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# 2023-07-24 - Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
(IMG) 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.
(DIR) 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
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Braiding_Sweetgrass
LOC: E98.P5 K56
tags: book,native-american,non-fiction
title: Braiding Sweetgrass
# Tags
(DIR) book
(DIR) native-american
(DIR) non-fiction