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

In an early teaching job in the US South, the author takes her pre-med students on a three-day field trip to the Smoky Mountains. There, she asks them to explain what causes the distinctive color patterns of a species of tree. One student credits God, which is a perspective the author has found common in “the Bible Belt.” For the most part, the students seem uninterested in ecology.

High up in the mountains, while delivering a lecture on an endangered spider species, a student questions the author’s zeal for ecology. The author struggles to explain her views to these “good Christians.” When finished, they hike back to the vans, exhausted. Driving home, the author has the sudden feeling that she has “failed to teach the kind of science that I longed for as a young student” (221). But as the students begin to sing Amazing Grace, the author is humbled; their singing contains the same “love and gratitude for the Creation that Skywoman sang on the back of Turtle Island” (222), albeit in a different context.

The author recalls working with students at the remote Cranberry Lake Biological Station in upstate New York. Although many students are enthusiastic, others resent being forced away from the “wired world” for five weeks. After a few days, most students fully embrace the naturalist lifestyle. They build a wigwam together, one that is big enough for all 15 people to fit inside. One morning, a reticent student named Brad is “still looking glum” (225). The author informs him that they are “going shopping” at the marsh. They paddle the canoes and wade through the wetlands, swamp gas bubbling up around them. They pull cattail plants to get at rhizomes to eat and collect the leaves to make twine.

As they pick apart the cattails, the author details all of the uses for every part of the plant, from waterproof material to camp bedding. She and the students joke about “nature’s Walmart.” The more they search, the more uses the students find for various parts of the cattails. A few days later, they gather in the wigwam, now bedecked in cattail mats.

On the final night of their stay, they sleep in the completed wigwam. The students have prepared a song for the author: “a marvelous anthem of their own creation, filled with crazy rhymes of spruce roots and hiking boots, human needs and marshy reeds, cattail torches on our porches” (240). The author considers it a “perfect gift” (240).

The author describes a scene from over two centuries ago: A school of salmon turn toward the river where they were born and begin to swim. As they swim upstream, the Indigenous people line up and catch them, but only after four days’ worth of fish have passed them. The First Salmon caught is prepared with “ritual care.” Then, large nets are spread across the river and “the harvest begins” (187).

In the 1830s, after the arrival of settlers—or, as Kimmerer calls them, “squatters”—of European descent, a “tsunami of disease swept the Oregon coast” (245). Smallpox and measles killed many native people, leaving behind empty ghost villages and towns. These areas were quickly colonized by the settlers, who grazed their cattle and spread West. These settlers drained wetlands, rerouted the river, and “unceremoniously” flushed the salmon out to sea. These displaced salmon were then fished without any of the respect or honor shown previously. Fish that had fed people for millennia were driven close to extinction.

The author hikes up to the place where the salmon journeyed. She cries, hearing the sadness “as if the land itself was crying for its people” (248). She thinks about the importance of the salmon festivals and about modern ceremonies such as weddings and high school graduations. She also ponders the 1976 efforts to undam the river and is pleased with these conservation efforts, which use science as “a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species” (252). The wetlands have returned, but as yet, the salmon have not.

Beside the Mohawk River, the author plants sweetgrass. She thinks about the Mohawk language, which is no longer heard in this area. The disappearance of the language was systemically aided by institutions like the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which her grandfather was forced to attend. Under the mission statement “Kill the Indian to Save the Man,” youths were forced to abandon their Indigenous languages and traditions.

Tom Porter, a member of the Bear Clan, has dedicated himself to returning the Mohawk people to the Mohawk River. Over the years, they have restored traditional homes and buildings. The next step is to restore the language, which is a “prism through which to see the world” (258). Although there are few speakers, there are enough to raise a new generation.

The author revisits the town of Carlisle for its tricentennial. There, while planting sweetgrass near the old grounds of the school, she unearths a diamond with her trowel.

In the Adirondack Mountains, on the forbidding post-glacial granite boulders left behind by the Ice Age, the only thing that grows is a species of lichen—known by its Latin name, Umbilicaria americana. With no roots, leaves, or flowers, lichen can grow even where there is no soil. The author visits these basic life forms, “just to be in the presence of such ancient beings” (269). She considers the nature of lichen, which is both a producer and decomposer, existing in “a mutualistic symbiosis, a partnership in which both members benefit from their association” (270). She compares the alga and fungus of the lichen to a man and woman in marriage. Both the lichen and the couple behave as a single organism.

Scientists have struggled to replicate the natural formation of lichen—the joining of alga and fungus—in a lab setting. They only succeed when “severely curtail[ing] the resources” (272) and forcing the two organisms into partnership. The author inspects a rock and finds a healthy population, replete with the dimpled skin that leads to the lichen’s nickname: belly button.

The author hikes with a group though a forest of Douglas firs; the conversation halts as the group descends into a basin, surrounded by “the biggest trees in the world” (278). Here, the biosphere is incredibly diverse. Native peoples existed for millennia in this part of the world, taking what they needed from the cedar. Today, however, the cedar, mistaken for a commodity, are “nearly gone.” The author reflects on the earliest settlers to travel out and discover these trees, followed by the loggers; she thinks about the way the forest rebirths itself on clear-cut ground. Pioneer human communities and pioneer plant communities are similarly opportunistic and similarly unsustainable.

The model of a self-sustainable community is an old-growth forest. The author recalls the story of Franz Dolp who, inspired by the cedar, hoped to cultivate an old-growth area. He learned as he planted cedar saplings, eventually viewing the project as his “personal art.” His story is an inspiration to the author and many others. They now tend to his forest of still-young trees.

In the Andrews Experimental Forest, the author watches rain fall silently on moss. She notes how easily water slips between “gaseous phase and liquid” (294) and wonders why the droplets are so much bigger in this location relative to others. Even after hours in the rain, the author does not want to return to her cabin. She does, however, search for shelter and finds her path blocked by a fallen log. Crawling beneath the log, she finds her “dry place.” The author lays down and feels content. Time seems to disappear as she considers the rain.