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

emotional hopeful inspiring reflective slow-paced

3.0

I have mixed feelings about this book. But let's start with the good! It is beautifully written and I do enjoy the way separate stories and anecdotes formed a whole. There are some good ideas in here as well: I especially thought the chapter on healing the relationship between people and land rather than healing just the land in order for it to be more sustainable was very insightful. I also enjoyed the first Windigo chapter and the story about the pond. I do think the book could have been quite a lot shorter and there were quite a few stories that had the same message, where one or two of them could have sufficed. I also didn't really enjoy the large focus on femininity and motherhood in the first chapters, but that's just my own preference. But what I really didn't like about this book is that is somehow seems to still be very individualistic in its approach to applying indigenous ways of thinking to our relation with science and nature. There were quite a few chapters where I felt like we as readers were invited to kind of laugh at the authors' students who couldn't go a day without their cellphones, wore high heels on excursions and couldn't look at a plant without going ewwww. But then when it turned to systemic issues, the book just didn't really seem to have a lot to say. It's not necessarily that I think a book like this should offer all the solutions to our problems, but the few solutions it did seem to offer are quite inaccessible for most people and I don't think the book really dealt with this. It didn't feel like the author was trying to blame individuals for their consumption too much, but the combination of these sort of caricatural depictions of random people who don't know enough about nature vs the way systemic issues were glossed over or treated more distantly/matter-of-factlike did leave a sort of sour taste for me. 
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