2023-07-24 - Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer ======================================================= Sky Woman Falling by Ernest Smith (1936) Several friends recommended this book to me years ago. I wanted to check it out, but it was backlogged with reservations at the library. And then it was lost at my local library. Recently, i found it in the shelves and checked it out! One of my favorite chapters was The Gift of Strawberries, which goes into depth about the gift economy and the nuance of gifts versus commodities. What follows are excerpts with my own writing in square brackets. The Council of Pecans ===================== As unpredictable as life may be, we have even less control over the stories they tell about us after we're gone. He'd laugh so hard to hear that his great-grandchildren know him not as a decorated World War I veteran, not as a skilled mechanic for newfangled automobiles, but as a barefoot boy on the reservation running home in his underwear with his pants stuffed with pecans. The word "pecan"--comes to English from indigenous languages. Pigan is a nut, any nut. Butternuts, black walnuts, and pecans are closely related members of the same family (Juglandaceae). Our people carried them wherever they migrated... Pecans today trace the rivers through the prairies, populating the fertile bottomlands where people settled. In the old times, our elders say, the trees talked to each other. There is now compelling evidence that our elders were right--the trees ARE talking to one another. ... There is so much we cannot yet sense with our limited human capacity. Tree conversations are still far above our heads. The Potawatomi Gathering of Nations reunites the people, an antidote to the divide and conquer strategy that was used to separate our people from each other and from our homelands. The synchrony of our Gathering is determined by our leaders, but more importantly, there is something like a mycorhizal network that unites us, an unseen connection of history and family and responsibility to both our ancestors and our children. As a nation, we are beginning to follow the guidance of our elders the pecans by standing together for the benefit of all. We are remembering what they said, that all flourishing is mutual. The Gift of Strawberries ======================== Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery--as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source. Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. It's funny how the nature of an object--let's say a strawberry or a pair of socks--is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or as a commodity. As the scholar Lewis Hyde notes, "It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people." That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage. The fields made a gift of berries to us and we made a gift of them to our father. The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes. This is hard to grasp for societies steeped in notions of private property, where others are, by definition, excluded from sharing. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a "bundle of rights." Whereas in a gift economy property has a "bundle of responsibilities" attached. What I mean of course is that our human relationship with strawberries is transformed by our choice of perspective. It is a human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed. ... when there is no gratitude in return--that food may not satisfy. It may leave the spirit hungry while the belly is full. Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. This is not a gift of life; it is theft. Refusal to participate is a moral choice. Water is a gift for all, not meant to be bought and sold. Don't buy it... An Offering =========== My mother had her own more pragmatic ritual of respect: the translation of reverence and intention into action. Before we paddled away from any camping place she made us kids scour the place to be sure that it was spotless. No burnt matchstick, no scrap of paper escaped her notice. "Leave this place better than you found it," she admonished. And so we did. We also had to leave wood for the next person's fire, with tinder and kindling carefully sheltered from rain by a sheet of birch bark. I liked to imagine their pleasure, those other paddlers, arriving after dark to find a ready pile of fuel to warm their evening meal. My mother's ceremony connected us to them too. That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? Asters and Goldenrod ==================== As it turns out, though, goldenrod and asters appear very similarly to bee eyes and human eyes. We both think they're beautiful. Their striking contrast when they grow together makes them the most attractive target in the whole meadow, a beacon for bees. Growing together, both receive more pollinator visits than they would if they were growing alone. It's a testable hypothesis; it's a question of science, a question of art, and a question of beauty. Why are they beautiful together? It is a phenomenon simultaneously material and spiritual, for which we need all wavelengths, for which we need depth perception. When botanists go walking the forests and fields looking for plants, we say we are going on a foray. When writers do the same, we should call it a metaphoray, and the land is rich in both. We need them both; scientist and poet Jeffrey Burton Russel writes that "as the sign of a deeper truth, metaphor was close to sacrament. Because the vastness and richness of reality cannot be expressed by the overt sense of a statement alone." Learning the Grammar of Animacy =============================== Listening in wild places we are audience to conversations in a language not our own. But beneath the richness of [the] vocabulary and [the] descriptive power, something is missing [from the language of science], the same something that swells around you and in you when you listen to the world. Science can be a language of distance which reduces a being to its working parts; it is a language of objects. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed. But a few summers ago, at our yearly tribal gathering, a language class was held and I slipped into the tent to listen. There was a great deal of excitement about the class because, for the first time, every fluent speaker in our tribe would be there as a teacher. When the speakers were called forward to the circle of folding chairs, they moved slowly--with canes, walkers, and wheelchairs, only a few entirely under their own power. I counted them as they filled the chairs. Nine. Nine fluent speakers. In the whole world. Our language, millennia in the making, sits in those nine chairs. The words that praised creation, told the old stories, lulled my ancestors to sleep, rests today in nine very mortal men and women. The speakers eyes blaze as he tells us, "We're the end of the road. We are all that is left. If you young people do not learn, the language will die. The missionaries and the United States government will have their victory at last." "It's not just the words that will be lost," she says. "The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It's too beautiful for English to explain." Our teacher, Justin Neely, explains that while there are several words for "thank you," there is no word for "please." Food was meant to be shared, no added politeness needed; it was simply a cultural given that one was asking respectfully. European languages often assign gender to nouns, but Potawatomi does not divide the world into masculine and feminine. Nouns and verbs both are animate and inanimate. ... Different verb forms, different plurals, different everything apply depending on whether what you are speaking of is alive. A bay is a noun only if the water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb "wiikwegaman"--to be a bay--releases the water from bondage and lets it live. "To be a bay" holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise--become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that too. This is the grammar of animacy. The list of inanimate objects seems to be smaller, filled with objects that are made by people. Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say, "What is it?" And we answer "Dopen yewe." Table it is. But of apple, we must say "Who is that being?" And reply "Mshimin yawe." Apple that being is. When we tell [the children] that the tree is not a "who," but an "it," we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying "it" makes a living land into "natural resources." If a maple is an "it," we can take up the chainsaw. If a maple is a "her," we think twice. The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human. I'm not advocating that we all learn Poppadom or Hopi or Seminole, even if we could. Immigrants came to these shores bearing a legacy of languages, all to be cherished. But to become native to this place, if we are to survive here, and our neighbors too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might truly be at home. Maple Sugar Moon ================ Sugaring has changed over the years. ... In many sugaring operations, plastic tubing runs right from the trees to the sugar house. People of the Maple Nation made sugar long before they possessed trade kettles for boiling. Instead, they collected sap in birch bark pails and poured it into log troughs hollowed from basswood trees. The large surface area and shallow depth of the troughs was ideal for ice formation. Every morning, ice was removed, leaving a more concentrated sugar solution behind. The concentrated solution could be boiled to sugar with far less energy required. The freezing nights did the work of many cords of firewood, a reminder of elegant connections: maple sap runs at the one time of the year when this method is possible. Wooden evaporation dishes were placed on flat stones over the coals of a fire that burned night and day. ... when the syrup reached just the right consistency, it was beaten so that it would solidify in the desired way, into soft cakes, hard candy, and granulated sugar. The women stored it in birch bark boxes called makaks, sewn tight with spruce root. Given birch bark's natural antifungal preservatives, the sugars would keep for years. The Consolation of Water Lillies ================================ Before I knew it, and long before the pond was ready for swimming, they were gone. My daughter Linden chose to leave the little pond and put her feet in the ocean at a redwood college far from home. I had known it would happen from the first time I held her--from that moment on, all her growing would be away from me. Before my younger daughter, Larkin, left, she and I had a last campfire up at the pond and watched the stars come out. The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us the gift that we cannot provide ourselves. I hadn't realized that I had come to the lake and said "feed me," but my empty heart was fed. I had a good mother. She gives what we need without being asked. I wonder if she gets tired, old Mother Earth. Or if she too is fed by the giving. "Thanks," I whispered, "for all of this." [I suspect that grief, being a complex of contradicting emotions, has room for a mother to feel simultaneously fed and tired.] We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back. Allegiance To Gratitude ======================= Our old farm is within the ancestral homelands of the Onondaga Nation and their reserve lies a few ridges to the west of my hilltop. Here [at the Onondaga school] the school week begins and ends not with the Pledge of Allegiance, but with the Thanksgiving Address, a river of words as old as the people themselves, known more accurately in the Onondaga language as the Words That Come Before All Else. This ancient order of protocol sets gratitude as the highest priority. The gratitude is directed straight to the ones who share their gifts with the world. Thanksgiving Address The actual wording of the Thanksgiving Address varies with the speaker. Gratitude doesn't send you our shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That's good medicine for land and people alike. Because I feared overstepping my boundaries in sharing what I have been told, I asked permission to write about [the Thanksgiving Address] and how it has influenced my own thinking. Over and over, I was told that these words are a gift of the Haudenosaunee to the world. Epiphany In The Beans ===================== Gardens are simultaneously a material and spiritual undertaking. ... "Where's the evidence? What are the key elements for detecting loving behavior?" That's easy. ... even a quantitative social psychologist would find no fault with my list of loving behaviors: * Nurturing health and well-being * Protection from harm * Encouraging individual growth and development * Desire to be together * Generous sharing of resources * Working together for a common goal * Celebration of shared values * Interdependence * Sacrifice by one for the other * Creation of beauty If we observed these behaviors between humans, we would say, "She loves that person." You might observe these actions between a person and a bit of carefully tended ground and say, "She loves that garden." Why then, seeing this list, would you not make the leap to say that the garden loves her back? The exchange between people and plants has shaped the evolutionary history of both. Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond. People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, "Plant a garden." It's good for the health of the earth and it's good for the health of people. Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass ========================================== "It's our way," she says, "to take only what we need. I've always been told that you never take more than half." ... the most important thing to remember is what my grandmother always said: "If we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away. If you don't give it respect it will leave us." ... As we leave the meadow for the path back through the woods, she twists a handful of timothy into a loose knot upon itself, beside the trail. "This tells other pickers that I've been here," she says, "so that they know not to take any more." In the early years, no matter how carefully you prepared, this was nearly a rite of passage for women scientists--the condescension, the verbal smackdown from academic authorities, especially if you had the audacity to ground your work in the observations of old women who had probably not finished high school, and talked to plants to boot. The surprise was that the failing plots were not the harvested ones, as predicted, but the unharvested controls. The sweetgrass that had not been picked or disturbed in any way was choked with dead stems while the harvested plots were thriving. Even though half of all stems had been harvested each year, they quickly grew back, completely replacing everything that had been gathered, in fact producing more shoots than were present before harvest. Picking sweetgrass seemed to actually stimulate growth. ... it didn't seem to matter how the grass was harvested, only that it was [harvested]. ... their Western science worldview... sets human beings outside of "nature" and judges their interactions with other species as largely negative. They had been schooled that the best way to protect a dwindling species was to leave it alone and keep people away. But the grassy meadow tells us that for sweetgrass, human beings are part of the system, a vital part. Many grasses undergo a physiological change known as compensatory growth in which the plant compensates for loss of foliage by quickly growing more. With a long, long history of cultural use, sweetgrass apparently became dependent on humans to create the "disturbance" that stimulates its compensatory growth. Sweetgrass thrives where it is used and disappears elsewhere. With their tobacco and their thanks, our people say to the Sweetgrass "I need you." By its renewal after picking, the grass says to the people "I need you, too." The Honorable Harvest ===================== Asking permission shows respect for the personhood of the plant, but it is also an assessment of the well-being of the population. Thus I must use both sides of my brain to listen to the answer. The analytical left reads the empirical signs to judge whether the population is large and healthy enough to share. The intuitive right hemisphere is reading something else, a sense of generosity, an open-handed radiance that says "take me," or sometimes a tight-lipped recalcitrance that makes me put my trowel away. Cautionary stories of the consequences of taking too much are ubiquitous in Native cultures, but it's hard to recall a single one in English. [Hansel and Gretel? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?] Early colonists on Turtle Island were stunned by the plenitude they found here, attributing the richness to the bounty of nature. Settlers in the Great Lakes wrote in their journals about the extraordinary abundance of wild rice harvested by Native peoples; in just a few days, they could fill their canoes with enough rice to last all year. But the settlers were puzzled by the fact that, as one of them wrote, "the savages stopped gathering long before all the rice was harvested." She observed that "the rice harvest starts with a ceremony of thanksgiving and prayers for good weather for the next four days. They will harvest dawn till dusk for the prescribed four days and then stop, often leaving much rice to stand unreaped. This rice, they say, is not for them but for the Thunders. Nothing will compel them to continue, therefore much goes to waste." The settlers took this as certain evidence of laziness and lack of industry on the part of the heathens. They did not understand how indigenous land-care practices might contribute to the wealth they encountered. The guidelines for the Honorable Harvest are not written down, or even consistently spoken of as a whole--they are reinforced in small acts of daily life. But if you were to list them, they might look something like this: * Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them. * Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for a life. * Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. * Never take the first. Never take the last. * Take only what you need. * Take only that which is given. * Never take more than half. Leave some for others. * Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. * Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. * Share. * Give thanks for what you have been given. * Give a gift in reciprocity for what you have taken. * Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever. Unlike state laws, the Honorable Harvest is not an enforced legal policy, but it is an agreement nonetheless, among people and most especially between consumers and providers. The providers have the upper hand. The deer, the sturgeon, the berries, and the leeks say, "If you follow these rules, we will continue to give our lives so that you may live." In The Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous To Place =========================================================== For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place. Wabunong--the East--is the direction of knowledge. We send gratitude to the East for the chance to learn every day, to start anew. Zhawanong--the South--is the land of birth and growth. In his journey to the North, Nanabozho found the medicine teachers. They gave him Wiingaashk to teach him the ways of compassion, kindness, and healing, even for those who have made bad mistakes, for who has not? When Nanabozho came to the West, he found many things that frightened him. ... "All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts in the side of creation." Plantain is so prevalent, so well-integrated, that we think of it as native. ... Plantain is not indigenous but "naturalized." That is the same term we use for the foreign-born when they become citizens in our country. Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do. The Sound of Silverbells ======================== The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart. My job was just to lead them into the presence and ready them to hear. A teacher comes, they say, when you are ready. And if you ignore its presence, it will speak to you more loudly. But you have to be quiet to hear. Sitting In A Circle =================== Indigenous architecture tends to the small and round, through following the model of nests and dens and burrows and redds and eggs and wombs--as if there were some universal pattern for home. ... A sphere has the highest ratio of volume to surface area, minimizing the material needed for living space. Its form sheds water and distributes the weight of a snow load. It is efficient to heat and resistant to wind. Beyond material considerations, there is cultural meaning to living within the teachings of a circle. [The Klamath dwellings and prayer seats were also constructed in circular forms.] > You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and > that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and > everything tries to be round. Everything the Power of the World does > is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the > earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in > its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for > theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes > down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. > Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always > come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle > from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power > moves. Our teepees were round like the nests of birds, and these > were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop, a nest of many > nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children. > > --Black Elk in Black Elk Speaks My students are always different after root gathering. There is something tender in them, and open, as if they are emerging from the embrace of arms they did not know were there. Through them I get to remember what it is to open to the world as a gift, to be flooded with the knowledge that the earth will take care of you, everything you need right here. This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn't this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world? The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack. Umbilicaria: The Belly Button of the World ========================================== Scientists are interested in how the marriage of alga and fungus occurs and so they've tried to identify the factors that induce two species to live as one. But when researchers put the two together in the laboratory and provide them with ideal conditions for both alga and fungus, they give each other the cold shoulder and proceed to live separate lives, in the same culture dish, like the most platonic of roommates. The scientists were puzzled and began to tinker with the habitat, altering one factor then another, but still no lichen. It was only when they severely curtailed the resources, when they created harsh and stressful conditions, that the two would turn toward each other and begin to cooperate. Only with severe need did the hyphae curl around the algae; only when the alga was stressed did it welcome the advances. When times are easy and there's plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward. In a world of scarcity, interconnection and mutual aid become critical for survival. So say the lichens. author: Kimmerer, Robin Wall detail: LOC: E98.P5 K56 tags: book,native-american,non-fiction title: Braiding Sweetgrass Tags ==== book native-american non-fiction