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

One occasionally encounters a text like an earthquake: it shakes one’s fundamental assumptions with a massive shift that, in comparison, renders mere epiphanies bloodless: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is one of these kinds of books. Plants, you say? Plants change everything. Tales of plants and humans together? Brace yourself, readers, because if you are paying attention, this book portraying the human-plant interconnections as understood by both botanical science and Indigenous traditions sings of our enmeshment in the green world with the verve of a classical tragedy revamped as a tale of unexpected hope in the face of mass extinction, pollution, and genocide. Braiding Sweetgrass weaves—or, rather, braids—together scientific knowledge with Native American cultures in a breathtaking narrative. Rich with scintillating plant facts integrated into Kimmerer’s personal history as a Native scientist, the book strips away the industrial haze fogging our perception of the facts that our sustenance consists primarily of plants or plant-eating animals, that our breath is provided through the waste products of photosynthesis, and that our living ecosystems that offer water, air, and life all emerge from, are fuelled by, or are directly themselves plant life. In short, Kimmerer repaints our world so boldly vegetal green that one comes to see that without plants we would not be, quite literally. And, oddly reassuringly, she also describes how many of them, the plants, that is, today need us (and other species), too, for this is above all a tale of reciprocity and not yet another enactment of the subject-object or master-slave dialectics.

Kimmerer unites (and contrasts) the stories of, and Indigenous knowledge about, plants with scientific perspectives, noting, for example, that plants have “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” (9–10). The scientific view that plants and trees are passive, in contrast, long rendered us blind to what was long known:

In the old times, our elders say, the trees talked to each other. They’d stand in their own council and craft a plan. But scientists decided long ago that plants were deaf and mute, locked in isolation without communication. The possibility of conversation was summarily dismissed.

(19)

These communicative abilities known for so long have finally been acknowledged by the most recent plant studies:

There is now compelling evidence that our elders were right—the trees are talking to one another. They communicate via pheromones, hormonelike compounds that are wafted on the breeze, laden with meaning. Scientists have identified specific compounds that one tree will release when it is under the stress of insect attack […].

(19–20, author’s italics)

Yes, plants communicate and share and work together. Botany, as Kimmerer was taught, however, was “reductionist, mechanistic, and strictly objective. Plants were reduced to objects; they were not subjects” (42). Such a reductionist view turns out to be false, and plants, it turns out, are wildly active but on a different time scale.

In describing how plants enable other life, Kimmerer contrasts the Western hierarchical thinking with humans at the top and plants at the bottom to the Native ways that reverse this pattern:

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.’

(9)

Plants have been around feeding themselves and everyone else much longer than human beings. She describes the relationship between (human) animals and plants as being one based on a “gift economy” such that nut trees, for example, give and...