Who is Robin Wall Kimmerer, and what is Braiding Sweetgrass about?

Who is Robin Wall Kimmerer? #

A scientist of mosses who writes for everyone. She was born in 1953 in upstate New York, of European and Anishinaabe ancestry, and is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.¹ The Potawatomi are a Great Lakes people who traditionally lived in farming villages in summer, growing corn, beans and squash, and moved to smaller winter camps to hunt, as well as fishing and gathering wild rice, berries and other plant foods.² She studied botany at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF) and took a master’s degree and a doctorate in botany at the University of Wisconsin, specialising in the ecology of mosses.³

She is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at SUNY ESF in Syracuse, and the founding director of its Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, which brings Indigenous and scientific knowledge together. Her first book, Gathering Moss (2003), won the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing; Braiding Sweetgrass followed in 2013, and The Serviceberry in 2024. She addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2015, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022, and received the National Humanities Medal in 2023.⁴

What is Braiding Sweetgrass about? #

Two ways of knowing the living world, braided together. As a botanist Kimmerer was trained to question nature with the tools of science; as a Potawatomi woman she learned to see plants and animals as our oldest teachers. The book’s essays, in five sections named for the stages of working sweetgrass, from planting to burning, argue that Indigenous knowledge and Western science can be partners, and that the sane relationship between people and the land is reciprocity, not extractionExtraction. Drawing a foreign body (an intrusion) out of a person and packing the hole with something healthy. The iron rule: only ever foreign bodies, never a part of the self: extracting a genuine part of self creates soul-loss. More about this.⁵

It opens with the creation story of Skywoman, who falls from the sky world and is caught by the animals, and sets it beside the story of Eve: one a story of a woman who gardens the world into being with the help of the other beings, the other of exile and dominion. Where Western tradition puts humans at the top of a hierarchy of beings, Kimmerer writes, Native ways of knowing often call humans “the younger brothers of Creation”, the species with the least experience of how to live and so the most to learn from the others.⁶

She is honest about where her own people’s stories belong. Indigenous stories are rich in wisdom and need to be heard, she writes, but she does not advocate taking them over wholesale: “an immigrant culture must write its own new stories of relationship to place”.⁷ The common plantain, which followed European settlers across North America and became a useful, welcome neighbour, is her picture of how newcomers might become naturalised to a place.⁸

What is the grammar of animacy? #

Kimmerer’s name for a language that speaks of the living world as alive. English calls every other living being “it”, a word we would never use for a person; in Potawatomi, a great many more beings are spoken of as animate, as someone and not something. Learning the language as an adult, she found a verb meaning “to be a bay”, where English has only the noun: the water is not a thing but something being a bay, for now. Calling a maple “it”, she points out, makes it an object and opens the door to exploitation: if a maple is an it, we can take up the chainsaw, but if a maple is a her, we think twice.⁹ See What did Sapir and Whorf actually claim about language and thought?

What is the Honourable Harvest? #

An ethics of taking life with respect. Kimmerer describes it as a set of guidelines seldom written down, carried instead in the small acts of daily life: get to know the ones who care for you; introduce yourself and ask permission before taking, and abide by the answer; never take the first or the last; take only what you need and only what is given, and never more than half; use it respectfully and waste nothing; share; give thanks; and give a gift in return.¹⁰ (She uses the American spelling, The Honorable Harvest.) See What does animism say about killing and eating? and Why is gratitude an animist practice?

How does her work relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #

Closely in worldview, differently in method. In animism everything is alive and conscious, rocks, rivers, mountains and wind included; humans are one of the Animal People, cousins of the Plant People and the Stone People, in one big family of beings with no hierarchy.¹¹ Kimmerer’s younger brothers of Creation, learning from older teachers, sit very close to this. So does her point about language. Where English has the noun “bay”, her ancestors’ language has a verb, “to be a bay”; and in the same way, the English habit of calling a river “the river”, a thing, instead of something being a river, reflects the sense of separation that animism sets out to heal. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?

The difference is method. Braiding Sweetgrass works through waking attention, story, the classroom and the land; it has no shamanic journeying, no Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and no GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this. Therapeutic Shamanism adds those, meeting the Animal, Plant and Stone People directly in the Lower-World as well as here. And where Kimmerer writes from within her own nation’s teachings, which come from a people who farmed as well as hunted and gathered, Therapeutic Shamanism looks to hunter-gatherer animism for its models and borrows the ceremonies of no living culture; her teachings are credited to her and to the Potawatomi, never taken over. That is close to her own call for newcomers to find their own stories of belonging to a place. See Is Western shamanism cultural appropriation?