Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

“In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten” (p. x). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, braids strands of indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and an Anishinabekwe scientist’s hope to bring together in ways to serve the earth through essays that create a richly textured whole. Kimmerer writes with the expertise of a scientist and the prose of a poet to create a reading experience through worlds of understanding that feels like you’re wrapped in a blanket of prose. Kimmerer filters scientific knowledge through indigenous story and wisdom about the natural world. Essay titles and compose reflect the intricate weaving of the book: “Skywoman Falling”, “The Council of Pecans”, “Maple Sugar Moon”, and “The Consolation of Water Lilies”. She brings the ancient wisdom to our contemporary world and poses the question, “Can we all understand the Skywoman story not as an artifact from the past but as instructions for the future?” (p 9). Kimmerer shares her acute sense of beauty with not only the physical landscape, but also the linguistic. In the essay “Learning the Grammar of Animacy” she writes, “My first taste of a missing language was the word Puhpowee on my tongue” and her amazement to discover it means, “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight” (p.48). With the discovery of Puhpowee, Kimmerer embarks on a journey to learn the language that was forbidden, beaten, and starved out of Native American children in government boarding schools. When the irritation at the verbs “to be a Saturday, and “to be a hill,” Kimmerer throws down the book, ready to give up, “Oh, the ghosts of the missionaries in the boarding schools must have been running their hands in glee at my frustration. ‘She’s going to surrender,’ they said.’” And in that moment she swears, “In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the share, and hear it sift onto the sand…the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live” (p. 55). An exquisite exploration into the natural world through ancient wisdom, Braiding Sweetgrass brings physical, cultural, and linguistic landscapes to life with such exquisite detail, it’s as if she paints the world anew. The three shining strands of sweetgrass in a braid, and strands within this book “represent the unity of mind, body, and spirit that makes us whole” (p. 378) A gorgeous and wise book.