Stories to Heal Our Relationship with the World
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer kept popping up on lots of outdoorsy reading lists, but the title was so unfamiliar that it really didn’t register for me. I had no idea what sweetgrass was. How was braiding it related to anything outdoorsy? I mean, sure, it was on my to-read list (not a short list) but I’d just finished Into Thin Air, and was going down an adventurer-memoir path. Then I read The Hidden Life of Trees, and The Overstory, and it was all over for me, dear readers.
Braiding Sweetgrass, an “intertwining of science, spirit, and story”, has been a delight to read, and I can’t recommend it enough. The author’s storytelling and writing skills have intimidated, inspired, and comforted me, and they have made this review all the more daunting to write.
In these pages, the world offers up strawberries, pecans, and sweetgrass as gifts. “Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present.” Gifts and gratitude are crucial themes throughout this book, and a valuable counterweight to a society that too often values personal wealth and division. (I’m writing this as a winter storm wipes out power and water to much of Texas where a lot of elected officials seem indifferent to the fates of their fellow Texans, and as we reach the terrifying milestone of 500,000 American deaths from COVID.) In one example of an informal ceremony of gratitude to the mountain, her father offers a splash of the first coffee of the morning to the campground. Coffee is dear to my heart, so this is a gratitude ritual I can get behind.
Ms. Kimmerer learns Potawatomi, a language forcibly decimated by US governmental policies, and struggles with the multitudes of verbs: “‘to be a hill,’ ’to be red,’… ‘to be a bay.’ “ Of course in English, a bay of water is a straightforward noun, and she deftly explores the relationships this causes in both languages. If a tree is a noun, and not a being, it’s much easier to chop it down for paper products; not unrelated to giving a lobster a human name so your dinner partner won’t eat lobster. After reading The Hidden Life of Trees and The Overstory, along with a light understanding of Japanese kami (spirits) that live in natural objects, I’m convinced that a wide variety of “inanimate” objects have spirits, particularly plants. I verbally taunt and argue with stubborn puzzle pieces and dropped objects, but I will concede there is a chance it might be eccentricity. On a related note, consider how we also dehumanize certain groups of humans we want to distance from the rest of us, like illegal aliens and the homeless.
Ms. Kimmerer retells the story of Nanabozho, who found a lazy village in a state of disrepair. The villagers were hopped up on a super-rich maple syrup, so the easy sugar fix left them unmotivated for chores and the proper ceremonies. Nanabozho waters the maple syrup down to teach them responsibility, which is why maple syrup is now diluted. The labor-intensive process (days!!) of tapping and reducing maple syrup surprised me. From what I recall of the Little House books on maple sugaring, they drizzled maple syrup straight from the tree on fresh snow to create candy. Laura Ingalls Wilder, how dare you.
Several chapters detail ways humans live in harmony or disharmony with nature.
A behind-the-scenes story of her grad student’s thesis project teaches that humans don’t always negatively impact the environment, a concept that was oddly foreign to me. I guess the Leave No Trace people got to me? It turns out that thoughtful harvesting of sweetgrass actually makes it grow faster.
There is also a heartbreaking story of the nine Superfund sites at Onondaga Lake in New York, where careless human behavior has rendered the site toxic and lifeless. The Onondaga Nation, who have a sacred connection to the land and were displaced to make room for salt mines and chemical waste beds, filed complaints to heal and clean up the area. Their legal battle to restore the water and land has met several setbacks, yet Ms. Kimmerer cautions against despair, and highlights a few plants making a comeback despite the pollution: “The plants are doing their work, rebuilding the nutrient cycle.” The site may never be what it was before, but it may not be a barren wasteland forever.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash