).

The next chapter, “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” is about language and listening to the sounds of the forest (48). The language is Potawatomi, and Kimmerer’s first encounter with it was in a book by the Anishinaabe ethnobotanist Keewaydinoquay, which includes a discussion of the traditional uses of fungi by her people (49). “Puhpowee” is a Potawatomi word that means “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight” (49). “As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed,” Kimmerer writes. “In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery” (49). She could see “an entire process of close observation” in that word, and she realized that she wanted to speak the language that holds the word Puhpowee. 

“Had history been different, I would likely speak Bodewadmimwin, or Potawatomi, an Anishinaabe language,” Kimmerer tells us. “But, like many of the three hundred and fifty indigenous languages of the Americas, Potawatomi is threatened, and I speak the language you read. The powers of assimilation did their work as my chance of hearing that language, and yours too, was washed from the mouths of Indian children in government boarding schools where speaking your native tongue was forbidden” (49). That’s how her grandfather lost his language (50). Besides, she lives far from the Citizen Potawatomi reservation and would have no one to talk to in the language (50). However, she did once slip into a language class at a gathering of her nation, one where every fluent speaker of the language was present (50). There were only nine fluent speakers, all in their seventies and older (50). Now Kimmerer is learning the language herself (51). Every Tuesday and Thursday she joins an online language class (52). At night she runs through language drills (52). It’s hard work, and discouraging, but she keeps at it (53). 

Kimmerer notes the differences between Potawatomi and English: the way the former sounds, the way it’s based in verbs rather than nouns, the way it divides the world into animate and inanimate nouns (53). The language’s reliance on verbs is important, because it’s another way that it sees the world as alive (55). “This is the grammar of animacy,” Kimmerer writes (55). The same words are used in Potawatomi to refer to family and to the living world, because the living world is also considered family (55). “English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy,” she notes. “In English, you are either a human or a thing” (56). English needs different pronouns, other than “it,” to suggest respect and relationality (57-58). This idea is expanded on in Kimmerer’s essay “Speaking of Nature,” available online.

Now comes the book’s second section, “Tending Sweetgrass,” which begins with a brief epigraph about the need to take care of wild meadows of sweetgrass by weeding them—something I’d never considered, although it’s what stewards of native grassland do. The first chapter, “Maple Sugar Moon,” begins with a story about Nanabozho diluting maple sap so that people would learn about responsibility and possibility (63). There is a sugar bush at Kimmerer’s country place, and her children convinced her to take up tapping trees and making syrup (64). The trees have sophisticated sensors in every bud, which tell the tree when to begin sending the sap the tree needs to grow up from its roots (65). Her people made syrup from the sap in different ways—by boiling it in copper pots, but before that, by allowing it to freeze, which separates the water from the sugar, and by putting it in shallow wooden pans beside fires, where it would evaporate (67). She refers to a story not unlike the one Leanne Betasamosake Simpson tells about Kwezens learning about the sweetness of maple sap from squirrels in her essay “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation.”   But, more importantly, I think, she notes that “[t]he Maples each year carry out their part of the Original Instructions, to care for the people. But they care for their own survival at the same time” (68). She explains the process she alluded to earlier in more detail, explaining how sugars rise up the tree to feed both budding leaves and people (68). When the buds open and leaves emerge, “they start making sugar on their own and the sapwood returns to its work as the water conduit,” and the sugar begins to move from the leaves back to the roots, where it is stored as starch (69). “They syrup we pour over pancakes on a winter morning is summer sunshine flowing in golden streams to pool on our plates,” Kimmerer writes (69).

But the point of the Nanabozho story Kimmerer begins the chapter with is twofold: “one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us: we participate in its transformation. It is our work, and our gratitude, that distills the sweetness” (69). She thinks about the people who planted those maple trees—homesteaders, settlers—and the responsibility she has to them, as well as to the trees themselves (70). “I have no way to pay them back. Their gift to me is far greater than I have the ability to reciprocate,” she writes, suggesting that perhaps all she can do is love them (70). “All I know to do is to leave another gift, for them and for the future, those next unknowns who will live here,” she states. So she plants daffodils under the maples, “in homage to their beauty and in reciprocity for their gift” (71).

The following chapter, “Witch Hazel,” recounts a relationship—a friendship—with an elderly neighbour named Hazel, who had a witch hazel tree growing that flowers in November (78). That story takes place in Kentucky, where Novembers are dreary but not frozen. After that comes “A Mother’s Work,” which begins with the process of moving from Kentucky to New York (82). The house she bought had what had once been a spring-fed pond, although it had become choked with weeds (83). There were ducks (83-85) and geese, which were able to walk on the mat of algae on the water’s surface (85). Kimmerer decided to do something to clean up the pond, to reverse the process of eutrophication that had taken place: “Generations of algae and lily pads and fallen leaves and autumn’s apples falling into the pond built up the sediments, layering the once clean gravel at the bottom in a sheet of muck. All those nutrients fueled the growth of new plants, which fueled the growth of more new plants, in an accelerating cycle” (85). Eventually the pond will become a marsh and then a meadow and a forest (86). It’s part of the aging process: “Making my pond swimmable would be an exercise in turning back time” (86). She tried removing the algae and sediments, but it was impossible (86-87). She learned what kind of algae were floating on the water’s surface: several different kinds, living together, her “partners in restoration” (88)—an odd phrase for something she’s trying to eliminate. 

Kimmerer rakes algae off of the pond and carried it away from the water, since as it decayed it would return nutrients to the water and continue the eutrophication (88). She keeps digging at the mud on the bottom (88). “I simply gave myself up to the task,” she writes, wading into the water without boots or hip waders (89). “I developed a new relationship with mud,” she writes. “Instead of trying to protect myself from it, I became oblivious to it, noticing its presence only when I would go back to the house and see strands of algae caught in my hair or the water in the shower turning brown” (89). One morning she discovered a bullfrog tadpole in a large clump of algae dragged out of the pond. One tadpole, and then more, which slowed her down: “I could work so much faster if I didn’t have to stop and pick tadpoles from the tangle of every moral dilemma” (89-90). But she wasn’t there to kill tadpoles, to make the pond swimmable for her children by killing another mother’s offspring (90). She began finding other creatures in the algae: small fish, diving beetles, dragonfly larvae (90). She was bitten by a crayfish (90). “A whole food web was dangling from my rake,” she tells us (90). She bargained with herself “over the chain of responsibility” and tried to convince herself that the deaths of those creatures “served a greater good” (90).

The algae ended up in her compost pile: “The pond was literally feeding the garden” (91). The pond’s surface began to clear—for a few days, anyway, before the algae returned (91). She cut back the willows on the edge of the pond and used the stems to make baskets, but they grew back, as did other plants she gathered on the edge of the water (91). The pond grew clearer, but she discovered that by cutting the willows, she was also in danger of removing a yellow warbler’s nest without thinking (91-92). “I was so quick and single-minded about what I was doing that I forgot to look,” she admits. “I forgot to acknowledge that creating the home that I wanted for my children jeopardized the homemaking of other mothers whose intents were no different than mine” (92). Kimmerer realizes that “restoring a habitat, no matter how well intentioned, produces casualties. We set ourselves up as arbiters of what is good when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests, but what we want” (92). “There are powerful forces of destruction loose in the world, advancing inexorably toward her children and mind,” she writes. “The onslaught of progress, well-intentioned to improve human habitat, threatens the nest I’ve chosen for my children” as surely as it threatened the nest of the yellow warbler she discovered (92). “What’s a good mother to do?” she asks (92).

She waits for a week, but the algae grows back. She returns to her work and discovers a new form of algae in the pond, Hydrodictyon, which provides fish and insects with a nursery, a safety net (93). She thinks about that algae as a lesson in motherhood (94). She thinks about the fact that among the Potawatomi, women are the Keepers of Water: “We carry the sacred water to ceremonies and act on its behalf” (94). Year after year she works to restore the pond, to arrive at a balance (94). The pond becomes part of her family’s lives, swimmable or not (94). She plants sweetgrass around the edge, spends countless hours there, years (94-95). “Our lives became entwined in ways both material and spiritual,” she writes. “It’s been a balanced exchange: I worked on the pond and the pond worked on me, and together we made a good home” (95).

Kimmerer learns about a rally in support of the cleanup of Onondaga Lake, which has become heavily polluted, and thinks about her obligations to that body of water (95). Meanwhile, after 12 years, “the pond is nearly swimmable, if you don’t mind the weeds that tickle your legs” (96). But, she admits, “in truth, I’ve not succeeded in turning back time,” and her daughters really don’t enjoy swimming in it (96). “So it is my grandchildren who will swim in this pond, and others whom the years will bring,” she concludes. “The circle of care grows larger and caregiving for my little pond spills over to caregiving for other waters. The outlet from my pond runs downhill to my good neighbor’s pond. What I do here matters. Everybody lives downstream. My pond drains to the brook, to the creek, to a great and needful lake. The water net connects us all” (97). In addition, the pond has shown her that motherhood doesn’t end “with creating a home where just my children can flourish”—it is about creating a home “where all of life’s beings can flourish. There are grandchildren to nurture, and frog children, nestlings, goslings, seedlings, and spores, and I still want to be a good mother” (97). I like the admissions of error and growth in this essay, and the conflicts Kimmerer explores, but I’m left wondering how nurturing all of those children fits in with the destruction involved in keeping the pond relatively clean. The conclusion might be a little too easy, but then again, the temptation to try to resolve those perhaps unresolvable conflicts is part of this kind of writing.

The following chapter, “The Consolation of Water Lilies,” carries on with the pond’s story (98). Her daughters grow up and move away. She visits one at college in California. She’s sad because she misses her daughter (98-99). She realizes that much of her work is feeding others (99). A kayak becomes her way of celebrating her freedom, of dealing with her midlife grief (100). At the pond where she paddles, she sees water lilies, and she tells us about their biology (101-03). “The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us the gift that we cannot provide ourselves,” she writes. “I hadn’t realized that I had come to the lake and said feed me, but my empty heart was fed. I had a good mother. She gives what we need without being asked” (103). And she thanks the earth for its gifts (103). But her human relations left gifts for her as well (103-04). “We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep,” Kimmerer concludes. “Their life is in their movement, the inhale and 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” (104). That conclusion might be too romantic for some, but it picks up on Kimmerer’s earlier discussions of the gift economy.

That conclusion also leads to the considerations of gratitude in the following chapter, “Allegiance to Gratitude.” The “allegiance” of the title refers to the Pledge of Allegiance. When that was read to the class, Kimmerer’s daughter—then in the sixth grade—was refusing to stand (105) She remembers her experience with the Pledge of Allegiance when she was a child (106). For her daughter, it is a meaningless ritual, and Kimmerer refused to interfere in her child’s decision (106). But she begins to think about gratitude—about Indigenous cultures as “cultures of gratitude” (106). She thinks about the Onondaga Nation’s reserve, just a few miles west of her home, and the way the school day in that community begins and ends with the Thanksgiving Address, “a river of words as old as the people themselves, known more accurately in the Onondaga language as the Words That Come Before All Else” (107). “This ancient order of protocol sets gratitude as the highest priority,” Kimmerer writes. “The gratitude is directed straight to the ones who share their gifts with the world” (107). At that school, the children lead the oratory, and it is conducted in Onondaga (107). According to the Elders at Onondaga, “the Address is far more than a pledge, a prayer, or a poem alone” (108). Rather, it is “at heart an invocation of gratitude, but it is also a material, scientific inventory of the natural world. Another name for the oration is Greetings and Thanks to the Natural World. As it goes forward, each element of the ecosystem is named in its turn, along with its function. It is a lesson in Native science” (108).

Part of the power of the Address “surely rests in the length of time it takes to send greetings and thanks to so many,” Kimmerer suggests. “The listeners reciprocate the gift of the speaker’s words with their attention, and by putting their minds into the place where gathered minds meet” (110). Each call asks for the response “Now our minds are one,” which means listeners have to concentrate (110). Non-Indigenous people often fidget and think the Address goes on too long (110). Kimmerer’s response to those complaints: “‘Poor you,’ I sympathize. ‘What a pity that we have so much to be thankful for’” (110). 

“Imagine raising children in a culture in which gratitude is the first priority,” Kimmerer continues (111). The Thanksgiving Address “embodies the Onondaga relationship with the world. Each part of Creation is thanked in turn for fulfilling its Creator-given duty to the others” (111). It’s impossible to listen to the Address without feeling wealthy, and the gratitude it espouses is “a revolutionary idea”: “In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness. The Thanksgiving Address reminds you that you already have everything you need” (111). “That’s good medicine for land and people alike,” Kimmerer states (111).

In addition, the oratory is a civics lesson, showing models of leadership: “the strawberry as leader of the berries, the eagle as leader of the birds” (111-12). That leadership is based on vision, generosity, and sacrifice; leaders are the first to offer their gifts (112). “It reminds the whole community that leadership is rooted not in power and authority, but in service and wisdom,” Kimmerer writes (112). Again, she asks, “What would it be like to be raised on gratitude, to speak to the natural world as a member of the democracy of species, to raise a pledge of interdependence?” (112). “In the Thanksgiving Address, I hear respect toward all our nonhuman relatives, not one political entity, but to all of life. What happens to nationalism, to political boundaries, when allegiance lies with the winds and waters that know no boundaries, that cannot be bought or sold?” she asks (112). 

The Thanksgiving Address is also a diplomatic tool, forging agreement in advance of difficult conversations (113). “Not surprisingly, Haudenosaunee decision-making proceeds from consensus, not by a vote of the majority,” Kimmerer reminds us. “A decision is made only ‘when our minds are one.’ Those words are a brilliant political preamble to negotiation, strong medicine for soothing partisan fervor” (113). And it “reminds us of how the world was meant to be in its original condition. We can compare the roll call of gifts bestowed on us with their current status. Are all the pieces of the ecosystem here and doing their duty? Is the water still supporting life? Are all the birds still healthy?” (114). The words of the Address “should awaken us to our loss and spur us to restorative action” (114). 

The words of the Address are simple, “but in the art of their joining, they become a statement of sovereignty, a political structure, a Bill of Responsibilities, an educational model, a family tree, and a scientific inventory of ecosystem services,” Kimmerer continues. “It is a powerful political document, a social contract, a way of being—all in one piece. But first and foremost, it is the credo for a culture of gratitude” (115). A culture of gratitude is also a culture of reciprocity: “Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them” (115). The address “reminds us that duties and gifts are two sides of the same coin” (115). And the Address is intended to be shared; as Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons told Kimmerer, “We’ve been waiting five hundred years for people to listen. If they’d understood the Thanksgiving then, we wouldn’t be in this mess” (116). And, for one last time, Kimmerer wonders why the Thanksgiving Address couldn’t replace the Pledge of Allegiance: “If we want to grow good citizens, then let us teach reciprocity. If what we aspire to is justice for all, then let it be justice for all of Creation” (116). She longs for “the day when we can hear the land give thanks in return” (117).

I had the privilege to hear the Thanksgiving Address once, and I agree that it’s a powerful expression of an important set of ideas. I should look for a version in English, like the one Kimmerer includes within this chapter, since the one I heard was in Mohawk. Despite my lack of comprehension, its length taught me about how much we have to be grateful for.

The book’s third section, “Picking Sweetgrass,” begins with “Epiphany in the Beans,” an essay about gardening—and the origin of (some) garden plants. “When Skywoman buried her beloved daughter in the earth, the plants that are special to the people sprang from her body,” Kimmerer writes. “Tobacco grew from her head. From her hair, sweetgrass. Her heart gave us the strawberry. From her breasts grew corn, from her belly the squash, and we see in her hands the long-fingered clusters of beans” (122). On this particular afternoon, Kimmerer realizes that “[t]he land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That’s what good mothers do” (122). She calls this “[t]he epiphany in the beans” (122). “I spend a lot of time thinking about our relationships with land, how we are given so much and what we might give back,” she tells us. “I try to work through the equations of reciprocity and responsibility, the whys and wherefores of building sustainable relationships with ecosystems. All in my head. But suddenly there was no intellectualizing, no rationalizing, just the pure sensation of baskets full of mother love. The ultimate reciprocity, loving and being loved in return” (122-23).

She knows that her scientist self doesn’t accept this idea of love, but she maintains that “[g]ardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking,” which is hard for scientists to accept, given the way they are “so fully brainwashed by Cartesian dualism” (123). But she maintains that her garden loves her back (124). “The exchange between plants and people has shaped the evolutionary history of both,” she writes. “Farms, orchards, and vineyards are stocked with species we have domesticated. Our appetite for their fruits leads us to till, prune, irrigate, fertilize, and weed on their behalf. Perhaps they domesticated us” (124). Perhaps the process was “a kind of mutual taming” (124). “We are linked in a co-evolutionary circle,” she notes: the sweetest fruits are the ones we plant, nurture, and protect from harm (124). “Food plants and people act as selective forces on each other’s evolution—the thriving of one in the best interest of the other,” she states. “This, to me, sounds a bit like love” (124). And “when you feel that the earth loves you back, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond” (124-25).

“I wonder if much that ails our society stems from the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be cut off from that love of, and from, the land,” Kimmerer writes. “It is medicine for a broken land and empty hearts” (126). But conventional forms of agriculture are about extraction, not love, unlike gardens where “food arises from partnership” (126). That’s true, but it might also be an exaggeration—some farmers might love their land, and some gardeners might behave in an extractive manner, and besides, few of us have gardens large enough to feed us throughout the year. Nevertheless, Kimmerer believes that gardening is the best way “to restore relationship between land and people” (126). “A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate—once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, and it becomes a seed itself,” she concludes (126-27). Gardeners say “I love you” in seeds, and the land reciprocates in beans (127).

The following chapter, “The Three Sisters,” is also about gardening. She suggests that the plants should tell their own story, since they make sounds as they grow: the squeaking and popping of corn growing rapidly, the “caressing sound” of beans, the creaking of ripening pumpkins (128). But those sounds are not the story: “Plants tell their stories not by what they say, but by what they do” (128). They “speak in a tongue that every breathing thing can understand. Plants teach in a universal language: food” (129). 

Next, Kimmerer describes the Three Sisters, “the genius of indigenous agriculture,” and how it works, in lovely, poetic prose that unpacks the science of the seeds’ germination and growth (129-31). Then she tells a version of the origin story of the Tree Sisters as a guarantee against hunger (131) and shows how the interaction between the plants show “lessons of reciprocity” and cooperation—again, in a mixture of poetry and science (131-34). She writes, “the beauty of the partnership is that each plant does what it does in order to increase its own growth. But as it happens, when the individuals flourish, so does the whole” (134). This relationship reminds Kimmerer “of one of the basic teachings of our people. The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others” (134). 

After learning that her students had never grown anything, Kimmerer begins her botany course in a garden, with the Three Sisters (134-37) and the “earthy sexuality” of the garden (136). Every August, she has a Three Sisters potluck for her friends. “The genius of the Three Sisters is not only in the process by which they grow, but also in the complementarity of the three species on the kitchen table,” she writes (137). It’s not just a question of taste, but also one of nutrition (138). She compares the Three Sisters to modern agriculture, the way corn grows in rows, without relationships (138). Polycultures, like the Three Sisters, “are less susceptible to pest outbreaks than monocultures,” and predatory beetles and parasitic wasps that feed on pests coexist with the garden (139). That is very different from conventional agriculture, which kills everything with insecticides (138-39). 

Perhaps the garden should be known as a Four Sisters gardener, because the gardener is also a partner, picking bugs, scaring away crows, weeding and seeding (139-40). Gardeners are midwives to the gifts of the plants (140). They are part of the reciprocity (140). “Of all the wise teachers who have come into my life, none are more eloquent than these, who wordlessly in leaf and vine embody the knowledge of relationship,” Kimmerer concludes. “Alone, a bean is just a vine, squash an oversize leaf. Only when standing together with corn does a whole emerge which transcends the individual. The gifts of each are more fully expressed when they are nurtured together than alone. In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship” (140). 

When I started reading this book before, I got as far as the next chapter before I put it down, pressed to write yet another course paper, and forgot about it. “Wisgaak Gokpenagen: A Black Ash Basket” is about a dying art, dying because the trees used as its raw material are dying because of the emerald ash borer, an insect pest introduced from China: the making of black ash baskets. Kimmerer explains how the wood is split into thick ribbons (141), how the Potawatomi tradition of basket making has been carried, how it is taught (142). She describes the tree that provides the wood, the black ash, and finding the specific tree that will make a good basket (143). “Traditional harvesters recognize the individuality of each tree as a person, a nonhuman forest person,” she writes:

Trees are not taken, but requested. Respectfully, the cutter explains his purpose and the tree is asked permission for harvest. Sometimes the answer is no. It might be a cue in the surroundings—a vireo nest in the branches, or the bark’s adamant resistance to the questioning knife—that suggests a tree is not willing, or it might be the ineffable knowing that turns him away. if consent is granted, a prayer is made and tobacco is left as a reciprocating gift. The tree is felled with great care so as not to damage it or others in the fall. Sometimes a cutter will make a bed of spruce boughs to cushion the landing of the tree. When they finish, John and his son hoist the log to their shoulders and begin the long walk home. (144)

The best times to harvest trees is in the spring, when the sap is rising, and the fall (145).

The process of splitting the wood to produce the splints that are woven into baskets involves peeling off the wood between the annual rings (145). “Depending on the individual history of the tree and its pattern of rings, a strip might come off carrying the wood of five years or sometimes just one,” Kimmerer explains. “Every tree is different, but as the basket makers pound and peel, he is always moving back through time. The tree’s life is coming off in his hands, layer by layer” (145). Because the long strips of wood are of different thicknesses, the annual rings need to be further separated, and different kinds of baskets require different thicknesses of wood (145). Most of the work of weaving a basket is finding the tree and splitting it into splints (147). The most important thing, according to John Pigeon, her teacher, is that the tree honoured the basket maker with its life (147-48). So splints should never be wasted: short pieces are kept for small baskets and decoration, while scraps and shavings become tinder (148). This is the credo of the Honourable Harvest: “take only what you need and use everything you take” (148). Kimmerer thinks about paper, the way it comes from the lives of trees but is used and discarded as if it were nothing (148).

In her research, Kimmerer has found that harvesting the black ash trees causes gaps in the forest that allows light to reach the saplings: “Black ash and basket makers are partners in a symbiosis between harvesters and harvested: ash relies on people as the people rely on ash. Their fates are linked” (149). The traditional craft of basketmaking is reviving after being almost extinguished by colonization (149). However, the emerald ash borer is killing ash trees, creating “a rupture in the chain of relationship that stretches back through time immemorial” (150). Basketmakers are working with forest scientists “to resist the insect and to adapt to its aftermath” (150). Ash trees are being grown and given away, and seeds are being stored for the future, “to replant the forest after the wave of invasion has passed” (151). “Many of our traditional teachings recognize that certain species are our helpers and guides,” Kimmerer writes. “The Original Instructions remind us that we must return the favor. It is an honor to be the guardian of another species—an honor within each person’s reach that we too often forget. A Black Ash basket is a gift the reminds us of the gifts of other beings, gifts we can gratefully return through advocacy and care” (151). I wonder if something similar could be said about advocating on behalf of keeping what remains of the grasslands that once covered southern Saskatchewan, and fragments that are still under threat.

Making baskets teaches lessons. The basket begins with two splints arranged in a cross, the four directions, the sacred foundation of everything (151). Kimmerer pauses before continuing; she feels the way she does when she’s about to write something (152). “For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the world; it is what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me,” she states. “And now there’s another layer of responsibility, writing on a thin sheet of tree and hoping the words are worth it. Such a thought could make a person set down her pen” (152). The weaving is difficult at the beginning, but by the third row, the give and take, or reciprocity, of balanced tension starts to become a whole (152). “In weaving well-being for land and people, we need to pay attention to the lessons of the three rows,” she continues. “Ecological well-being and the laws of nature are always the first row. Without them, there is no basket of plenty” (152-53). The second circle can proceed once the first is in place; it “reveals material welfare, the subsistence of human needs,” economy built on ecology (153). “But with only two rows in place, the basket is still in jeopardy of falling apart. It’s only when the third row comes that the first two can hold together,” Kimmerer states:

Here is where ecology, economics, and spirit are woven together. By using materials as if they were a gift, and returning that gift through worthy use, we find balance. I think that third row goes by many names: Respect. Reciprocity. All Our Relations. I think of it as the spirit row. Whatever the name, the three rows represent recognition that our lives depend on one another, human needs being only one row in the basket that must hold us all. In relationship, the separate splints become a whole basket, sturdy and resilient enough to carry us into the future. (153)

Each basket the class makes is unique, and that’s a lesson, too, about how everyone is the same and yet different (154). 

All of this leaves Kimmerer looking at things differently: “I see the powwow circle with new eyes. I notice that the cedar arbor sheltering the drums is supported by poles set in the four directions. The drum, the heartbeat, calls us out to dance. There is one beat, but each dancer has a distinctive step” (154). And the baskets continue to prompt reflections. What would it be like to think about the lives given for ours, she asks? “To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect? Once you start, it’s hard to stop, and you begin to feel yourself awash in gifts” (154). That’s the central thrust of this book, of course—the idea of gifts, reciprocity, and gratitude.

And yet, she cannot consider the plastic on her desk in that way: “It is so far removed from the natural world. I wonder if that’s a place where the disconnection began, the loss of respect, when we could no longer easily see the life within the object” (155). That comment reminds me of Zoe Todd’s desire to come into relationship with petroleum products (see Todd). Like Kimmerer, I find that very difficult to do: we both know that the plastic, and the oil it came from, originated in life, millions of years ago. She writes, “being mindful in the vast network of hyperindustrialized goods really gives me a headache. We weren’t made for that sort of constant awareness. We’ve got work to do” (155). But, she continues, “every once in a while, with a basket in hand, or a peach or a pencil, there is that moment when the mind and spirit open to all the connections, to all the lives and our responsibility to use them well” (155).

The next chapter, “Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass,” is structured like a scientific paper, a lab report, but the content is nothing like that. The introduction reflects on the smell of sweetgrass, “the sweet vanilla fragrance, beckoning” (156). The literature review follows Lena—it’s not immediately clear who she is: an Elder?—collecting sweetgrass, leaving tobacco as a gift (156-57). The plants show the need for respect by not returning if they are not collected with respect: mishkos kenomagwen (157). The hypothesis is whether different ways of harvesting sweetgrass might be the cause of its disappearance from its historic locales (157). Kimmerer wants to help, but she’s wary, because sweetgrass is a gift for her, not an experimental unit (158). But her graduate student, Laurie, is eager to work on research that will mean something to someone, but she had never seen sweetgrass before, so Kimmerer takes her to her restored sweetgrass meadows (158). It was “love at first sniff,” and Laurie found it easy to find the plant afterwards: “It was as if the plant wanted her to find it” (158).

Together, they designed an experiment to compare the effects of the two harvesting methods the basket makers had described, but she encouraged Laurie to “live out a slightly different style of research,” one that is less extractive than the scientific method, one that is “about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings” (158). Lena and other basket makers, by observing what happens when they collect sweetgrass, are engaged in experimental science (159). The faculty committee that approves research projects rejected Laurie’s proposal, though, because they did not recognize the Indigenous knowledge—if plants are used respectfully, they will flourish; if not, they will disappear—as theory, or that harvesting plants can help them grow (159). “Getting scientists to consider the validity of indigenous knowledge is like swimming upstream in cold, cold water,” Kimmerer writes. “They’ve been so conditioned to be skeptical of even the hardest of hard data that bending their minds towards theories that are verified without the expected graphs or equations is tough. Couple that with the unblinking assumption that science has cornered the market on truth and there’s not much room for discussion” (160). Nevertheless, Laurie came up with a careful method to compare two restored sweetgrass meadows. She didn’t make offerings to the plants—that would add a variable she didn’t understand—but Kimmerer suggests that she did show them “mindful respect” (161). “For two years she harvested and measured the response of the grass along with a team of student interns,” Kimmerer writes. “It was a little tough at first to recruit student helpers given that their task would be watching grass grow” (161).

Laurie’s research found that the plots that did not thrive 

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. Even though half of all stems had been harvested each year, they quickly grew back, completely replacing everything that had been gathered, in fact producing more shoots than were present before harvest. Picking sweetgrass seemed to actually stimulate growth. (162)

“Laurie’s graduate committee had dismissed this possibility from the outset,” Kimmerer notes. “They had been taught that harvesting causes decline. And yet the grasses themselves unequivocally argued the opposite point” (163). Laurie had data to support her findings, though.

“We are all the product of our worldviews—even scientists who claim pure objectivity,” Kimmerer writes (163). The scientists had been taught that the best way to preserve a resource was to keep people away from it, but the sweetgrass showed that humans are a vital part of its system (163). Laurie discovered that the effects she observed were well known to scientists studying grasslands, where fire and grazing stimulate growth (163). They are “adapted to disturbance” (164). Laurie explained how harvesting 

thinned the population, allowing the remaining shoots to respond to the extra space and light by reproducing quickly. Even the pulling method was beneficial. The underground stem that connects the shoots is dotted with buds. When gently tugged, the stem breaks and all those buds produce thrifty young shoots to fill the gap. (164)

Grazing makes grasses grow faster: “there is an enzyme in the saliva of grazing buffalo that actually stimulates grass growth. To say nothing of the fertilizer produced by a passing herd. Grass gives to buffalo and buffalo give to grass” (164). With its long history of cultural use, sweetgrass seems to have become dependent on human disturbance, which stimulates its compensatory growth (164). The decline of sweetgrass, then, might be due to underharvesting, not overharvesting (164). Areas where sweetgrass thrives are near Indigenous communities, particularly those where baskets are made (165). According to Kimmerer, “[s]weetgrass thrives where it is used and disappears elsewhere” (165).

For Kimmerer, as well as an example of the way that science and traditional languages “may converge when both truly listen to the plants,” this story is an example of reciprocity and respect (165). “The grass gives its fragrant self to us and we receive it with gratitude,” she writes. “In return, through the very act of accepting the gift, the pickers open some space, let the light come in, and with a gentle tug bestir the dormant buds that make new grass. Reciprocity is a matter of keeping the gift in motion through self-perpetuating cycles of giving and receiving” (165). But overharvesting—taking more than half—disrupts the balance of that relationship (166). Each plant is different, and each has its own way of regenerating, its own form of relationship with people. The differences between them need to be respected (166).

The next chapter is entitled “Maple Nation: A Citizenship Guide.” Kimmerer notes that maple trees outnumber humans in her community by “a hundred to one” (168). “In our Anishinaabe way, we count trees as people, ‘the standing people,’” and even though the government does not, there’s no doubt, to her, that “we live in the nation of maples” (168). “I’m thinking about what it would mean to declare citizenship in Maple Nation,” she continues (168). What would that mean? Paying taxes, “sharing in the support of your community” (168). The trees give generously: they give shade, they break the wind, “they create habitat for songbirds, and wildlife cover, leaves to shuffle through, tree forts and branches for swings” (168-69). They build the soil with their fallen leaves, generate oxygen, and provide other “ecosystem services, the structures and functions of the natural world that make life possible” (169). Those services don’t figure in calculations of human economic activity (170). 

Here Kimmerer turns to the activity in a sugar shack where the sap is boiled over a wood fire (170-71). “In Maple Nation, the currency is carbon,” she writes. “It is traded, exchanged, bartered among community members from atmosphere to tree to beetle to woodpecker to fungus to log to firewood to atmosphere and back to tree. No waste, shared wealth, balance, and reciprocity. What better model for a sustainable economy do we need?” (171). I wonder if she’s read Primo Levi’s essay on carbon, which comes to a similar conclusion from very different premises. 

Kimmerer researches the citizenship oaths of various human nations. Most are pledges of loyalty, of shared beliefs, of an agreement to obey the law (173). If she had to choose a place to invest her allegiance, she would choose the Maple Nation: “If citizenship is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species. If citizenship means an oath of loyalty to a leader, then I choose the leader of the trees. If good citizens agree to uphold the laws of the nation, then I choose natural law, the law of reciprocity, of regeneration, of mutual flourishing” (173). But rising temperatures are threatening the maple forests of the northeastern United States (173). The maples will have to move north, exiles because of cheap gasoline (173). She would trade cheap gas for maples (174). The maples, she concludes, deserve better: they need humans to speak up on their behalf (174). “Political action, civic engagement—these are powerful acts of reciprocity with the land,” she writes. “The Maple Nation Bill of Responsibilities asks us to stand up for the standing people, to lead with the wisdom of Maples” (174). I was wondering two chapters back about the need to advocate on behalf of the grasslands, and whether that would be a form of reciprocity. Kimmerer just answered that question for me.

The following chapter, “The Honorable Harvest,” begins with Kimmerer crossing a field in spring, carrying a basket, looking to pick wild leeks. She begins by addressing the plants as she’s been taught to do: “introducing myself in case they’ve forgotten, even though we’ve been meeting like this for years. I explain why I’ve come and ask their permission to harvest, inquiring politely if they would be willing to share” (175). She suggests that eating leeks in the spring is both food and medicine (175-76). The first clump she digs out has no bulbs, and she takes this as a refusal of permission to gather; she tucks the clump back into the soil and goes home (176). She envies the plants their chlorophyll, wishes she could photosynthesize so that she could do the work of the world by standing in the sun (176). “But this generosity is beyond my realm, as I am a mere heterotroph, a feeder on the carbon transmuted by others,” she writes. “In order to live, I must consume. That’s the way the world works, the exchange of a life for a life, the endless cycling between my body and the body of the world” (177). Once again I’m reminded of Primo Levi. She thinks about the moral question of extinguishing the lives of others on behalf of our own: “how do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives that we take?” (177). “In our oldest stories, we are reminded that this was a question of profound concern for our ancestors,” she notes, and that “conundrum” remains: “the need to resolve the inescapable tension between honoring life around us and taking it in order to live is part of being human” (177).

A few weeks later, Kimmerer goes out to pick wild leeks again. She chooses a different clump and asks for permission (177-78). “Asking permission shows respect for the personhood of the plant, but it is also an assessment of the well-being of the population. Thus I must use both sides of my brain to listen for the answer,” she writes (178). Is the population large enough to sustain a harvest? That’s an analytical, left-brain question (178). Are the plants willing to be taken? That’s an intuitive, right-brain question (178). “This time, when I push my trowel deep I come up with a thick cluster of gleaming white bulbs, plump, slippery, and aromatic,” she tells us. “I hear yes, so I make a gift from the soft old tobacco pouch in my pocket and begin to dig” (178).

Harvesting wild leeks can help them grow by thinning them out (178). But it’s important not to take too many—so Kimmerer doesn’t use a sharp shovel, which would encourage overharvesting: “Not everything should be convenient” (178-79). “The traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous harvesters is rich in prescriptions for sustainability,” she writes. “They are found in Native science and philosophy, in lifeways and practices, but most of all in stories, the ones that are told to help restore balance, to locate ourselves once again in the circle” (179). She relates a story told by the Anishinaabe Elder Basil Johnston about Nanabozho fishing for supper. He takes too many fish and empties the lake, thus learning a key rule: “never take more than you need” (179). “Cautionary stories of the consequences of taking too much are ubiquitous in Native cultures, but it’s hard to recall a single one in English,” she suggests. “Perhaps this helps to explain why we seem so caught in a trap of overconsumption, which is as destructive to ourselves as to those we consume” (179).

“Collectively, the indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest,” Kimmerer states. “They are rules of sorts that govern our taking, shape our relationships which the natural world, and rein in our tendency to consume—that the world might be as rich for the seventh generation as it is for our own” (180). She describes herself as a student of that way of thinking, rather than a scholar, and says that she struggles “to participate in the Honorable Harvest” (180). She listens to those who are wiser than she is (180). “What I share here, in the same way they were shared with me, are seeds gleaned from the fields of their collective wisdom, the barest surface, the moss on the mountains of their knowledge,” she continues. “I feel grateful for their teachings and responsible for passing them on as best I can” (180).

She notes that traditional peoples have harvest guidelines, “based on sophisticated ecological knowledge and long-term monitoring of populations” (180-81). Settlers were amazed at the abundance of nature on Turtle Island, noting that Indigenous people didn’t harvest all the wild rice on the lakes (181). The settlers took this as evidence of laziness, not understanding “how indigenous land-care practices might contribute to the wealth they encountered” (181). Other creatures like rice, after all, and the rice itself needs to reseed: “Our teachings tell us to never take more than half” (182). Nor should one take the first plant one sees, because it might be the only one (182). Kimmerer writes down the rules of the Honorable Harvest, even though they aren’t codified but “reinforced in small acts of daily life” (183) Unlike the state guidelines on hunting and gathering, the rules of the Honorable Harvest “are based on accountability to both the physical and the metaphysical worlds” (183). Nonhuman beings are also persons, after all, “vested with awareness, intelligence, spirit—and who have families waiting for them at home” (183). “Killing a who demands something different than killing an it,” she writes. “When you regard those nonhuman persons as kinfolk, another set of harvesting regulations extends beyond bag limits and legal seasons” (183). The rules of the Honorable Harvest are also agreements between providers and consumers, in which the providers have the upper hand (184).

Kimmerer imagines what it would be like if the Honorable Harvest were the law now, as in the past (184). “Imagine if a developer, eyeing open land for a shopping mall, had to ask the goldenrod, the meadowlarks, and the monarch butterflies for permission to take their homeland,” she writes. “What if he had to abide by the answer? Why not?” (184). She realizes that people, even Indigenous people, struggle with the self-restraint that would involve: “The dictum to take only what you need leaves a lot of room for interpretation when our needs get so tangled with our wants” (184). That’s the reason for an even more primal rule, “an old teaching nearly forgotten now in the din of industry and technology. Deeply rooted in cultures of gratitude, this ancient rule is not just to take only what you need, but to take only that which is given” (184). It’s a question of manners, on an individual level, but as a culture “we seem unable to extend these good manners to the natural world. The dishonorable harvest has become a way of life—we take what doesn’t belong to us and destroy it beyond repair: Onondaga Lake, the Alberta tar sands, the rainforests of Malaysia, the list is endless” (185). “How do we find the Honorable Harvest again?” Kimmerer asks (185). “How can we distinguish between that which is given by the earth and that which is not? When does taking become outright theft?” (185). Here she’s talking about extraction, to use the term in vogue at the moment. It’s an essential question, and he answer is that “each of us must find our own way” (185). “Discerning all that it might mean is like bush-whacking through dense undergrowth,” she writes. “Sometimes I get faint glimpses of a deer trail” (185).

Here Kimmerer turns to a fall afternoon at Onondaga, listening to men telling stories about hunting, and one story in particular, about the deer that offers itself to the hunter’s lone bullet (186). That’s why he thanks the deer, the Elder telling that story says, for its generosity in feeding the people (186). The Honorable Harvest is an inspiration and a model for what we should do: eat food that’s been harvested honorably, celebrate every mouthful, use technologies that minimize harm, take what is given (186-87). “This philosophy guides not only our taking of food, but also any taking of the gifts of Mother Earth—air, water, and the literal body of the earth: the rocks and soil and fossil fuel,” she writes (187). Doing irreparable damage to the earth through coal mining, she continues, is by no stretch of the imagination accepting a gift: “We have to wound the land and water to gouge it from Mother Earth” (187). “It doesn’t mean that we can’t consume the energy we need, but it does mean that we honorably take what is given”: energy from the sun, the wind, the tides, which are “consistent with the ancient rules of the Honorable Harvest” (187). 

Once Kimmerer gave a lecture on “Cultures of Gratitude” at a private college with expensive tuition (187). She told a story about what happened when the fields were so generous that people stopped treating the corn with respect (187-88). Saddened, the Corn Spirit left the people, going where she thought she would be appreciated (188). Only when the people relearned gratitude would she return (188). The students in the audience yawned: they couldn’t imagine such a thing. One young woman could, though; she said that Kimmerer’s words reminded her of her grandmother in Turkey, who never wasted anything (188-89). Kimmerer realizes that gratitude is important, but suggests that “we are called to go beyond cultures of gratitude, to once again become cultures of reciprocity” (189). Notions of sustainability don’t go far enough; we need to be thinking about how we can give back (189-90). That’s what the Honourable Harvest asks of us: reciprocity (190). “One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world,” Kimmerer writes. “We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence” (190).

Next Kimmerer describes what she learned from a trapper. He abandoned that trade because he found leg-hold traps to be cruel (191). He worked in mines in Sudbury, where the smelters’ emissions killed the forests; he again felt blood on his hands, and he quit (191). He returned to trapping, using the old brain tanning technique to prepare the hides (191). He is careful to only catch male martens, because catching a female means he has taken too many (192). He feeds the female martens with fish guts dumped on platforms in the trees (193). “Feeding mama martens is not altruism; it is deep respect for the way the world works, for the connections between us, of life flowing into life,” she writes. “The more he gives, the more he can take, and he goes the extra mile to give more than he takes” (194). “A harvest is made honorable when it sustains the giver as well as the taker,” she continues (194). That trapper is giving back what was given to him (194). 

“The canon of the Honorable Harvest is poised to make its comeback,” Kimmerer writes, “as people remember that what’s good for the land is also good for the people” (195). Acts of restoration are needed, not only for the lands and waters, “but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgement of the reset of the earth’s beings” (195). But how can people who live in cities participate in the Honorable Harvest? “We can use our dollars as the indirect currency of reciprocity,” she suggests; we can try to make sure that what we buy is not complicit in the dishonourable harvest (195). We can reuse and compost and recycle (196). We can choose to buy organic produce (196). It’s not easy, and we each will have to do what we can (196). So Kimmerer buys recycled paper to write on, but has trouble finding pens that have not been dishonourably harvested (197-98). “I’ve been trying hard to make this work, but what I feel in the woods, the pulsing animacy, is simply not here,” she states. “I realize why the tenets of reciprocity don’t work here, why this glittering labyrinth seems to make a mockery of the Honorable Harvest. it’s so obvious, but I didn’t see it, so intent was I on searching for the lives behind the products. I couldn’t find them because the lives aren’t here. Everything for sale here is dead” (198). It hurts Kimmerer to bring notions of the Honourable Harvest to the shopping mall; she wants to protect them, “shelter them from the onslaught of their antithesis,” even though she knows that they are stronger than that (199). “It’s not the Honorable Harvest that is the aberration,” she writes: “it is this marketplace” (199). The Honourable Harvest cannot survive in this habitat; the mall’s bounty offers an illusion, a pretence that the products it contains have not been “ripped from the earth” (199). 

At home, Kimmerer prepares the wild leeks for dinner. She leaves one handful unwashed, and later carries them to the tiny patch of forest above her pond to plant them (199). “The harvesting process now unfolds in reverse,” she writes. “I ask permission to bring them here, to open the earth for their arrival” (199-200). She notes that areas that have reforested themselves after being ploughed have no flowers growing beneath the trees, no medicines, and that scientists don’t understand why (200). So she plants the leeks there (200). It’s her responsibility to help the regrown forest (200). She hopes that the leeks will return by the time she is old (200).

“We need the Honorable Harvest today,” Kimmerer concludes. “But like the leeks and the marten, it is an endangered species that arose in another landscape, another time, from a legacy of traditional knowledge. That ethic of reciprocity was cleared away along with the forests, the beauty of justice traded away for more stuff” (200). If the earth is inanimate, if our lives are just commodities, “then the way of the Honorable Harvest, too, is dead” (200-01). “But when you stand in the stirring spring woods, you know otherwise,” she writes. “It is an animate earth that we hear calling to us to feed the martens and kiss the rice. Wild leeks and wild ideas are in jeopardy. We have to transplant them both and nurture their return to the lands of their birth. We have to carry them across the wall, restoring the Honorable Harvest, bringing back the medicine” (201). If we can’t do that, then we are doomed, I think, although it might be too late to adopt that ethos, new to us but still older than we are. I don’t think Kimmerer is being romantic here; I think she’s being reasonable.

The book’s fourth section is “Braiding Sweetgrass.” Its first chapter is “In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place.” I will have to be careful here; that title might suggest that it’s possible for a settler like me to become indigenous to a place, and everything I’ve learned over the past couple of years tells me that’s a dangerous desire, one that can only serve to further displace the people who have been displaced by my presence on this land. Indeed, she begins by suggesting that Skywoman was an immigrant, that she’s also new where she’s standing, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean (205). Then she turns to Nanabozho, the powerful spirit-being, “the personfication of life forces, the Anishinaabe culture hero, and our great teacher of how to be human. In Nanabozho’s form as Original Man and in our own, we humans are the newest arrivals on earth, the youngsters, just learning to find our way” (205). Fair enough—I like the humility of that perspective, but of course the newest arrivals on Turtle Island are the settlers whose way of thinking and behaving are so destructive. Perhaps she’s not thinking about us. I hope we’re excluded from this story.

Kimmerer suggests that because he was new to the world, Nanabozho was also an immigrant. The Creator gave him tasks: he was to walk through the world with each step being a greeting to Mother Earth (206). He followed the paths made by other creatures (206). This all happened long ago, but Kimmerer argues that time is a circle, not a linear straight line, so that the stories of Nanabozho are both history and prophecy (207). He did his best to follow the Original Instructions “and tried to become native to his new home” (207). The legacy of Nanabozho is that we are still trying, even though “the instructions have gotten tattered along the way and many have been forgotten” (207).

Kimmerer now turns to consider settlers: “some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, ‘The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not’” (207). That rootlessness is characteristic of American life (207). “For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place,” Kimmerer says. “But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore?” (207). Who is “the Second Man” in that sentence? Nanabozho is the “Original Man” (205), but surely settlers aren’t “the Second Man,” although that’s the way we seem to be invited to understand that sentence. No: I’m confusing “Original Man” with “First Man.” “First Man” represents Indigenous peoples; “Original Man” is Nanabozho; “Second Man” represents settlers.

Kimmerer has more questions: “What happens when we truly become native to a place, when we finally make a home? Where are the stories that lead the way? If time does in fact eddy back on itself, maybe the journey of the First Man will provide footsteps to guide the journey of the Second” (207). What is the difference between being a settler and making a home, though? Métis artist David Garneau suggests that it might be possible for a settler like me “to home in these territories without trying to settle them” (Garneau). Is Kimmerer suggesting something similar? 

Nanabozho’s journey took him east, towards the rising sun (207). He was hungry and not sure how to find his way (207). He knew that all the knowledge he needed to live was present in the land and that his role was to learn how to be human from the world (208). The east is the direction of knowledge, and Nanabozho got to know semaa, the sacred tobacco, and how to use it to carry his thoughts to the Creator (208). He was given a new responsibility: to learn the names of the beings in the world (208). He spoke with them to learn about the gifts they carried (208). He learned to greet the other creatures by their names (208).

But today, “[m]ost people don’t know the names of these relatives; in fact, they hardly even see them. Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world” (208). Kimmerer can’t imagine “what it would be like going through life not knowing the names of the plants and animals around you” (208). She thinks it would be “scary and disorienting—like being lost in a foreign city where you can’t read the street signs” (208). She suggests that “[p]hilosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection ‘species loneliness’—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship” (208-09). Human dominance of the world has led to more isolation (209). Here the account of Nanabozho gets a little confusing. Kimmerer suggests that he names the animals rather than learning the names they already had, and compares him to Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist who invented scientific nomenclature (209). She imagines Nanabozho and Linnaeus travelling together, looking at plants (209). 

Then Nanabozho travels south. If the east is the direction of knowledge (208), the south is the direction of birth and growth (209). That’s the direction spring comes from (209). He learns the teachings of cedar, kizhig, there (209). Nanabozho learns what he can eat by watching what the animals ate (209-10). He was also taught by the plants (210). These elder brothers and sisters inspired Nanabozho to make new things in order to survive: the Whale inspired the canoe; the Beaver showed him how to make an axe; the Spider’s web became a fishing net; the Squirrels showed him how to make maple sugar (210). “The lessons Nanabozho learned are the mythic roots of Native science, medicine, architecture, agriculture, and ecological knowledge,” Kimmerer writes (210).

Nanabozho sang loudly as he walked, and blundered into a Grizzly. After that, he “learned to sit quietly at the edge of the woods and wait to be invited” (210). He became grateful for the abilities of the other creatures “and he came to understand that to carry a gift is also to carry a responsibility” (211). “Every being with a gift, every being with a responsibility,” Kimmerer tells us. “he considered his own empty hands. He had to rely on the world to take care of him” (211).

“Had the new people learned what Original Man was taught at a council of animals—never damage Creation, and never interfere with the sacred purpose of another being—the eagle would look down on a different world,” Kimmerer continues. “The salmon would be crowding up the rivers, and passenger pigeons would darken the sky” (211). Kimmerer herself would be speaking Potawatomi (211). “We would see what Nanabozho saw,” she writes. “It does not bear too much imagining, for in that direction lies heartbreak” (211). 

“Against the backdrop of that history, an invitation to settler society to become indigenous to place feels like a free ticket to a housebreaking party,” Kimmerer admits. So she is talking about us. “It cold be read as an open invitation to take what little is left. Can settlers be trusted to follow Nanabozho, to walk so that ‘each step is a greeting to Mother Earth?” (211). She feels grief and fear and those emotions “try to hold my heart closed” (211). And yet, she continues, “the grief is the settlers’ as well. They too will never walk in a tallgrass prairie where sunflowers dance with goldfinches. Their children have also lost the chance to sing at the Maple Dance. They can’t drink the water either” (211-12).

On Nanabozho’s journey to the north, he met medicine teachers who gave him sweetgrass “to teach him the ways of compassion, kindness, and healing, even for those who made bad mistakes, for who has not?” (212). “To become indigenous is to grow the circle of healing to include all of Creation,” Kimmerer suggests. “A path scented with sweetgrass leads to a landscape of forgiveness and healing for all who need it. She doesn’t give her gift only to some” (212).

In the west, Nanabozho found many frightening things: earthquakes and great fires (212). Sage, the sacred plant of the west, helped him overcome his fear (212). He learned that fire can destroy, but it can also create—that all things have that duality—and he learned that he has a twin brother devoted to making imbalance, just as Nanabozho was devoted to making balance (212). “Nanabozho vowed to walk with humility in order to balance his twin’s arrogance,” Kimmerer writes. “That too is the task of those who would walk in his footsteps” (212).

Kimmerer is still thinking about immigrants, and her thoughts are tangled. “Like my elders before me, I want to envision a way that an immigrant society could become indigenous to place, but I’m stumbling on the words. Immigrants cannot by definition be indigenous. Indigenous is a birthright word. No amount of time or caring changes history or substitutes for soul-deep fusion with the land,” she writes (213). But, she continues, “if people do not feel ‘indigenous,’ can they nevertheless enter into the deep reciprocity that renews the world? Is this something that can be learned? Where are the teachers?” (213). She thinks about the Elder who says that the land has been teaching settlers all along. I don’t see any evidence of that learning. Perhaps Kimmerer doesn’t, either.

She notices some plantain growing in the woods. The Potawatomi call this plant “White Man’s Footstep” because it followed settlers everywhere they went (213). At first, the Potawatomi didn’t trust that plant, because of its association with the settlers, but they also knew that “all things have a purpose and that we must not interfere with its fulfillment,” so “they began to learn about its gifts”: as a cooked vegetable in spring, as a poultice, as an aid to digestion and an antiseptic (213-14). “This wise and generous plant, faithfully following the people, became an honored member of the plant community,” she writes. “It’s a foreigner, an immigrant, but after five hundred years of living as a good neighbor, people forget that kind of thing” (214). But other immigrant plants are invaders, leaving destruction behind them: garlic mustard, tamarisk, loosestrife, kudzu, cheat grass (214). Nevertheless, plantain isn’t like that: “Its strategy was to be useful, to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds” (214). It’s become naturalized (214). Perhaps settlers could become naturalized by learning to “uphold Nanabozho’s Original Instructions, too” (214).

“Maybe the task assigned to Second man is to unlearn the model of kudzu and follow the teachings of White Man’s Footstep, to strive to become naturalized to place, to throw off the mind-set of the immigrant,” Kimmerer concludes. “Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit” (214). I’m not certain that what she’s describing is possible—that settlers aren’t more like kudzu than plantain, that we cannot change our ways. Individuals might be able to, but our system of living and thinking is too badly broken. It’s particularly hard to imagine when unmarked graves are being discovered at the sites of former Indian residential schools in this country—discoveries which make me wonder if settlers deserve such generosity and kindness. Nonetheless, she wonders if White Man’s Footstep isn’t following in the steps of Nanabozho: “Perhaps Plantain will line the homeward path. We could follow. White Man’s Footstep, generous and healing, grows with its leaves so close to the ground that each step is a greeting to Mother Earth” (215).

The next chapter, “The Sound of Silverbells,” takes Kimmerer back to an experience teaching in the southern US, in the Bible Belt, where students were not interested in ecology (216-17). She took her students on a three-day field trip into the Great Smoky Mountains in an effort to convert “their scientific souls” (217). “I had a whole three days to be subversive, to distract them from Homo sapiens for a glimpse of the six million other species with whom we share the planet,” she recalls (218). It was early spring, and the woods were filled with wildflowers (218). The group wandered up the mountains, “traversing elevational zones from deep cove forests of tulip poplar and cucumber magnolia to the summits. The lush coves were a garden of wildflowers, glossy patches of wild ginger and nine species of trillium,” but the students were looking “without much apparent interest” (219). One student even asked if this was her religion (220). “I should have just answered yes,” she states (221). On the last day of the trip, she recalls, “I knew that I had failed. I had failed to teach the kind of science that I had longed for as a young student seeking the secret of Asters and Goldenrod, a science deeper than data” (221). She had imparted information but not how to respond to the world as a gift (221). Then one student started to sing “Amazing Grace” (221). “I was humbled,” she writes. “Their singing said everything that my well-intentioned lectures did not” (222). They hadn’t missed the point after all. “I’ll never forget that moment,” she concludes. “The worst teacher in the world or the best teacher in the world—neither can be heard over the voices of Silverbells and Hermit Thrushes” (222). “The land is the real teacher,” she continues. “All we need as students is mindfulness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart” (222). That Sunday afternoon changed the way she teaches: “A teacher comes, they say, when you are ready. And if you ignore its presence, it will speak to you more loudly. But you have to be quiet to hear” (222). I find myself wondering what kind of impact those three days did have on the students, and how long it lasted, but I wasn’t present to hear the students’ song, and so who am I to say the effects would have been temporary at best?

The next chapter, “Sitting In a Circle,” is also about teaching—in particular, one student, Brad, who is not enthusiastic to be at a remote biological research station for five weeks (223). After just a few days there, at Cranberry Lake Biological Station, most students “start to metamorphose into field biologists,” but Kimmerer notes that “when we put scientific instruments in their hands they trust their own senses less,” and “when they put more energy into memorizing Latin names, they spend less time looking at the beings themselves” (224). So, at the beginning of her ethnobotany class, she has the students brainstorm a list of human needs and think about which ones the Adirondack plants might be able to meet (224). Then the students build their classroom—which looks like a wigwam (224-25). 

Meanwhile, Brad is still unhappy. Kimmerer tries to cheer him up by saying that they’re going shopping, although their “store” is the marsh across the lake (225). They are going to gather cattails for the walls of the classroom—in the water (226). The cattail rhizomes can be roasted in the fire or turned into flour or porridge. The leaves are a source of string and twine (227). Back at the camp, they start cleaning the cattails (227). They discover the cattail gel at the base of the leaves, which is soothing on sunburn (228). The leaves are water repellent as well, and in the old days they would be sewn together to make the walls for a summer wigwam and mats for sleeping (228). One student says, “It’s almost as if the plants made these things for us” (228). The things that help the plants to survive are useful to people and increase their likelihood of survival: “The plants adapt, the people adopt” (229). In the centre of the leaves is a “soft column of white pith as thick as your pinkie and as crisp as a summer squash”; it tastes like cucumber (229). The places where they were harvesting are visible in the marsh, and the students discuss their own impact (229). The pollen of the cattails “can be added to biscuits and pancakes, adding nutritional value and a beautiful golden color,” and the female half of the stalk can be boiled and eaten; it tastes like artichokes (230). The fluff of the flowers can be used to stuff pillows or bedding; Potawatomi people used it for diapers (230). The flowers can also be dipped in fat and used as torches, and the fluff was used as tinder for starting fires (230). Within a few days, the teaching wigwam has walls, and birch bark has been gathered for the roof (231-32).

Freshwater marshes are productive—a place where fish spawn, frogs and salamanders and birds live—and “hunger for this productive land precipitated a 90 percent loss of the wetlands—as well as the Native people who depended upon them” (231). Because the cattails build rich soil, wetlands are in demand for cropland, although in some places they’ve been drained and paved over for parking (231). In this province, the destruction of wetlands—unregulated by the provincial government—has increased flooding in rural areas and damaging the quality of surface water sources (“We’re Losing Our Wetlands”). The ecosystem needs wetlands, but people need them, too.

“I used to teach the way I was taught, but now I let someone else do all the work for me,” Kimmerer writes. “If plants are our oldest teachers, why not let them teach?” (232). On this day, they are harvesting the roots of white spruce to stitch together their birch bark roof (232). “In gathering roots, just plunging will get you nothing but a hole,” she continues. “We have to unlearn hurrying. This is all about slowness” (233). She asks the spruce trees for permission to gather some roots (233). She uses a knife to cut open the humus beneath the trees (233). The roots of many different plants are visible (233). They search for the spruce roots: “A dozen roots are exposed, and somehow you need to choose one and follow it without breaking it, so that you have one great, long continuous strand. It’s not easy” (235). While harvesting a few roots won’t do any damage, they put the soil and mosses back carefully, emptying their water bottles over the wilting leaves when they are finished (235). The students are quiet, concentrating, then one starts to sing: “It happens every time” (235). The smell of humus releases the hormone oxytocin, which promotes bonding between mother and child or between lovers, in our brains: “No wonder we sing in response” (236).

They clean and peel the roots and weave baskets. “Imperfect they may be, but I believe they are a beginning of a reweaving of the bond between people and the land,” Kimmerer writes (237). The roof is sewn onto the wigwam (237). The students sit together, weaving and talking (237). The cattail gives people all they need to live (237). Kimmerer thinks about Mother Earth: “How can we ever reciprocate such a wealth of care? Knowing that she carries us, could we shoulder a burden for her?” (238). One student asks what they can do in return for the earth’s gifts. Gratitude is important, but Kimmerer thinks that “we humans gifts in addition to gratitude that we might offer in return. The philosophy of reciprocity is beautiful in the abstract, but the practical is harder” (238). So what is the ethical duty to compensate those plants for what they’ve given (239). Kimmerer loves to listen to her students discussing these questions, and she feels humbled by the creativity of the solutions they offer (239). “The gifts they might return to cattails are as diverse as those the cattails gave them,” she writes. “This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?” (239).

Kimmerer also realizes “that caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack” (239). “It takes real effort to remember that it’s not just in a wigwam that the earth gives us everything we need,” she continues. “The exchange of recognition, gratitude, and reciprocity for these gifts is just as important in a Brooklyn flat as under a birch bark roof” (240). 

The next chapter, “Burning Cascade Head,” begins with “prodigal salmon coming home” (241). They are greeted by a welcome feast (242). Kimmerer is thinking about the past, about how things were in the Pacific northwest before settlers arrived. The people set fire to the grass headland near the ocean as a way of welcoming the salmon home (242). After the salmon have been running upriver for four days, the people begin to fish (243). The salmon fed the people, but also the forests (244). Then disease arrives on the Oregon coast in the 1830s (245). By the time settlers arrived around 1850, the villages were ghost towns (245). They began draining the marshes in the estuaries, which have “the highest biodiversity and productivity of any wetland,” changing the river “from a capillary system to a single straightened flow to hurry the river to the sea,” a disaster for young salmon who could no longer ease themselves from freshwater to salt (245-46). The salmon were no longer honoured, and the construction of dams upstream “reduced spawning to nil” (246). “The commodity mind-set drove fish that had fed the people for thousands of years close to extinction,” Kimmerer writes (246). Fewer and fewer fish returned, and no ceremonies welcomed them (246). 

Kimmerer hikes on a trail up a mountain in Oregon, onto the headland where the fires were once set to welcome the salmon home (246-47). Knowing the story about the rivers and the salmon, she cries tears of both joy and grief: “Joy for the being of the shimmering world and grief for what we have lost” (248). The other walkers there “look like they’re trying to remember what it would be like to love the world” (248).

“It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land,” Kimmerer writes. “We know that loving a person has agency and power—we know it can change everything. yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart” (248). Burning the grass headland “cemented the people’s connection to salmon, to each other, and to the spirit world, but it also created biodiversity,” creating “the headland meadows that are home to fire-dependent species that occur nowhere else on earth” (248). The First Salmon Ceremony, a feast “of love and gratitude,” wasn’t just “internal emotional expressions but actually aided the upstream passage of the fish by releasing them from predation at a critical time. Laying salmon bones back in the streams returned nutrients to the system. These are ceremonies of practical reverence” (248-49).

“Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention,” Kimmerer continues. “If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable” (249). And, she states, “[c]eremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm. These acts of reverence are powerfully pragmatic. These are ceremonies that magnify life” (249). In many Indigenous communities, ceremony remains strong, although in settler society, it has withered away (249). The ceremonies that remain—birthdays, weddings, funerals, graduations—focus on ourselves; they are rites of personal transition (249). That doesn’t mean they are unimportant or that they have no effects (250). “But imagine standing by the river, flooded with those same feelings as the Salmon march into the auditorium of their estuary,” she writes:

Rise in their honor, thank them for all the ways they have enriched our lives, sing to honor their hard work and accomplishments against all odds, tell them they are our hope for the future, encourage them to go off into the world to grow, and pray that they will come home. Then the feating begins. Can we extend our bonds of celebration and support from our own species to the others who need us? (250)

Settler ceremonies tend to be brought from somewhere else, while Indigenous ceremonies honour other species and events in the seasons’ annual cycles (250). 

“To have agency in the world, ceremonies should be reciprocal co-creations, organic in nature, in which the community creates ceremony and the ceremony creates communities,” Kimmerer writes (250). Ceremonies should not be appropriated from Indigenous peoples, but “generating new ceremony in today’s world is hard to do” (250). She wants to see ceremonies that have “an active, reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world,” that are not commercialized (251). “I want to stand by the river in my finest dress. I want to sing, strong and hard, and stomp my feet with a hundred others so that the waters hum with our happiness,” she states. “I want to dance for the renewal of the world” (251).

Today, a different kind of First Salmon Ceremony happens, as the U.S. Forest Service and partner organizations led by Oregon State University dismantle the human structures that have damaged the estuary (251). Research scientists participate in that work (251). “Doing science with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity with the more-than-human world,” Kimmerer suggests (252). Ecologists are motivated by a desire to form intimacy and respect with other species “that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders. It too can be a path to kinship” (252). 

And that ceremony was successful: “When the dikes and dams were removed, the land did remember how to be a salt marsh. Water remembered how it was supposed to distribute itself through tiny drainage channels in the sediment. Insects remembered where they were supposed to lay their eggs. Today the natural curvaceous flow of the river has been restored” (252). The salmon are returning (252).

According to Kimmerer, the First Salmon Ceremonies were for the salmon, not for the people, “and for all the glittering realms of Creation, for the renewal of the world. People understood that when lives are given on their behalf they have received something precious. Ceremonies are a way to give something precious in return” (252-53). The essay ends by juxtaposing the traditional ceremonies it began with against the scientists waiting for the salmon to return, one single microscope light “blazing a tiny beacon into the night, calling the salmon back home” (253).

“Putting Down Roots,” the next chapter, begins along the Mohawk River. When the Mohawk people lived there, before they were pushed out by waves of settlers, “the river was full of fish and its spring floods brought silt to fertilize their cornfields. Sweetgrass, called wenserakon ohonte in Mohawk, flourished on the banks” (254-55). But settlers and their governments worked to eradicate Haudenosaunee languages and culture (255). 

Kimmerer and a research team of graduate students are planting sweetgrass on the banks of the river (255-56). She thinks about baskets, both the ones made of sweetgrass and the ones made of black ash, both of which grow along the rivers, in wetlands, and which “are reunited as neighbors in the Mohawk baskets. Braids of sweetgrass are woven among the splints of ash” (256). 

The St. Lawrence River, blocked by power dams, is now a site of heavy industry and pollution, where fishermen can no longer eat what they catch (257). In 1993, Tom Powter and a group of friends left the Akwesasne reservation for 400 acres of woods and farms in the Mohawk Valley, at a place called Kanatsiohareke, the site of an ancient Mohawk village (257). The project was intended to be a reversal of boarding schools: “Kanatsiohareke would return to the people what was taken from them—their language, their culture, their spirituality, their identity. The children of the lost generation could come home” (258). Saving the language by teaching it to children was essential (258). Kimmerer wanted to contribute the bringing back the sweetgrass (259). “The history of the plants is inextricably tied up with the history of the people, with the forces of destruction and creation,” Kimmerer writes (261). When settlers arrived, they brought their own plants, including weeds, which supplanted the native species:

Plants mirror changes in culture and ownership of land. Today this field is choked by a vigorous sward of foreign plants that the first sweetgrass pickers would not recognize: quackgrass, timothy, clover, daisies. A wave of invasive purple loosestrife threatens from along the slough. To restore sweetgrass here we’ll need to loosen the hold of the colonists, opening a way for the return of the natives. (261)

Sweetgrass rarely makes viable seeds; instead, it spreads by rhizomes (262). “But those tender white rhizomes cannot make their way across a highway or a parking lot,” Kimmerer notes. “When a patch of sweetgrass was lost to the plow it cold not be replenished by seed from outside” (262). Development and draining of wetlands and invasion of nonnative species all contribute to the disappearance of sweetgrass (262).

Kimmerer has been growing sweetgrass in nursery stocks at her university (262). “But cultivation is miles removed from restoration,” Kimmerer continues:

The science of restoration ecology depends upon myriad other factors—soil, insects, pathogens, herbivores, competition. Plants are seemingly equipped with their own sense about where they will live, defying the predictions of science, for there is yet another dimension to sweetgrass’ requirements. The most vigorous stands are the ones tended by basket makers. Reciprocity is a key to success. When the sweetgrass is cared for and treated with respect, it will flourish, but if the relationship fails, so does the plant. (262)

All of this might explain why the sweetgrass I planted in our yard 20 years ago quickly disappeared: I would never have thought of picking any of the grass for any purpose. Kimmerer is engaged in more than just an ecological restoration: she is trying to restore a relationship between plants and people (263). “We are dreaming of a time when the land might give thanks for the people,” she writes (263).

Kimmerer thinks about how the Carlisle boarding school robbed her of the chance to learn stories about sweetgrass from her grandfather (263-64). She writes about “ceremonies of remembrance and reconciliation” held at that school on the occasion of the city’s tricentennial (265). “Forgiveness was hard to find,” she writes (265). But, she continues, “grief can also be comforted by creation, by rebuilding the homeland that was taken. The fragments, like ash splints, can be rewoven into a new whole. And so we are here along the river, kneeling in the earth with the smell of sweetgrass in our hands” (266). 

The next essay, “Umbilicaria: The Belly Button of the World,” is about a variety of lichen, umbilicaria, which grows on rocks, among other places. “They blur the definition of what it means to be an individual, as a lichen is not one being, but two: a fungus and an alga,” Kimmerer tells us. “These partners are as different as could be and yet are joined in a symbiosis so close that their union becomes a wholly new organism” (269). She thinks about that symbiosis as a marriage (269-70). She describes how the symbiosis works (270-71). The fungus and the alga only come together under harsh, stressful conditions (272). “These ancients carry teachings in the ways that they live,” Kimmerer writes. “They remind us of the enduring power that arises from mutualism, from the sharing of the gifts carried by each species. Balanced reciprocity has enabled them to flourish under the most stressful of conditions. Their success is measured not by consumption and growth, but by graceful longevity and simplicity, by persistence while the world changed around them” (275). Umbilicaria is sensitive to air pollution (275). It has “the responsibility of building up life and in an eyeblink of earth’s history we have set about undermining their work to usher in a time of great environmental stress, a barrenness of our own making” (275). Kimmerer suspects that lichens will endure, and humans could, too, if we would listen to their teachings (275-76). She notes that in Asia, Umbilicaria is called “the ear of the stone,” and she wonders if it will listen to “our anguish when we understand what we have done” (276).

“Old-Growth Children,” the following chapter, is about the Douglas fir and coastal rainforests (277). Those forests are quiet now, but there was a time when people were here (277). These are the biggest trees in the world, trees that were born before Columbus sailed (278). But the trees are only the beginning: “The numbers of species of mammals, birds, amphibians, wildflowers, ferns, mosses, lichens, fungi, and insects are staggering” (278). These were among the greatest forests on earth, and “Native peoples of the coastal Pacific Northwest made rich livelihoods here for millennia, living with one foot in the forest and one on the shore, gathering the abundance of both” (278). Cedar trees provided canoes, paddles, fishing floats, nets, ropes, arrows, and harpoons (278). Even the waterproof capes and hats of the paddlers were made from the cedar (278). “Along the creeks and bottomlands, the women sang their way down well-worn trails to find just the right tree for each purpose,” Kimmerer writes. “Whatever they needed they asked for respectfully, and for whatever they received they offered prayers and gifts in return” (278). “When sickness came, the people turned again to her,” Kimmerer continues, noting that the trees are sources of physical and spiritual medicine (279).  Kimmerer notes that the coastal peoples were wealthy, and that “extraordinary art, science, and architecture flowered in their midst” (279). The potlatch tradition reflected “the generosity of the land to the people” (279-80). “Cedar unstintingly provided for the people, who responded with gratitude and reciprocity,” Kimmerer writes (280).

Kimmerer now shifts to the present, to a forester, Franz Dolp, who is walking through the contemporary forest (280). It’s a different place, scarred by logging (281). “Only at the top of Mary’s Peak, within the boundaries of a preserve, is there a continuous span of forest, rough textured and multihued from a distance, the signature of the old-growth forest, the forest that used to be,” she writes (281-82). Dolp, a professor of economics in Oregon, came to live at Shotpouch Creek after his marriage ended (282). The conifers were gone, but alders and maples were growing, trying to keep the land from slumping into the creek (282). A clear-cut changes the land (283). “Forest ecosystems have tools for dealing with massive disturbance, evolved from a history of blowdown, landslide, and fire,” Kimmerer writes (283). Pioneer species grow quickly—mostly plants that produce berries—producing “a community based on the principles of unlimited growth, sprawl, and high energy consumption, sucking up resources as fast as they can, wresting land from others through competition, and then moving on” (284). When those resources run short, “cooperation and strategies that promote stability—strategies perfected by rainforest ecosystems—will be favored by evolution” (284). Kimmerer compares salmonberry thickets to industrial forestry, resource extraction, and other aspects of human sprawl, which swallow up the land, reduce biodiversity, and simply ecosystems “at the demand of societies always bent on having more. In five hundred years we exterminated old-growth cultures and old-growth ecosystems, replacing them with opportunistic culture” (284).

In comparison, “[t]he old-growth forest is as stunning in its elegance of function as in its beauty. Under conditions of scarcity, there can be no frenzy of uncontrolled growth or waste of resources” (284). Old-growth forests are models of efficiency, optimizing the capture of solar energy (284). “If we are looking for models of self-sustaining communities, we need look no further than an old-growth forest,” Kimmerer continues. “Or the old-growth cultures they raised in symbiosis with them” (284). Here, Kimmerer returns to Dolp and his desire to live in a sustainable way (285). Dolp wanted to return the land to forest, and he encountered bureaucratic obstacles, since it was designated as timberland, not forest (286). He learned how to replant a forest by observing the forest, by becoming its student (286). “Over time, Franz became a very good ecologist, reading his way through both the printed library and the more subtle library of texts offered by the forest itself,” Kimmerer tells us. “His goal was to match his vision for an ancient forest with the possibilities that the land provided” (287). He planted cedar along the creeks (287). He named places at Shotpouch, even individual trees, remnants of the original forest (288). Beaver ate his creekside plantings of cedar (289). He began watching the watershed heal from the damage it has suffered (290). He created the Spring Creek Project, bringing together artists and ecologists at his cabin (291). But, sadly, he died in a collision with a paper mill truck in 2004 (291).The young cedars he planted invite the rest of us “to be part of the dance of regeneration. Clumsy at first, from generations of sitting on the sidelines, we stumble until we find the rhythm” (292). “Here in a homemade forest, poets, writers, scientists, foresters, shovels, seeds, elk, and alder join in the circle with Mother Cedar, dancing the old-growth children into being,” Kimmerer concludes. “We’re all invited. Pick up a shovel and join the dance” (292).

The following chapter, “Witness to the Rain,” sees Kimmerer still on the Oregon coast. (She must have been a visiting professor there at some point.) Most places she knows, “water is a discrete entity,” “hemmed in by well-defined boundaries,” but in the rain forest (those edges seem to blur, with rain to fine and constant as to be indistinguishable from air and ceders wrapped with cloud so dense that only their outlines emerge” (293-94). Nor does the river, Lookout Creek, “respect clear boundaries”: it flows beneath the bed of the river into the forest, “[a] deep invisible river, known to roots and rocks, the water and the land intimate beyond our knowing” (294). This is the “hypothetic flow,” and it’s what Kimmerer is listening for (294). She stands in the rain, wondering whether all of the drops that fall on the moss are the same size, if “the high humidity around moss makes the drops last longer” (294). She is soaked, after hours in the rain, but, she writes, “I don’t want to just be a bystander to rain, passive and protected; I want to be part of the downpour, to be soaked, along with the dark humus that squishes underfoot” (295). “I want to feel what the cedars feel and know what they know,” she tells us, but unlike the cedars, she is warm-blooded and looks to creatures like her, who require places of refuge, but she can’t find any shelter until she crawls under a giant fallen log (295). That log could fall on her, she notes, but she feels safe in the moment: “The pace of my resting and the pace of its falling run on different clocks” (296).

“Time as an objective reality has never made much sense to me,” Kimmerer writes. “It’s what happens that matters. How can minutes and years, devices of our own creation, mean the same thing to gnats and to cedars?” (296). “If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment,” she continues (296). She examines the nearby moss on which rain is falling, a “threadlike tip” of a leaf “animated in a most unplantlike fashion,” in which she sees grace, “an animal made of green light and water, a mere thread of a being who like me has gone walking in the rain” (296-97). 

Down by the river, she ponders the differences between rainwater and the river, which are so different and yet kin (297). She tests a hypothesis about the size of raindrops using lichen that has fallen from an alder (297). One she puts in a water containing tannins from an alder leaf, and the other in rainwater: the drops that form from each are different sizes (298). “One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random,” she suggests. “Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another” (298).

Beside the river is a flooded meadow (298). “It is a different river in August than in October,” Kimmerer writes. “You’d have to stand here a long time to know them both” (298). We might not be able to know the river, but perhaps we could know the raindrops (298). Different plants shed the rainwater differently (299). She tries to register the different sounds phonetically (299). “Maybe there is no such thing as rain; there are only raindrops, each with its own story,” she states (299).

Then Kimmerer sees her face reflected in a dangling drop of water (300). “The fish-eye lens gives me a giant forehead and tiny ears,” she concludes. “I suppose that’s the way we humans are, thinking too much and listening too little. Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop. The drop swells on the tip of a cedar and I catch it on my tongue like a blessing” (300). This moment might be one that could be critiqued as romantic, given its echoes of the Eucharist and its perhaps rather easy effacement of the differences between the observer and the observed.

The next chapter, “Windigo Footprints,” is the first in the book’s final section, “Burning Sweetgrass.” I may have read this one before, while writing a paper on the cannibal monster who is the subject of some Cree narratives, but I took no notes and only remember the suggestion that settler society acts like that creature. It’s set in winter, appropriately, since those cannibal stories are late-winter stories, in a season of hunger for the creatures that are not asleep (303). “It is on nights like this that the Windigo is afoot,” Kimmerer writes. “You can hear its unearthly shrieks as it hunts through the blizzard” (303). She explains:

The Windigo is the legendary monster of our Anishinaabe people, the villain of a tale told on freezing nights in the north woods. You can feel it lurking behind you, a being in the shape of an outsized man, ten feet tall, with frost-white hair hanging from its shaking body. With arms like tree trunks, feet as big as snowshoes, it travels easily through the blizzards of the hungry time, stalking us. The hideous stench of its carrion breath poisons the clean scent of snow as it pants behind us. Yellow fangs hang from its mouth that is raw where it has chewed off its lips from hunger. Most telling of all, its heart is made of ice. (304)

I’ve also heard that, along with its lips, this being has chewed off its own fingertips as well. “The Windigo is a human being who has become a cannibal monster,” Kimmerer continues. “Its bite will transform victims into cannibals too” (304).

“Starvation in winter was a reality for our people, particularly in the era of the Little Ice Age when winters were especially hard and long,” she tells us. “Some scholars suggest that Windigo mythology also spread quickly in the time of the fur trade, when overexploitation of game brought famine to the villages. The ever-present fear of winter famine is embodied in the icy hunger and gaping maw of the Windigo” (304). The stories “reinforced the taboo against cannibalism, when the madness of hunger and isolation rustled at the edge of winter lodges” (304). “The more a Windigo eats, the more revenous it becomes,” she continues. “It shrieks with its craving, its mind a torture of unmet want. Consumed by consumption, it lays waste to humankind” (305). The stories about this creature display “the collective fears and deepest values of a people” by presenting a thing “which cares more for its own survival than for anything else” (305).

This being “is a case study of a positive feedback loop, in which a change in one entity promotes a similar change in another, connected part of the system” (305). Thus, its hunger makes it eat, which feeds its hunger ever more “in an eventual frenzy of uncontrolled consumption” (305). However, “[s]table, balanced systems are typified by negative feedback loops, in which a change in one component incites an opposite change in another, so they balance each other out” (305). Thus, eating produces satiety, a decrease in hunger (305). “Negative feedback is a form of reciprocity, a coupling of forces that create balance and sustainability,” she notes (305). “Windigo stories sought to encourage negative feedback loops in the minds of listeners,” she continues, by building “resistance against the insidious germ of taking too much. The old teachings recognized that Windigo nature is in each of us, so the monster was created in stories, that we might learn why we should recoil from the greedy part of ourselves” (305-06). Those stories encourage people to “[s]ee the dark, recognize its power,” but to refrain from feeding it” (306). Ojibwe scholar Basil Johnston and others “point to the current epidemic of self-destructive practices—addiction to alcohol, drugs, gambling, technology, and more—as a sign that Windigo is alive and well” (306). But, more importantly, as Johnston tells us, “multinational corporations have spawned a new breed of Windigo that insatiably devours the earth’s resources” (306). Our addiction to economic growth is probably a sign of that creatures ascendancy in our thinking and in our behaviour.

Kimmerer recalls a brief visit to oilfields in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the ugliness of the town, the potential violence of the drug traffickers, “the snarling town ringed with rainbow-colored lagoons of petrochemical waste, too many to count. The footprints of the Windigo” (307). She sees those footprints everywhere: in polluted lakes, clear cuts, open-pit mining, oil spills, industrial agriculture, “[a] closet stuffed with clothes” (307). “Windigo footprints all, they are the tracks of insatiable consumption,” she writes. “You can see them walking the malls, eyeing your farm for a housing development, running for Congress” (307). By allowing the market to define what we value, we are all complicit, because we have redefined the “common good” so that it depends “on profligate lifestyles that enrich the sellers while impoverishing the soul and the earth” (307).

Cautionary tales, like those about the cannibal spirit, “arose in a commons-based society where sharing was essential to survival and greed made any individual a danger to the whole” (307). Then, those greedy people would be counseled, then ostracized if their behaviour didn’t change, and finally banished, “doomed to wander hungry and alone, wreaking vengeance on the ones who spurned them” (307). “It is a terrible punishment to be banished from the web of reciprocity, with no one to share with you and no one for you to care for,” she writes (307). “Maybe we’ve all been banished to lonely corners by our obsession with private property,” she continues. “We’ve accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy. It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave” (308). She fears the ascendancy of that way of thinking and acting: “We have unleashed a monster” (308). 

“Ecological economists argue for reforms that would ground economics in ecological principles and the constraints of thermodynamics,” she concludes, noting that “we must sustain natural capital and ecosystem services if we are to maintain quality of life” (308). However, our “governments still cling to the neoclassical fallacy that human consumption has no consequences. We continue to embrace economic systems that prescribe infinite growth on a finite planet, as if somehow the universe had repealed the laws of thermodynamics on our behalf” (308). “Our leaders wilfully ignore the wisdom and the models of every other species on the planet—except of course those that have gone extinct,” she writes. “Windigo thinking” (309).

The next chapter, “The Sacred and the Superfund,” begins with rain in upstate New york, “the ancestral homelands of the Onondaga people, the central fire of the Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, Confederacy” (310). “Traditional Onondaga understand a world in which all beings were given a gift, a gift that simultaneously engenders a responsibility to the world,” Kimmerer writes. “Water’s gift is its role as life sustainer, and its duties are manifold: making plants grow, creating homes for fish and mayflies, and, for me today, offering a cool drink” (310). The water she drinks is sweet because it comes from springs that flow through limestone, while others are salty and were used by the Onondaga to season corn soup and preserve fish (310). Water is mentioned in the Thanksgiving address, which also outlines the responsibilities of people—“to give thanks for the gifts of the earth and to care for them” (311).

The Haudenosaunee have stories about a time when they forgot to live in gratitude: “They became greedy and jealous and began fighting among themselves. Conflict brought only more conflict, until war between the nations became continuous. Soon grief was known in every longhouse and yet the violence went on. All were suffering” (311). That is when the Peacemaker, a young Huron man, came to the Haudenosaunee. “Few heeded him at first, but those who listened were transformed,” Kimmerer writes (311). For years the Peacemaker and his allies “travelled between villages and one by one the chiefs of the warring nations came to accept the message of peace, all but one. Tadodaho, an Onondaga leader, refused the way of peace for his people. He was so filled with hate that his hair writhed with snakes and his body was crippled by vitriol” (311-12). However, when he accepted the message of peace, his “twisted body was restored to health and together the messengers of peace combed the snakes from his hair. He too was transformed” (312). The Peacemaker gathered the leaders of the five Haudenosaunee nations beneath the Great Tree of Peace “and joined them with one mind”; that tree came to represent “the unity of the Five Nations” (312). The Peacemaker “lifted the great tree from the soil and the assembled chiefs stepped forward to cast their weapons of war into the hole,” and the nations agreed to “live by the Great Law of Peace, which sets out right relations among peoples and with the natural world. Four white roots spread out to the four directions, inviting all peace-loving nations to shelter under the tree’s branches” (312). “So was born the great Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the oldest living democracy on the planet,” on the shores of Onondaga Lake (312). Today, however, after another stranger, and a different kind of violence, came to the land, “the ground where the Peacemaker walked is a Superfund site” (312).

There are nine Superfund sites around Onondaga Lake, around which Syracuse, New York, has grown (312). More than a century of industrial development has left the lake one of the most polluted in the United States (313). “It is as if the newcomers to Onondaga Lake had declared war, not on each other, but with the land,” Kimmerer writes (313). Beds of industrial waste have filled in the shoreline; that waste is known as Solvay waste, “after the Solvay Process Company that left it behind” (313). “The Solvay Process was a chemical breakthrough that allowed for the production of soda ash, an essential component of other industrial processes such as glass manufacturing and making detergents, pulp, and paper,” Kimmerer explains. “Native limestone was melted in coke-fired furnaces and then reacted with salt to produce soda ash. This industry fueled the growth of the whole region, and chemical processing expanded to include organic chemicals, dyes, and chlorine gas. Train lines ran steadily past the factories, shipping out tons of produces. Pipes ran in the other direction, pouring out tons of waste” (313). Those hills of waste “are the topographic inverse of the open pit minds—the largest open pit mines in New York State, still unreclaimed—where the limestone rocks were quarried, the earth gouged out in one place to bury the ground in another” (314).

Kimmerer imagines the first drops of waste coming out of the pipes at the lake (314). “Did the frogs and mink get away in time to avoid being entombed?” she asks. “What about the turtles? Too slow—they wouldn’t be able to escape being embedded at the bottom of the pile in a perversion of the story of the world’s creation, when the earth was carried on Turtle’s back” (314). The lake’s blue water became white paste; then the pipe was moved to the surrounding wetlands (314). By the time rainwater leaches through the heap of waste, it is “as salty as soup and corrosive as lye. Its beautiful name, water, is lost. It is now called leachate” (314). Leachate burns skin. Engineers now “collect the leachate and mix it with hydrochloric acid in order to neutralize the pH” before releasing it back into the lake” (315). Here, Kimmerer’s personification of the water as innocent could lead to charges of romanticism, but it’s hard not to sympathize with her account of how industrial pollution has turned the water into poison.

The shore of Onondaga Lake is lined with cliffs of Solvay waste (315). Oncolite, “accretions of calcium carbonate . . . pepper the lake bottom” like “tumorous rocks” (315). Rusting pipes stick out of the waste at odd intervals (315). Crystal sheets of salt cover the water (315). “Before the Allied Chemical Company, successor to Solvay Process, ceased operation, the salinity of Onondaga Lake was ten times the salinity of the headwaters of Nine Mile Creek,” Kimmerer tells us (315-16). Aquatic plants can’t grow in the water, and the lake is thus oxygen-poor, and the whole food chain is left without a home (316). Meanwhile, the lake has been fertilized with nitrogen and phosphorous from municipal sewage, which fuels algae blooms which die off and rob the oxygen that is left in the water as they decay (316). The lake smells like the dead fish that wash up on shore on hot summer days (316). 

Fishing in Onondaga Lake has been banned since 1970 because the fish contain high concentrations of mercury, dumped in the lake by Allied Chemical (316). Kids used to make pocket money collecting mercury from the waste beds, and today the mercury remains trapped in the sediments, from which it circulates in the aquatic food chain (316). “A sampling core drilled into the lake bottom cuts through sludge, trapped layers of discharged gas, oil, and sticky black ooze,” Kimmerer writes. “Analysis of these cores reveals significant concentrations of cadmium, barium, chromium, cobalt, lead, benzene, chlorobenzene, assorted xylenes, pesticides, and PCBs” (316). The whitefish Onondaga Lake was once famous for are gone (317). Swimming in the lake has been banned since 1940 (317). 

The dead lake isn’t clear; instead, its waters are nearly opaque with silt which comes from Onondaga Creek, where the Tully mudboils, “which erupt into the creek like mud volcanoes,” send sediment downstream (317). Those mudboils might be the result of salt mining upstream, a process by which water was pumped into the subterranean salt deposits and the brine piped miles down the valley to the Solvay plant (317). “The brine line was run through the remaining territory of the Onondaga Nation, where breaks in the line ruined the well water,” Kimmerer continues. “Eventually the dissolved salt domes collapsed underground, creating holes through which groundwater pushed with high pressure. The resulting gushers created the mudboils that flow downstream and fill the lake with sediment” (317-18). The creek was once a fishery for Atlantic salmon and a place where children swam; now it is as brown as chocolate milk (318).

“The wounds to these waters are as numberous as the snakes in the Tadodaho’s hair, and they must be named before they can be combed out,” Kimmerer writes (318). She describes the extent of ancestral Onondaga territory, the treaties between the Onondaga and the United States, George Washington’s war of extermination against the Onondaga, the assault on language and culture represented by boarding schools, the banning of longhouse ceremonies of thanksgiving (318). Nevertheless, the Onondaga people “never surrendered their caregiving responsibilities. They have continued the ceremonies that honor the land and their connection to it” (319). However, without title to their lands, they cannot protect them, and so they have watched, powerless, as “[t]he plants, animals, and waters they were bound to protect dwindled away, though the covenant with the land was never broken. . . . The people went on giving thanks to the land, although so much of the land had little reason to be thankful for the people” (319).

“Generations of grief, generations of loss, but also strength—the people did not surrender. They had spirit on their side. They had their traditional teachings. And they also had the law,” Kimmerer writes (319). In 2005, the Onondaga Nation filed a complaint in federal court with the goal of reclaiming title to their homelands, so “that they might once again exercise their care-giving responsibilities” (319). The US Supreme Court ruled that Haudenosaunee lands had been illegally taken (319-20). The Onondaga have said they will not try to evict people from their homes—they know the pain of displacement too well to inflict it on others—and their suit begins with a reference to the Gayanashagowa, the Great Law of Peace (320). The defendants include the state of New York and corporations responsible for the pollution, including Honeywell, which is being held accountable for the cleanup of the lake, although no one is quite sure about the best approach for dealing with the contaminated sediments (321). Honeywell’s proposed cleanup plan is minimal and leaves much of the toxins in place to continue to circulate in the ecosystem (321). However, the Onondaga Nation land rights action “stipulated a full cleanup as part of restitution; no halfway measures would be accepted” (322). In 2010, however, the federal court dismissed the Onondaga Nation’s case (322).

Kimmerer recalls her experience as a student in Syracuse, and as a teacher there (322-23). One day, she visited the sediments, behind the fairground (323). Surrounded by reeds, she saw a cottonwood  tree surrounded by life-sized figures posed as if they had been murdered. It was the site of the Solvay Lions Club’s “Haunted Hayrides” (324-25). “The Solvay waste beds: how very fitting a venue for our fears,” she writes. “What we ought to be afraid of isn’t in the haunts, but under them”—the toxins trickling into the lake (325). Even more frightening “is the mind-set that allowed it to happen, that thought it was okay to fill a lake with toxic stew. . . . Human beings made this happen, not a faceless corporation. There were no threats, no extenuating circumstances to force their hands, just business as usual. And the people of the city allowed it to happen” (325). She ponders the etymology of the term “waste beds,” “[r]uined land” that “was accepted as the collateral damage of progress” (326). 

“The waste beds are not unique,” she continues. “The cause and the chemistry vary from my homeland to yours, but each of us can name these wounded places. We hold them in our minds and our hearts. The question is, what do we do in response?” (327). “We could take the path of fear and despair,” documenting all of the destruction, creating a vision of woe and despair (327). She cites philosopher Joanna Macy’s suggestion that “until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health” (327). But grief is not enough: the land also gives us joy and we must return that gift, through action (327). “The participatory role of people in the well-being of the land has been lost, our reciprocal relations reduced to a KEEP OUT sign,” she writes (327). “Despair is paralysis,” she continues. “It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth. Environmental despair is a poison every bit as destructive as the methylated mercury in the bottom of Onondaga Lake” (328).

Kimmerer suggests that restoration “is a powerful anecdote to despair” which “offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual” (328). We have to clean up our mess (328). But restoration means different things depending on what we think the land is: “If land is just real estate, then restoration looks very different than if land is the source of a subsistence economy and a spiritual home. Restoring for production of natural resources is not the same as renewal of land as cultural identity” (328). Such questions “are played out on the Solvay waste beds” (328). The remediation efforts to date have come out of a notion of land as property, of covering the damaged land with invasive phragmites (329). But better ideas exist: “new laws and policy demanded evolution in the concept of restoration: restored sites would have to not only look like nature, but have functional integrity as well” (330). In this model, plants are used “as an engineering solution to water pollution”; shrub willows are used to collect the salts, alkali, and other compounds, and they are then mown down and used as feedstock for biomass fuel digesters (330-31). But that mechanistic fix doesn’t go far enough. “What if we took the indigenous worldview?” Kimmerer asks. “The ecosystem is not a machine, but a community of sovereign beings, subjects rather than objects. What if those beings were the drivers?” (331).

She describes the oldest section of the waste beds, where nature and time are acting to restore the land: “Here on the waste beds there are expanses without a living thing, but there are also teachers of healing and their names are Birch and Alder, Aster and Plantain, Cattail, Moss, and Switchgrass. On the most barren, ground, on the wounds we have inflicted, the plants have not turned their backs on us; instead, they have come” (331-32). The struggling plants she sees are “a form of peacemaking. Plants are the first restoration ecologists. They are using their gifts for healing the land, showing us the way” (332). The waste is changing, being turned into humus (332). Ants have returned, along with birds and deer and insects: “And so the world is made” (332). Under a few pioneering birch trees, fruit shrubs are growing, feeding the birds, which drop their seeds everywhere (332-33). “The beds are greening over. The land knows what to do when we do not,” Kimmerer writes (333). She hopes the waste beds don’t completely disappear, though; we need a reminder of the destruction we are capable of causing (333). “We have an opportunity to learn from them, to understand ourselves as students of nature, not the masters,” she writes (333). 

And yet, the part of the restoration work we have to do is not complete: “As factories have closed and citizens of the watershed build better sewage treatment plants, the waters have responded to that care. The natural resilience of the lake is making its presence known in the tiny increments of dissolved oxygen and returning fish” (333). Hydrogeologists have redirected the output of the mudboils so that the sediment load of Onondaga Creek has been lightened (333). Trout are once again living in the lake, and eagles have nested on the north shore (334). “The waters have not forgotten their responsibility,” she continues. “The waters are reminding the people that they can use their healing gifts when we will use ours” (334). 

However, the plants that are returning are not a native ecosystem (334). “It is unlikely to lead to a plant community that the Onondaga Nation would recognize from their ancestral past,” Kimmerer writes. “Given the drastic changes produced by industrial contamination, it is probably not possible to recreate cedar swamps and beds of wild rice without some help. We can trust the plants to do their work, but except for windblown volunteers, new species can’t get here across highways and acres of industry” (334). People are working to restore the native plants that survived in the lake’s salt marshes (335). Kimmerer suggests that work is a sign of an acceptance of the land as responsibility (335). She suggests that the people engaged in that restoration work love the land, although they cannot admit it in scientific discourse (335). Sweetgrass is growing beside Onondaga Lake now (335): “She reminded me that it is not the land that has been broken, but our relationship with it” (336).

“Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration,” Kimmerer writes. “Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us” (336). Although we might not be able to be restore the Onondaga watershed to its preindustrial condition, the earth itself “will restore the structure and function, the ecosystem services” (336). “What if we could fashion a restoration plan that grew from understanding multiple meanings of land?” Kimmerer asks. “Land as sustainer. Land as identity. Land as grocery store and pharmacy. Land as connection to ancestors. Land as moral obligation. Land as sacred. Land as self” (337). 

The plants growing on the waste beds remind Kimmerer of her neighbours at Onondaga Nation: “faced with daunting odds, great hostility, and an environment much changed from the rich land that first sustained them,” the Onondaga people have survived and continued to meet their responsibilities (337-38). They have issued the “Onondaga Nation Vision for a Clean Onondaga Lake,” which “follows the ancient teachings of the Thanksgiving Address” (338). “It is an exemplar of a new holistic approach, called biocultural or reciprocal restoration,” Kimmerer notes (338). It sees the land as a community of non-human persons to which we have a responsibility (338). Renewal of relationships means being able to swim in the water and eat the fish (338). “Biocultural restoration raises the bar for environmental quality of the reference ecosystem, so that as we care for the land, it can once again care for us,” she continues. “Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth” (338).

Kimmerer describes the beginning of a restoration project on the western shore of Onondaga Lake, one that saw the land as sacred and as community (338-39). Such restoration projects, even if they are small and fragile, are inspiring: “Your hands itch to pull out invasive species and replant the native flowers. Your finger trembles with a wish to detonate the explosion of an obsolete dam that would restore a salmon run. These are antidotes to the poison of despair” (339). She cites Joanna Macy’s notion of the Great Turning, from a society based on industrial growth to one based on sustaining life, and suggests that restoring land and relationship “pushes that turning wheel” (339-40). She concludes by imagining what the land could look like, an idyllic (even utopian) scene she describes as “LAND AS HOME” (340).

The next chapter, “People of Corn, People of Light,” begins: “The story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did” (341). “Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land,” Kimmerer continues. “We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers” (341). All stories are connected—each is woven from threads of older stories (341). Kimmerer tells the Mayan story of the creation of humans: unsatisfactory people made of mud, people made from wood who filled the world but whose hearts were empty of compassion and love and who expressed no gratitude for the gifts they had received, people made of light who believed themselves to be the gods’ equals, people made from corn who were grateful (341-43). The people of corn were grateful because they were beings transformed by relationship (343). Corn owes its existence to all four elements; it is light transformed by relationship; it is in relationship with people, because it needs us to sow it and tend its growth (343). “From these reciprocal acts of creation arise the elements that were missing from the other attempts to create sustainable humanity: gratitude, and a capacity for reciprocity,” Kimmerer states (343).

She considers that story of creation to reflect an ongoing process: are we yet people of corn? Might we be made of wood? Are we made of light, “in thrall to our own power”? Have we been transformed by relationship to earth (343)? She thinks Indigenous stories are important, but does not advocate their appropriation by settlers (344). Instead, “an immigrant culture must write its own new stories of relationship to place,” stories “tempered by the wisdom of those who were old on this land long before we came” (344). (The pronoun “we” is curious here.) But how can that happen? She considers the chemistry of corn’s photosynthesis to be “a beautiful poem, and the chemistry of respiration another, and the reciprocity they suggest together to be a story worth telling: “Only when people understand the symbiotic relationships that sustain them can they become people of corn, capable of gratitude and reciprocity” (344-45).

“The very facts of the world are a poem,” Kimmerer continues:

Light is turned to sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren’t these stories we all should know? (545)

But scientists are poor storytellers and communicate in abstruse, difficult language, and “the scientific worldview is all too often an enemy of ecological compassion,” because its practice feeds a scientific worldview that reinforces “reductionist, materialist economic and political agendas” (345-46). “I maintain that the destructive lens of the people made of wood is not science itself, but the lens of the scientific worldview, the illusion of dominance and control, the separation of knowledge from responsibility,” she writes. “I dream of a world guided by a lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an indigenous worldview—stories in which matter and spirit are both given voice” (346). 

Moreover, scientists lack humility, believing that theirs is the only form of intelligence. But, in the Indigenous worldview, “humans are viewed as somewhat lesser beings in the democracy of species. We are referred to as the younger brothers of Creation, so like younger brothers we must learn from our elders” (346). So, what would happen if Western scientists “saw plants as their teachers rather than their subjects? What if they told stories with that lens?” (346-47). What if they thought about our responsibility and our gift (347)? Gratitude and reciprocity are linked (347). If the human gift is language, then writing is “an act of reciprocity with the living land,” Kimmerer concludes. “Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones, stories that bring science and spirit back together to nurture our becoming people made of corn” (347).

“Collateral Damage,” the following chapter, begins with clearing the spotted salamanders off a road at night (348). It flashes back to preparing for the work while CNN reports that bombs are falling on Baghdad (349). Kimmerer thinks about the phrase “collateral damage,” words which “ask us to turn our faces away, as if man-made destruction were an inescapable fact of nature” (349). It’s raining on this spring night, and as the ice melts, spotted salamanders are waking up (349). Their migration “from winter burrows to the vernal pools where they will meet their mates” is one of the signs of spring (350). They move en masse (350). Their numbers diminish each year; a highway blocks their access to Labrador Pond, their destination: “The pond and surrounding hills are connected as state forest, but the road is a free-for-all” (350). Other creatures—frogs, toads, newts, tree frogs—are also on the move, but Kimmerer and her companions are only there to help the lumbering salamanders: “we stop and pick them up one after the other, carefully setting them on the other side of the road” (350). The females arrive first, heavy with eggs, heading for the pool where they were born (351). They are guided “by a combination of magnetic and chemical signals that herpetologists are just beginning to understand,” in part by the planet’s magnetic field (352).

When the salamanders arrive at the pool where they were born, they disappear into the water (352). The water churns with their mating dance (353). After the eggs are laid, the mother returns to the woods, while her young stay in the pool, “metamorphosing until they are capable of life on land” (353-54). “By the time the pool has dried up and forced them out, their gills will be replaced by lungs and they are ready to forage on their own,” Kimmerer writes (354). Juvenile salamanders, newts, will wander for years until they are sexually mature, when they will return to the pond (354). Salamanders can live as long as 18 years—but only if they make it across that highway (354).

“Amphibians are one of the most vulnerable groups on the planet,” Kimmerer explains. “Subject to habitat loss as wetlands and forests disappear, amphibians are the collateral damage we blindly accept as the cost of development. And because amphibians breathe through their skin, they have little ability to filter out toxins at that moist membrane between animal and atmosphere” (354). 

On this foggy night, Kimmerer compares the carnage on the highway to the broken bodies in Baghdad (355). “They are all collateral damage,” she writes. “If it is oil that sends the sons to war, and oil that fuels the engines that roar down this hollow, then we are all complicit, soldiers, civilians, and salamanders connected in death by our appetite for oil” (355). Okay, but the salamanders are innocent—they have no appetite for oil at all. They are its victims.

More people arrive—helpers, students from a herpetology class at the college (355-56). The highway department could install salamander crossings, “special culverts that allow the animals to avoid the road, but they’re expensive and the authorities need to be convinced of their importance” (356). The students are estimating the number of animals crossing the highway, and the number who die en route (356). Counting the dead is easy; counting the living requires special fences that lead the salamanders to plastic buckets, where they are caught; the students count their numbers and then let them go (356-57). By helping the animals, Kimmerer and her friends have skewed the numbers. Naturalists, she says, paraphrasing Aldo Leopold, “live in a world of wounds that only they can see” (357).

Kimmerer notes that helping the salamanders isn’t altruism; it rewards both the givers and the receivers (358). “We get to be there, to witness this amazing rite, and, for an evening, to enter into relationship with other beings, as different from ourselves as we can imagine,” she writes (358). Unlike the “species loneliness”—the “estrangement from the rest of Creation”—that the rest of us feel, for the salamanders’ helpers, the barriers between species dissolved “and we began to relieve the loneliness and know each other once again” (358). Amphibians are different from us—cold, slimy—and hard for some humans to empathize with: “They bring us face to face with our innate xenophobia, sometimes directed at other species and sometimes directed at our own” (358). However, “[b]eing with salamanders gives honor to otherness, offers an antidote to the poison of xenophobia. Each time we rescue slippery, spotted beings we attest to their right to be, to live in the sovereign territory of their own lives” (358). It also reminds Kimmerer of “the covenant of reciprocity, the mutual responsibility that we have for each other. As the perpetrators of the war zone on this road, are we not bound to heal the wounds that we inflict?” (358-59). Kimmerer can’t stop the war in Iraq, but she can pick up salamanders and carry them across a highway: “What is it that draws us to this lonely hollow? Maybe it is love, the same thing that draws the salamanders from under the logs. Or maybe we walked this road tonight in search of absolution” (359). 

Kimmerer concludes with the sound of frogs, as if they were telling listeners that the strange human desire for ease “should not mean a death sentence for the rest of Creation” (359). When she gets home, she can’t sleep, and walks to the pond behind her house, where the air rings with the calls of frogs and toads. A toad calls “Weep! Weep!” and she does: “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again” (359).

The next chapter, “Shkitagen: People of the Seventh Fire,” begins with a description of laying and lighting a fire (360). She recalls how her father taught her to split wood and build fires (360-61). “Woven into my dad’s fire teachings was appreciation for all the woods gave us and a sense of our responsibility for reciprocity,” she writes (361). “Fire building was a vital connection to those who came before,” the Potawatomi, or Bodwewadmi in their own language, which means “People of the Fire” (361). Kimmerer tries to make a fire without matches, using a bow and drill (361-62). She recalls how her father teaches children at Indigenous summer camps that Indigenous peoples used to set small fires “to take care of the land—to help the blueberries grow, or to make meadows for deer” (362). Fire can be a way to give back to the land (363). Here Kimmerer shifts to birch forests and their gifts, which include a fungus the Potawatomi call shkitagen, which is used for tinder. But, “as forests are felled and fire suppression jeopardizes species that depend upon burned ground,” like birches, “it is getting harder and harder to find” (364). 

Kimmerer shifts back to her father teaching children at the camp, discussing the Sacred Fire as a symbol of life and spirit, and the fire each child carries, their spirit, a piece of that sacred fire (364). He tells them that fire has two sides: it is both creative or destructive (365). Both sides must be respected; balance is essential (365). She thinks about a metaphorical use of the word “fire”—to represent eras in the life of the Potawatomi nation, places they have lived and the events and teachings that come from them (365). “Anishinaabe knowledge keepers—our historians and scholars—carry the narrative of the people from our earliest origin, long before the coming of the offshore people, the zaaganaash,” she writes. “They also carry what came before, for our histories are inevitably braided together with our futures. This story is known as the Seventh Fire Prophecy” (365). During the era of the First Fire, Anishinaabe people lived on the Atlantic coast, but a prophecy foretold their destruction if they didn’t move west to a place where food grows on the water (365). They moved inland, near what’s now Montreal, where a new teacher advised them to move farther west; they followed that teaching and settled on Lake Huron in three groups: the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi (366). The three groups separated, but they reunited at Manitoulin Island and formed the Three Fires Confederacy (366). In the time fo the Third Fire, they established their homelands in the place where wild rice grows (366). 

Then comes the Fourth Fire: the arrival of people from across the sea (366). Two prophets disagreed on what would transpire. One said “that if the offshore people, the zaaganaash, came in brotherhood, they would bring great knowledge. Combined with Anishnaabe ways of knowing, this would form a great new nation” (366). But the other said that these new people might be greedy, hungry for the riches of the land, and that what looked like the face of brotherhood might end up being the face of death (366). “If the fish became poisoned and the water unfit to drink, we would know which face they wore,” that prophet said (366). Because of their behaviour, the zaaganaash came to be known as chimokman—the long-knife people (366-67). The prophecies described what became history during the period of the Fifth Fire, when children were taken from their families and forbidden to speak their languages, when a universe of knowledge disappeared within a generation (367). And the prophecy said that in the time of the Sixth Fire there would be great grief and bitterness, but that something would still remain, that the peoples’ spiritual lives would keep them strong (367). During the time of the Seventh Fire, “a new people would emerge with a sacred purpose,” and they would “retrace the steps of the ones who brought us here,” gathering all the fragments left scattered along the trail: fragments of language, song, stories, sacred teachings (367-67). “Our elders say that we live in the time of the seventh fire,” Kimmerer writes. “We are the ones the ancestors spoke of, the ones who will bend to the task of putting things back together to rekindle the flames of the sacred fire, to begin the rebirth of a nation” (368).

Today, language and culture are being revitalized by people with “the courage to breathe life into old ceremonies, gather speakers to reteach the language, plant old seed varieties, restore native landscapes, bring the youth back to the land” (368). During the time of the Seventh Fire, there will be two paths forward: one grassy, the other burned black (368). If people choose the grassy path, life will be sustained; if they choose the path of cinders and ash, “the damage they have wrought upon the earth will turn against them and bring suffering and death to earth’s people” (368). We do stand at that crossroads, particularly regarding climate change and mass extinctions (368). For Kimmerer, this prophecy is a metaphor she can imagine, and she thinks about people carrying the knowledge they need to change their worldview so they can “find the tools that allow us to walk into the future” (369). The people are not alone—nonhumans also want to help, because they want to live, too—and others, of all skin tones, “who understand the choice ahead, who share a vision of respect and reciprocity, of fellowship with the more-than-human world,” are there too (369). But there are others travelling blindly down the road of cinders, and she worries they will come to the crossroads first and make the choice for everyone (369).

Kimmerer says she has seen that cinder path before, when a natural-gas pipeline exploded less than a mile from their farm and the road had melted into sharp cinders (369-70). “I was a climate refugee for just one night, but it was enough,” she writes, noting that she’s afraid of what is coming, as coastal towns are flooding and coral reefs bleaching and the permafrost is melting (370-71). “These are the fires of the scorched path,” she writes. “Let this not be the seventh fire. I pray we have not already passed the fork in the road” (371).

Everyone needs to carry something, a song, a story, a word, a tool, a ceremony, not for ourselves, but for those who are not yet born (371). “Collectively, we assemble from the wisdom of the past a vision for the future, a worldview shaped by mutual flourishing,” she writes:

Our spiritual leaders interpret this prophecy as the choice between the deadly road of materialism that threatens the land and the people, and the soft path of wisdom, respect, and reciprocity that is held in the teachings of the first fire. It is said that if the people choose the green path, then all races will go forward together to light the eighth and final fire of peace and brotherhood, forging the great nation that was foretold long ago. (371)

We have to gather everything needed—tinder, thoughts, practices—that will nurture that Eighth Fire (371-72).

Here Kimmerer returns to making a fire with a bow and drill, with the shkitagen, the materials the bow and drill and board are made from, and then she turns again to the prophecies (372-73). “As the seventh fire people walk the path, we should also be looking for shkitagen, the ones who hold the spark that cannot be extinguished,” she writes. “We find the firekeepers all along the path and greet them with gratitude and humility that against all odds, they have carried the ember forward, waiting to be breathed into life” (373). “I don’t know how the eighth fire will be lit,” she concludes. “But I do know we can gather the tinder what will nurture the flame, that we can be shkitagen to carry the fire, as it was carried to us. Is this not a holy thing, the kindling of this fire? So much depends on the spark” (373).

The book’s last chapter—except for the epilogue—is “Defeating Windigo.” It begins with a walk through the woods in spring and the discovery that her neighbour has cut down the forest, a dishonorable way to harvest (374). The invasive species that follow Windigo footprints—garlic mustard and buckthorn—will replace the trillium, bloodroot, hepatica, bellwort, trout lily, wild ginger, and wild leeks that, without the trees, will not survive the summer (374). Kimmerer fears that a world made of gifts cannot coexist with a world made of commodities, and she fears that she cannot protect what she loves against the Windigo (374). I’m reminded of the friendly farmer I met the other day who is expanding her organic farm quickly, by ploughing under native grassland; that way she won’t have to wait for the chemicals used by other farmers to dissipate. But that grassland is priceless. What world have we created, where to grow organically means destroying indigenous prairie? No doubt she can’t afford to let fields sit idle while the herbicides and pesticides and chemical fertilizers slowly disappear. And perhaps Kimmerer’s neighbour needed the money the maple forest brought in—to pay medical bills, to fund a retirement. But it’s still a destruction of the ecosystem we depend on, in ways we cannot see because we cannot measure it.

“Given the rampant destruction wrought by our contemporary Windigo-mind,” Kimmerer continues, “I wondered if our ancient stories contained some wisdom that might guide us today” (375). Some suggest that climate change will melt the cannibal monster’s icy heart, but before it dies, it will take much of what Kimmerer loves with it: “We can wait for climate change to turn the world and the Windigo into a puddle of red-tinged meltwater, or we can strap on our snowshoes and track him down” (375). She recalls a story of Nanabozho leading warriors against a cannibal monster in summer, when his power is weak, because summer is niibin—the time of plenty (375). “Here is the arrow that weakens the monster of overconsumption, a medicine that heals the sickness: its name is plenty,” she writes. “In winter, when scarcity is at its zenith, the Windigo rages beyond control, but when abundance reigns the hunger fades away and with it the power of the monster” (376). She cites the work of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who argues that capitalist societies require artificial scarcity to function, giving nothing to some and “diseases of excess” to others (376). “An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to more-than-human beings: this is a Windigo economy,” she writes (376).

The alternative may be contained within the “One Bowl and One Spoon” teaching, “which holds that the girts of the earth are all in one bowl, all to be shared from a single spoon. This is the vision of the economy of the commons, wherein resources fundamental to our well-being, like water and land and forests, are commonly held rather than commodified” (376). Managed correctly, the commons maintains abundance instead of scarcity (376). “These contemporary economic alternatives strongly echo the indigenous worldview in which the earth exists not as private property, but as a commons, to be tended with respect and reciprocity for the benefit of all,” Kimmerer states (376).

But changes in policy need to be accompanied by changes to the heart: “Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance” (376). We need to reclaim

our membership in the cultures of gratitude that formed our old relationships with the living earth. Gratitude is a powerful antidote to Windigo psychosis. A deep awareness of the gifts of the earth and of each other is medicine. The practice of gratitude lets us hear the badgering of marketers as the stomach grumblings of a Windigo. It celebrates cultures of regenerative reciprocity, where wealth is understood to be having enough to share and riches are counted in mutually beneficial relationships. Besides, it makes us happy. (377)

Gratitude for what the earth has given us gives us the courage to face the cannibal spirit that stalks us, “to refuse to participate in an economy that destroys the beloved earth to line the pockets of the greedy, to demand an economy that is aligned with life, not stacked against it” (377). And here, Kimmerer anticipates my objection: “It’s easy to write that, harder to do” (377).

The chapter ends with a story about feeding buckthorn berries to a cannibal monster (377). Buckthorn “is a rampant invader of disturbed species” and poisons the soil, “creating a floristic desert” (377-78). It is “a winner in the free market, a success story built on efficiency, monopoly, and the creation of scarcity. It is a botanical imperialist, stealing land from the native species” (378). It’s also taking over our yard. She imagines making a syrup of blackthorn berries, adding other plants, turning it into a tea (378). The cannibal monster arrives; she gives it buckthorn tea (379). He drinks it and howls for more (379). He vomits and shits himself—because the berries contain a laxative, and a whole kettle is an emetic—throwing up “coins and coal slurry, clumps of sawdust from my woods, clots of tar sand, and the little bones of birds,” “Solvay waste,” “an entire oil slick,” until his stomach is empty and all that comes up “is the thin liquid of loneliness” (379). The monster is now a carcass, but his hunger remains; she feeds it medicine: “tea of Willow to quell the fever of want and Strawberries to mend the heart. With the nourishing broth of the Three Sisters and infued with savory Wild Leeks, the medicines enter his bloodstream: White Pine for unity, justice from Pecans, the humility of Spruce roots,” “the compassion of Witch Hazel, the respect of Cedars, a blessing of Silverbells, all sweetened with the Maple of gratitude” (379). “You can’t know reciprocity until you know the gift,” she writes. “He is helpless before their power” (379). And she gives him one final gift, the story of Skywoman (379). That story is unlike the Cree narratives I’ve read about that monster, but it’s forgiving and kind and suggests that, despite her anxiety about cultural appropriation, the way for the cannibal spirit to become human is through Indigenous knowledge.

Finally, the book ends with “Epilogue: Returning the Gift.” Kimmerer is picking raspberries (380). She counts the gifts that are being given in ceremony (380). Then there is a dance (380). “This is our traditional giveaway, the minidewak, an old ceremony well loved by our people and a frequent feature of powwows,” she writes. “In the outside world, people who are celebrating life events can look forward to receiving presents in their honor. In the Potawatomi way, this expectation is turned upside down. It is the honored one who gives the gifts, who piles the blanket high to share good fortune with everyone in the circle” (381). Gifts are often handmade, and an entire community might work all year long to make presents for gifts they don’t know; at large intertribal gatherings, the gifts might be from Walmart (381). “No matter what the gift is, a black ash basket or a pot holder, the sentiment is the same,” she continues. “The ceremonial giveaway is an echo of our oldest teachings” (381). 

This ceremony is about generosity, “a moral and a material imperative, especially among people who live close to the land and know its waves of plenty and scarcity” (381). Hoarding gifts leads to a kind of constipation, and hoarders become “too heavy to join the dance,” the way those who take too much will sit beside their things, guarding them, instead of dancing (381). However, in a culture of gratitude, “everyone knows that gifts will follow the circle of reciprocity and flow back to you again. This time you give and next time you receive. Both the honor of giving and the humility of receiving are necessary halves of the equation” (381). Gifts are to be taken care of: that’s what gifts ask of you (382).

Kimmerer wonders if this ceremony comes from the behaviour of berry plants (382). “The berries are always present at our ceremonies,” she writes. “They join us in a wooden bowl. One big bowl and one big spoon, which are passed around the circle, so that each person can taste the sweetness, remember the gifts, and say thank you” (382). The gifts of the earth are to be shared, but they aren’t limitless, and when there’s one spoon, it’s the same size for everyone (382). Berries show that gratitude isn’t enough to refill the empty bowl: “The berries trust that we will uphold our end of the bargain and disperse their seeds to new places to grow, which is good for berries and for boys. They reminds us that all flourishing is mutual. We need the berries and the berries need us. Their gifts multiply by our care for them, and dwindle from our neglect” (382). But people have abandoned those berry teachings, and act “[a]s if the earth were not a bowl of berries, but an open pit mine, and the spoon a gouging shovel” (383). We act like burglars, breaking into the earth to take fossil fuels, instead of receiving the gifts of wind and sun and water (383). 

“We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying,” Kimmerer continues. “Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth” (383). Elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember this fact: “In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift that we must pass on, just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning. For the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers and the memory of snow” (383). Kimmerer imagines “people recognizing, for perhaps the first time, the dazzling gifts of the world, seeing them with new eyes, just as they teeter on the cusp of undoing. Maybe just in time. Or maybe too late” (383). She lists the gifts of the earth and wants “to hear a great song of thanks rise on the wind. I think that song might save us” (383). That song, the drums, will lead to a dance celebrating the living earth (383-84).

“The moral covenant of reciprocity calls us to honor all our responsibilities for all we have been given, for all that we have taken,” Kimmerer concludes. “It’s our turn now, long overdue. Let us hold a giveaway for Mother Earth, spread our blankets out for her and pile them high with gifts of our own making”: books, works of art, poems, compassionate acts, ideas, tools (384). “Gifts of mind, hands, heart, voice, and vision all offered up on behalf of the earth,” she states. “Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world” (384). We must do this, she says, in her final sentence, “[i]n return for the privilege of breath” (384).

Braiding Sweetgrass is an important book. Its emphasis on gratitude and reciprocity are absolutely important. So too (for my current project, anyway) is its focus on botany. It’s not a short book, and it offers more to think about than I can consider here, in this conclusion. In fact, I’m almost overwhelmed by it. It’s also a model for writing creative nonfiction—particularly the way Kimmerer shifts back and forth between personal narrative and wider contexts. It’s a generous book—to settlers, I mean—and it might be too generous, given the way she describes the society and economy we’ve established as participating in the Windigo spirit. I also wonder whether that spirit can be rehabilitated, as Kimmerer’s story suggests, or whether it must be eliminated, as the Cree narratives I’ve read teach. That story might be too generous to that creature and the the economy it represents, but at the same time, Kimmerer is clearly reaching for something hopeful, something positive, despite everything in our world that calls us to despair. That sense of hope is worth holding onto, even if it doesn’t quite feel real on a day when temperatures in British Columbia are reaching 49 degrees and people are watching for catastrophic forest fires. If this is a foretaste of the future, we are in terrible trouble.

Works Cited

Garneau, David. “Migration as Territory: Performing Domain with a Non-Colonial Aesthetic Attitude.” Voz-à-Voz/Voice-à-Voice, http://www.vozavoz.ca/feature/david-garneau.

Kimmerer, Robin. “Speaking of Nature.” Orion Magazine, 12 June 2017, https://orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/. 

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Levi, Primo. “Carbon.” The Periodic Table, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, Schocken, 1984, pp. 226-36.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 3, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1-25. 

Todd, Zoe. “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory.” Afterall, vol. 43, 2017, pp. 102-07.

“We’re Losing Our Wetlands—and That’s a Big Problem.” EcoFriendly Sask, 6 December 2018, https://www.ecofriendlysask.ca/2018/12/were-losing-our-wetlands-and-thats-big.html.