ROBIN WALL KIMMERER,

BRAIDING SWEETGRASS (2013)

Of every essay in my
relentlessly earmarked copy of
Braiding Sweetgrass, Dr. Robin
Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously
rendered argument for why
and how we should keep going,
there’s one that especially hits
home: her account of
professor-turned-forester Franz
Dolp. When Dolp, several
decades ago, revisited the farm
that he had once shared with
his ex-wife, he found a scene of
destruction: The farm’s new
owners had razed the land
where he had tried to build a
life. “I sat among the stumps
and the swirling red dust and I
cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and

younger) feel this kind of
helplessness–and considerable
rage–at finding ourselves newly
adult in a world where those in
power seem determined to
abandon or destroy everything
that human bodies have always
needed to survive: air, water,
land. Asking any single book to
speak to this helplessness feels
unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding
Sweetgrass does, by weaving
descriptions of indigenous
tradition with the
environmental sciences in
order to show what survival has
looked like over the course of
many millennia. Kimmerer’s
essays describe her personal
experience as a Potawotami
woman, plant ecologist, and
teacher alongside stories of the
many ways that humans have
lived in relationship to other
species. Whether describing
Dolp’s work–he left the stumps
for a life of forest restoration
on the Oregon coast–or the
work of others in maple sugar
harvesting, creating black ash
baskets, or planting a Three
Sisters garden of corn, beans,
and squash, she brings hope.
“In ripe ears and swelling fruit,
they counsel us that all gifts are
multiplied in relationship,” she
writes of the Three Sisters,
which all sustain one another
as they grow. “This is how the
world keeps going.” –Corinne
Segal, Senior Editor