Discussion Questions – Braiding Sweetgrass

In what ways does Kimmerer’s heritage affect her life in academia, as described in Braiding Sweetgrass?

Early in her book, Kimmerer tells of the uphill battle she faced to become a research scientist. Raised with a sense of wonder toward the natural world, she pursues a degree in botany because she is fascinated by plants, and she is disheartened when her professors dismiss her attitude as unscientific. (Overt bigotry toward Indigenous peoples also plays a role, as when Kimmerer is described as having “done remarkably well for an Indian girl.”) Immersed in an academic subculture concerned with empirical observation, testing, and labeling, Kimmerer suppresses—but does not extinguish—that original attitude of curiosity and reverence. 

When she becomes a professor, however, Kimmerer’s Indigenous heritage turns out to be an asset. For one thing, Kimmerer is more receptive than many of her colleagues to Indigenous teachings and land management practices. Because she sees these traditions as valuable, she is motivated to incorporate them into her research and encourages her students to do the same. Thus, one of Kimmerer’s graduate students undertakes a project comparing traditional sweetgrass harvesting methods to assess their impact on the plant’s growth and propagation (“Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass”). She finds that, contrary to the conventional scientific wisdom that wild species are harmed by harvesting, the sweetgrass grows back healthier and fuller when harvested. Devising scientific experiments and ecological protocols based on Indigenous practices becomes an important part of Kimmerer’s work as presented in Braiding Sweetgrass.  

Why does Kimmerer value reciprocity?

A fundamental idea in Braiding Sweetgrass is the compatibility of Indigenous wisdom with scientific knowledge in understanding the natural world. Thus, it’s not too surprising to find that Kimmerer has both traditional and professional reasons for valuing reciprocity. Indigenous beliefs—more specifically, the Anishinaabe beliefs of Kimmerer’s ancestral nation—hold that everything from nature is a gift: clean water, food, medicine, and much else. Kimmerer points out that for gift giving to thrive in a human community, it must be reciprocal: at a minimum, recipients need to show gratitude and appreciation for the gifts they receive. The same principles, she suggests, apply in humanity’s relationship with the land and with nonhuman species. On an emotional level, Kimmerer argues that it feels much better to engage in reciprocity with nature than it does to treat nature as a neutral “resource” to be maintained. She asserts that people who see nature as a gift giver are apt to make more ecologically sound decisions, because people try not to harm what they love. 

There is also a pragmatic side to Kimmerer’s arguments for an ethic of reciprocity. Many Indigenous peoples, whose traditions Kimmerer surveys in Braiding Sweetgrass, adopted customs that allowed them to engage in reciprocal give-and-take with the natural world. For Anishinaabe herbalists and basket makers, this means asking permission of the land and the plants before harvesting. This idea might sound merely metaphorical or even fanciful, since plants cannot grant permission verbally, but it manifests in practical decisions: is this population healthy enough to tolerate harvesting? Will wildlife habitat be damaged if this tree is felled? 

As Kimmerer shows throughout Braiding Sweetgrass, modern scientific findings bear out the practical value of reciprocity, beyond the rather obvious idea that taking indefinitely from nature will eventually destroy natural resources. The experiments that Kimmerer reports in her book—in some cases, ones she has supervised and/or conducted—show that thoughtfully harvesting from wild or domesticated species is sometimes of greater benefit than leaving them alone altogether. Reciprocity allows humans to productively engage with other species instead of merely trying to minimize their footprint. 

How does Braiding Sweetgrass describe the current relationship between society and the environment? What does Kimmerer suggest that relationship could be?

Kimmerer is unflinchingly critical of the relationship between modern society and the natural environment, which she characterizes as one of undisciplined, one-sided taking. She points to such actions as the chemical industry’s poisoning of Onondaga Lake and the plowing under of wetlands for pasture to show how the dominant human societies largely take what they want from nature without considering the consequences. Those who realize the harm being done to the environment are, Kimmerer says, sometimes paralyzed by despair and unable to imagine an active, positive relationship with nature.  

In “Windigo Footprints,” Kimmerer uses the image of the Windigo, a yeti-like monster from Anishinaabe and Algonquian lore, to illustrate the prevailing attitude toward nature. The Windigo is a cannibalistic creature tormented by insatiable hunger; Kimmerer sees it as a symbol of the miserable selfishness that results when a person or a culture comes to view its own wants as more important than the needs of anyone else. Just as the Windigo’s ravenous hunger is never satisfied, she suggests, consumerism creates desires that can never be fulfilled no matter how much wealth is extracted from the planet. 

Braiding Sweetgrass does not, however, dwell exclusively on the negatives. Kimmerer continually points out ways large and small in which humans have traditionally worked alongside wild species for mutual benefit. She suggests that even people without specific ancestral traditions to draw upon can rediscover their relationship with the natural world through acts as simple as gardening or low-impact camping. In the process, Kimmerer proposes, society might come to see nature’s gifts as more than “resources” separate from humanity. The ideal relationship is, she says, more like a marriage in which humans use their gifts—ingenuity, language, artistic creativity, rational thought—to give back to the land, water, and wildlife. 

According to Braiding Sweetgrass, what is the common ground between modern science and Indigenous traditions? 

Kimmerer argues that there is much more common ground between Indigenous and scientific perspectives than may appear at first glance. In recounting her own education and career, she admits that she was at first skeptical that the two could overlap at all: Indigenous traditions seemed so warmly reverent toward the natural world while science seemed to her to be concerned only with dry facts and the lifeless dissection of natural phenomena. As her scientific thinking became more mature and independent, however, Kimmerer came to realize that many branches of science are concerned with seeing the whole that interconnects the parts, whether of an organism or of an ecosystem. Indigenous traditions, as Kimmerer describes them, are often fundamentally concerned with the whole and only secondarily with the parts; they are not reductionistic in the thinking they promote. Scientific research, while it may isolate the parts, often does so to fit them into a larger system. 

For Kimmerer, Indigenous ecological practices and scientific research can both lead the practitioner to a sense of wonder toward the natural world. Kimmerer describes this synthesis in her narratives of field expeditions undertaken with her students, who come to see the interrelatedness firsthand as they study forests and wetlands. Another point of common ground, especially for field biologists and ecologists, is that both scientists and Indigenous people (and, naturally, Indigenous scientists like Kimmerer) are often interested in the preservation of wild ecosystems. Sometimes, as Kimmerer shows, science provides the tools to analyze and diagnose disruptions in or threats to Indigenous ecological practices.  

How does Braiding Sweetgrass depict the relationship between individual and community? 

Braiding Sweetgrass can be regarded as a book about relationships: humans’ relationship to each other, to the land and the ecosystem, and to nonhuman species. Although Kimmerer does not spend much time talking about individualism as an ideology, she does suggest that much harm has come from the tendency to see humans as separate from the rest of the planet. She attributes the current ecological crisis in part to the fact that individuals do not see themselves as part of a community—at least not a community that meaningfully includes nature. In political communities, too, Kimmerer calls out excessive individualism as harmful to the common good, as when people are unwilling to pay taxes for sustainable energy and cleaner water. 

Traditional stories, biographical anecdotes, and illustrations from nature often serve to illustrate Kimmerer’s point about the value, even the necessity, of living in community. In “The Three Sisters,” Kimmerer illustrates how individuals—meaning individual people and individual species—can work together not just to overcome their differences but to utilize them for mutual benefit. Like diverse crops grown on the same plot, she suggests, people with distinct talents and personalities can thrive best when they thrive together. Her later chapter on lichen (“Umbilicaria: The Belly Button of the World”) makes substantially the same point while noting that various factors, such as pollution or a glut of resources, can make ecological communities fragile. Likewise, the material wealth of modern societies can tempt people to ignore the fact that, whatever their individual goals or accomplishments, they are part of a larger community.