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Reviews tagging 'Excrement'
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
5 reviews
readingwithkaitlyn's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Minor: Excrement, Pregnancy, Alcohol, Misogyny, Fire/Fire injury, Animal death, Forced institutionalization, Animal cruelty, Racial slurs, Death, Colonisation, Suicide, War, Genocide, Blood, Car accident, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, and Murder
residential schools, trail of death, carlisle, pollution.maeverose's review against another edition
4.0
This is a collection of essays about Indigenous peoples’ relationship to plants and what we can learn from it to have a better relationship to the earth, and help heal the damage that’s been done to it. As well as some cool plant science sprinkled throughout.
I think this book should be required reading for every non-Indigenous American. I’ve always loved nature, but this book really helped me appreciate elements of nature that I took for granted or never really thought about. Who knew cattails were so cool? This book shows how amazing and intelligent plants are. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing is very vivid and beautiful, and the plant science is written in an easy to understand way.
I did have two small issues with it:
Some of the language she uses when talking about women made me a bit uncomfortable. She talks a lot about motherhood in relation to womanhood, which is always a bit of a terfy red flag for me. Not to mention it’s also just regressive even when talking strictly about women. This isn’t about the parts where she writes about her own experience as a mother, of course, she’s more than allowed to do that in her own memoir lol. I understand that this could also be a matter of cultural difference, as I’m a white, so I’ll leave it at that.
Because this is a collection of essays, a lot of them are a bit repetitive. I ended up putting myself into a reading slump by reading too much of this in a short span of time, as I’m really sensitive to repetition and it started to feel tedious to read. I really should’ve read an essay a week and just gone through the book really slowly. That likely would’ve worked better for me.
Those things aside, I still think this book is really good and would strongly recommend it.
My favorite essays:
•The Counsel of Pecans
•An Offering
•Learning the Grammar of Animacy
•Maple Sugar Moon
•Witch Hazel
•Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass
•Sitting in a Circle
•Defeating Windigo
Some of my favorite quotes:
“Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own.”
“When we tell them that a tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.” If a maple is an it, we can take up a chainsaw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.”
“In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires.”
“What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect?”
“Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.”
“It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power—we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart.”
“If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”
I think this book should be required reading for every non-Indigenous American. I’ve always loved nature, but this book really helped me appreciate elements of nature that I took for granted or never really thought about. Who knew cattails were so cool? This book shows how amazing and intelligent plants are. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing is very vivid and beautiful, and the plant science is written in an easy to understand way.
I did have two small issues with it:
Some of the language she uses when talking about women made me a bit uncomfortable. She talks a lot about motherhood in relation to womanhood, which is always a bit of a terfy red flag for me. Not to mention it’s also just regressive even when talking strictly about women. This isn’t about the parts where she writes about her own experience as a mother, of course, she’s more than allowed to do that in her own memoir lol. I understand that this could also be a matter of cultural difference, as I’m a white, so I’ll leave it at that.
Because this is a collection of essays, a lot of them are a bit repetitive. I ended up putting myself into a reading slump by reading too much of this in a short span of time, as I’m really sensitive to repetition and it started to feel tedious to read. I really should’ve read an essay a week and just gone through the book really slowly. That likely would’ve worked better for me.
Those things aside, I still think this book is really good and would strongly recommend it.
My favorite essays:
•The Counsel of Pecans
•An Offering
•Learning the Grammar of Animacy
•Maple Sugar Moon
•Witch Hazel
•Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass
•Sitting in a Circle
•Defeating Windigo
Some of my favorite quotes:
“Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own.”
“When we tell them that a tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.” If a maple is an it, we can take up a chainsaw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.”
“In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires.”
“What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect?”
“Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.”
“It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power—we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart.”
“If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death
Moderate: Colonisation, Excrement, Racism, Animal cruelty, Kidnapping, Suicide attempt, Vomit, and Gore
Minor: Cannibalism and Ableism
Graphic: destruction of ecosystems and nature, climate change Moderate: baby/motherhood talk, animal goretalonsontypewriters's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation and Racism
Moderate: Xenophobia, Death, War, Grief, Religious bigotry, Animal death, Genocide, Fire/Fire injury, Classism, and Forced institutionalization
Minor: Sexism, Suicide, Vomit, Alcohol, Car accident, Cannibalism, Excrement, Abandonment, Child death, Animal cruelty, Pregnancy, Cultural appropriation, Misogyny, Suicide attempt, and Murder
Climate change, habitat destruction, pollution.melancholymegs's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation, Animal death, Death, Confinement, Forced institutionalization, and Racism
Moderate: Grief
Minor: Suicide attempt and Excrement
fiveredhens's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
favorite quotes:
In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as "the younger brothers of Creation." We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent us by example. They've been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.
It's funny how the nature of an object—let's say a strawberry or a pair of socks—is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or as a commodity. The pair of wool socks that I buy at the store, red and gray striped, are warm and cozy. I might feel grateful for the sheep that made the wool and the worker who ran the knitting machine. I hope so. But I have no inherent obligation to those socks as a commodity, as private property. There is no bond beyond the politely exchanged "thank yous" with the clerk. I have paid for them and our reciprocity ended the minute handed her the money. The exchange ends once parity has been established, an equal exchange. They become my property. I don't write a thank-you note to JCPenney. But what if those very same socks, red and gray striped, were knitted by my grandmother and given to me as a gift? That changes everything. A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I'll wear them when she visits even if don't like them.
Had all the things in the market merely been a very low price, I probably aould have scooped up as much as I could. But when everything became a gift, I felt self-restraint. I didn't want to take too much.
The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one. One of these stories sustains the living systems on which we depend. One of these stories opens the way to living in gratitude and amazement at the richness and generosity of the
world. One of these stories asks us
to bestow our own gifts in kind, to
celebrate our kinship with the world. We can choose. If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in
motion, how wealthy we become.
Ceremonies large and small have the power to focus attention to a way of living awake in the world.
I realize that those first homesteaders were not the beneficiaries of that shade, at least not as a young couple. They must have meant for their people to stay here. Surely those two were sleeping up on Cemetery Road long before the shade arched across the road. I am living today in the shady future trees planted with their wedding vows. They could not have imagined me , many generations later, and yet I live in the gift of their care. Could they have imagined that when my daughter Linden was married, she would choose leaves of maple sugar for the wedding giveaway?
The Thanksgiving Address reminds us that duties and gifts are two sides of the same coin. Eagles were given the gift of far sight, so it is their duty to watch over us. Rain fulfills its duty as it falls, because it was given the gift of sustaining life. What is the duty of humans? If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking "What is our responsibility?" is the same as asking "What is our gift?"
I don't have much patience with food proselytizers who refuse all but organic, free-range, fair-trade gerbil milk. We each do what we can; the Honorable Harvest is as much about the relationships as about the materials. A friend of mine says she buys just one green item a week—that's all she can do, so she does it.
"I want to vote with my dollar," she says. I can make choices because
have the disposable income to choose "green" over less-expensive goods, and I hope that will drive the market in the right direction. In the
food deserts of the South Side there
is no such choice, and the dishonor in that inequity runs far deeper than the food supply.
My students are always different after root gathering. There is
something tender in them, and open, as if they are emerging from the embrace of arms they did not know were there. Through them I get to remember what it is to open to the world as gift, to be flooded with the knowledge that the earth will take care of you, everything you need right there.
There are often other walkers here. I suppose that's what it means when they put down the camera and stand on the headland, straining to hear above the wind with that wistful look, the gaze out to sea. They look like they're trying to remember what it would be like to love the world.
Every drip it seems is changed by its relationship with life, whether it encounters moss or maple or fir bark or my hair. And we think of it as simply rain, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it.
The very facts of the world are a poem. Light is turned to sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke.
Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren't these stories we should all know? Who is it who holds them? In long-ago times, it was the elders who carried them. In the twenty-first century, it is often scientists who first hear them. The stories of buffalo and salamanders belong to the land, but scientists are one of their translators and carry a large responsibility for conveying
their stories to the world. And yet scientists mostly convey these stories in a language that excludes readers. Conventions for efficiency and precision make scientific papers very difficult for the rest of the world, and if the truth be known, for us as well. This has serious consequences for public dialogue about the environment and therefore for real democracy, especially the democracy of all species. For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring?
I maintain that the destructive lens of the people made of wood is not science itself, but the lens of the scientific worldview, the illusion of dominance and control, the separation of knowledge from responsibility.
Let us hold a giveaway for Mother Earth, spread our blankets out for her and pile them high with gifts of our own making. Imagine the books, the paintings, the poems, the clever machines, the compassionate acts, the transcendent ideas, the perfect tools. The fierce defense of all that has been given. Gifts of mind, hands, heart, voice, and vision all offered up on behalf of the earth. Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world.
In return for the privilege of breath.
i think most ppl should read this book but i had some ?? moments
the chapter on language emphasized linguistic relativity almost to the point of linguistic determinism which seemed really out of place, especially given how often that theory has been used to dehumanize indigenous people in the americas specifically
i felt like i didn't get a good handle on her ideas around colonizers becoming indigenous to place. it seemed a little too open-ended for me there
also the beginning of the book listed sponsors or something and one of them was Wells Fargo ? idk what was goin on there
The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one. One of these stories sustains the living systems on which we depend. One of these stories opens the way to living in gratitude and amazement at the richness and generosity of the
world. One of these stories asks us
to bestow our own gifts in kind, to
celebrate our kinship with the world. We can choose. If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in
motion, how wealthy we become.
"I want to vote with my dollar," she says. I can make choices because
have the disposable income to choose "green" over less-expensive goods, and I hope that will drive the market in the right direction. In the
food deserts of the South Side there
is no such choice, and the dishonor in that inequity runs far deeper than the food supply.
something tender in them, and open, as if they are emerging from the embrace of arms they did not know were there. Through them I get to remember what it is to open to the world as gift, to be flooded with the knowledge that the earth will take care of you, everything you need right there.
Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren't these stories we should all know? Who is it who holds them? In long-ago times, it was the elders who carried them. In the twenty-first century, it is often scientists who first hear them. The stories of buffalo and salamanders belong to the land, but scientists are one of their translators and carry a large responsibility for conveying
their stories to the world. And yet scientists mostly convey these stories in a language that excludes readers. Conventions for efficiency and precision make scientific papers very difficult for the rest of the world, and if the truth be known, for us as well. This has serious consequences for public dialogue about the environment and therefore for real democracy, especially the democracy of all species. For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring?
In return for the privilege of breath.
i think most ppl should read this book but i had some ?? moments
the chapter on language emphasized linguistic relativity almost to the point of linguistic determinism which seemed really out of place, especially given how often that theory has been used to dehumanize indigenous people in the americas specifically
i felt like i didn't get a good handle on her ideas around colonizers becoming indigenous to place. it seemed a little too open-ended for me there
also the beginning of the book listed sponsors or something and one of them was Wells Fargo ? idk what was goin on there
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism, Animal death, Body horror, Child abuse, Colonisation, Excrement, Forced institutionalization, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Sexism, Suicide attempt, War, and Xenophobia
Minor: Car accident, Child death, Fatphobia, Genocide, Grief, Hate crime, Racism, Religious bigotry, and Vomit
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