Summerbook #3: Braiding Sweetgrass

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

Yep, I'm ten years late to the party, but I got there!  This book made a huge splash some years ago, and rightfully so.  I'm going to hand it to my youngest, who will love it.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Potawatomi Nation, and comes at the natural world with two perspectives that merge into one, and that were never really that different to begin with.  Her point, which she makes over and over with various stories and ecological histories from several places in the United States, is that the Indigenous peoples of North America had (and still have) massive scientific and ecological knowledge about their environments, gained through centuries/millennia of practical experience in cultivating abundance and working with local resources.  When colonizers arrived, they simply assumed that the Native peoples were ignorant, and proceeded to exploit and ruin resources rather than learning how to care for them.  Today, we're finally starting to learn something about paying attention and putting things back together, maybe, in some places.

Kimmerer devotes chapters to areas in Texas and Oklahoma, New York State, and eventually Oregon, among others, using sweetgrass (native to wet areas in the eastern half of the US, so I've never seen it) as a throughline and symbol of Indigenous knowledge and practices.  She describes the pond she spent years dredging and cleaning up, a New York lake covered in industrial effluents, Appalachian mountains covered in rare medicinal plants.  It's all fascinating.

This book reminded me forcibly of the Australian books, Dark Emu: Black Seeds, and The Biggest Estate on Earth, both about Aboriginal ecological and farming practices.  If you want to spend a summer learning such things, Dark Emu: Black Seeds and Braiding Sweetgrass are both great places to start.

So, a great learning and reading experience, and one I've been meaning to get around to for a long time.  Highly recommended, but you probably got there before me!