The reader's edition
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants: the summary
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, a professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In Braiding Sweetgrass she braids three strands together: Indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and her own story as a scientist and a mother. Her argument is that the living world is a gift, and that a gift asks for something back: gratitude, care and reciprocity. She sets out the Honorable Harvest, a set of guidelines for taking only what is given, and contrasts a gift economy with a market one. The essays move from wild strawberries and maple sugaring to a Three Sisters garden, a black ash basket and a polluted lake in upstate New York. Read a chapter at a time, with a printable action book at the end.
- Robin Wall Kimmerer
- 2013
- 4 chapters
- 5 min read
- 9 takeaways
This is HourLife's reading of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, in our own words. It is not a substitute for the book.
Chapter 01
Before you start
The book in a minute
Tap a paragraph to highlight it. Turn pages with the arrows, the arrow keys, or a swipe.
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, a professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In Braiding Sweetgrass she braids three strands together: Indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and her own story as a scientist and a mother. Her argument is that the living world is a gift, and that a gift asks for something back: gratitude, care and reciprocity. She sets out the Honorable Harvest, a set of guidelines for taking only what is given, and contrasts a gift economy with a market one. The essays move from wild strawberries and maple sugaring to a Three Sisters garden, a black ash basket and a polluted lake in upstate New York.
Below are the 9 ideas HourLife readers vote up most, each in our words with a note on what it asks of you, and then the steps that put them to work.
Chapter 02
What readers keep
The takeaways
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1
HourLife takeaway
A gift starts a relationship. A purchase usually ends one.
Kimmerer grew up picking wild strawberries and understood them as gifts from the land, not goods. A gift comes with a bond and a duty to give something in return. Bought goods change hands and the bond ends at the till. She asks what would change if we treated more of what we receive as gifts.
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2
HourLife takeaway
Whatever you take, something should go back.
Reciprocity is the thread through the whole book. The living world gives, and people owe a return. That return can be care, attention, restoration or simple thanks. Kimmerer treats it as the basic test of a good relationship with land.
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3
HourLife takeaway
The Honorable Harvest: take only what is given, leave enough, and use it well.
Kimmerer describes the Honorable Harvest as a set of unwritten guidelines for taking. Ask first. Never take the first or the last. Take only what you need, leave some for others, waste nothing, share, give thanks and give a gift back. She shows them at a small scale, digging wild leeks in spring, then asks how they would read if a whole economy followed them.
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4
HourLife takeaway
The words we use for plants and animals decide whether we treat them as beings or as things.
Learning Potawatomi as an adult, Kimmerer found a grammar that marks the living world as animate. English sorts almost everything that is not human into objects. She suggests that the habits of a language shape the habits of care.
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5
HourLife takeaway
Corn, beans and squash grow better together than any of them grows alone.
In a Three Sisters garden the corn gives a stalk to climb, the beans feed nitrogen into the soil, and the squash shades the ground with broad leaves that hold water and keep weeds down. Kimmerer reads it as a model of a community where each member brings a different gift and all of them are needed.
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6
HourLife takeaway
Science and Indigenous knowledge can be braided together instead of set against each other.
As a first-year botany student, Kimmerer said she wanted to learn why asters and goldenrod look so beautiful together, and was told that was not a question for science. Later she found part of the answer in how pollinators respond to purple and yellow side by side. The book joins careful observation with the idea that plants have something to teach.
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7
HourLife takeaway
Gratitude is a way of noticing that you already have enough.
Kimmerer describes the Thanksgiving Address of the Haudenosaunee, which greets and thanks each part of the natural world in turn, and which children at the Onondaga Nation School recite in place of a pledge. She argues that gratitude works against the endless wanting a consumer economy depends on.
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8
HourLife takeaway
Land that is tended with care can do better than land left alone.
A graduate student's study found that sweetgrass harvested in the traditional way came back stronger than plots that were never picked. For Kimmerer it upends the idea that the best thing people can do for nature is to stay away. The better question is how to take part well.
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9
HourLife takeaway
An appetite that is never satisfied eats up the thing that feeds it.
Kimmerer draws on the Windigo of Anishinaabe stories, a being whose hunger grows the more it eats. She uses it to describe an economy of endless consumption, and answers it with the habits that starve it: gratitude, restraint and reciprocity.
Chapter 03
Put it to work
Your action book
Do the setup steps once, then keep the habits going. The setup changes your week; the habits keep it changed after the first good one.
The download puts this whole reading and a printable action book in one PDF: the setup checklist, then a page of real calendar days for each habit, starting on the day you choose.
Set up once
Run the harvest check once
Pick one thing you take often, such as your morning coffee, your lunch or an hour of someone's help. Run it through the Honorable Harvest check on this page and note the guideline you skip most.
Learn five plants near you by name
Walk your street or a nearby park with a field guide or a plant ID app. Learn five plants by name and write down where each one grows.
Start a reciprocity ledger
Keep a page with two columns: what I received and what I gave back. Fill in the last seven days to see where the balance sits.
Plant something that feeds others
Sow a pot of herbs, a native flower for pollinators or, if you have the room, a small Three Sisters bed of corn, beans and squash.
Learn whose land you live on
Look up the Indigenous nations whose homelands include the place you live, starting with a nation's own website or your local library. Write down one thing you learn.
Keep it up
Say thank you before you take
Before a meal, a walk or the first coffee of the day, name one thing you are grateful for. Say it out loud or write it down.
Leave at least half
When you pick, forage or take from a shared supply, take less than half of what is there. Leave the rest for others and for it to come back.
Give one gift back each week
Pick up litter on a walk you love, water a street tree, or give an hour to a community garden. Match something you received with something you return.
Chapter 04
The last word
Before you go
Pick one step from the action book and do it today. An idea from a book starts to count once it changes what one ordinary day looks like.
Take what is given, give something back, and the gift keeps moving.
That is the end of our reading. Where to go from here, or go back to the full Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants page.
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