A review by kxiong5
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

 

First off: Kimmerer is a subtly incredible writer from a craft perspective. This is a high stakes enterprise because what she’s taken on in her book is both a call to repair our individual relationships to land, but to subliminally rewrite our history to expose American (and global) environmental history as that of pollution as colonialism, the environmental destruction of capitalism as piggybacking off the colonialism of destroying the traditional relationship that indigenous communities had to these lands—inherently against the idea of land as resource for extraction of value. Not environmental destruction as a byproduct of capitalism and colonialism, but an act of it. Which means that the environmentalism she describes in her writing is premised on the idea that land cannot be owned or a resource, but is a living world to which we must give and honor as family member, as great teacher, as beloved friend. Which, still further, means that the environmentalism she recognizes as legitimate down to the very framing of her work is opposed to the idea of restoration for the sake of continued extractive use or in ways that do not recognize the land, the plants, the animals, as equally autonomous and honored actors in a world. Which she uses as a really good framing of land back / reparations, in the case of Onondaga Lake: the return of the ‘legal right’ to the land to the Onondaga people such that they can have an equal voice at the table for true restoration vs. the halfway bullshit minimum viable options put forth by chemical companies like Honeywell that destroyed the lake’s ecosystem to begin with. She builds this radical framework and situates it in our present world, in and of modernity even as it is in and of tradition, without naming it as radical. But it is. And her language is so clever, so as to have this truth slowly creep up on you. 

 

There were so many times listening to this book that I nearly started crying with how beautiful the land and the reciprocal love between land and people was, and how visceral it felt to hear her latter-half descriptions of that same land laid waste by humans. Hearing her read it in audiobook form, too, felt powerful: you can hear her love and her anger and her laughter and her grief as she reads, and so reading the book feels like an act of listening to an honored teacher telling you about the honored teachers that are this land: the maples, leaders of the trees; the clever, water-loving cedars; the goldenrods, tall and beautiful. On and on and on. Her book is about remaking communities—communities of land and of people (parts of this felt very much like All about love in those respects). And how an attack on the land and an attack on Indigenous peoples and life ways are one and the same, bound up in the same evil. 

 

Kimmerer knows how her language itself mirrors (sometimes) the language of capitalism and coloniality (eg with the pioneer species) and how her propositions for how human life unfolds socially can pull on recognizable forms of kinship and reciprocity and mutual responsibility (eg the “citizen”) while simultaneously redefining what it means to be a “citizen” through those propositions, which is to say her language also sometimes works against capitalism and coloniality—incredibly thoughtful writing. She uses this as her way in + then bends and bends and bends until you emerge changed by the stories she’s shared. And she ends on action after having bent us into shapes that are ready to take action in ways that truly restore and reminded us of the responsibility we have to repay our debts and return to the giving, sharing, stewarding of land that once meant human relationships to land and animals and plants and waterways could be truly reciprocal and good. 

 

Thank you, Dr. Kimmerer, for this gift. I’ll be sure to pass it on and use it well.