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

Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub

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.

• Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
• The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate_Discoveries from A Secret World
• If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging
• The Overstory: A Novel
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home
• The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
• The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
• Upstream: Selected Essays
• As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock