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

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

by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

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

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Hardcover

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Braiding Sweetgrass is a book to focus the eyes, open the heart and stretch the imagination about our appropriate relationships within the natural world. Hundreds of thousands of readers have turned to Kimmerer’s words over the decades since the book’s first publication, finding these tender, poetic, and respectful words, rooted in soil and tradition, intended to teach and celebrate. This is a storyteller’s book; we do well to listen and take the guidance to heart. As Kimmerer tells us, “We have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again.”

A New York Times Bestseller
A Washington Post Bestseller
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub
A Book Riot "Favorite Summer Read of 2020"
A Food Tank Fall 2020 Reading Recommendation

Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a bookmark ribbon and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book—gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred—and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781571311771
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication date: 10/13/2020
Pages: 456
Sales rank: 22,669
Product dimensions: 5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling collection of essays Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants as well as Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Kimmerer is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

Table of Contents


Preface

Planting Sweetgrass
Skywoman Falling
The Pecan Grove
An Offering
The Gift of Strawberries
Asters and Goldenrod
Learning the Grammar of Animacy

Tending Sweetgrass
Maple Sugar Moon
Witch Hazel
The Water Net
The Condolence of Water Lilies
Allegiance to Gratitude

Picking Sweetgrass
Epiphany in the Beans
The Three Sisters
Wisgaak Gokpenagen: A Black Ash basket
Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass
Maple Nation: A Citizenship Guide
The Honorable Harvest

Braiding Sweetgrass
In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place
The Sound of Silverbells
Sitting in a Circle
Burning Cascade Head
Putting Down Roots
Umbilicaria: The bellybutton of the World
Old Growth Children
Witness to the Rain

Burning Sweetgrass
Windigo Footprints
The Sacred and the Superfund
Collateral Damage
People of Corn, People of Light
Shkitagen: People of the Seventh Fire
Defeating Windigo

Epilogue: Returning the Gift

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