Staff Reviews
Kimmerer asks her students to name a positive relationship nature has with humans and the group fails to name a single one. With each chapter, I found myself reevaluating how I relate to the world around me. The ways that nature depends on me just as much as I depend on it. The ways that the planet would not be better off if humans were to just disappear. It was a spiritual experience
— Parrish
This is by far one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. It focuses on the importance of botany, in a sense, in Indigenous cultures. One of the bigger themes was the symbiotic relationship between Mama Earth and us as humans. Respecting and healing the land so she can respect and heal us as well. Also, storytelling was a highlight. Not only do people tell stories, but so does the Earth and we have to learn to listen.
As an American-Indian Studies minor in college, some of the information and references about Indigenous people, culture, language, and lands were familiar so I was able to use my prior knowledge to learn more which I loved!!
— Asia
Description
A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Bestseller A Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub A Book Riot "Favorite Summer Read of 2020" A Food Tank Fall 2020 Reading Recommendation Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a bookmark ribbon and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book--gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred--and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants.
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.
