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