48 pages • 1 hour read
Robin Wall KimmererBraiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Planting Sweetgrass”
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “The Council of Pecans”
In 1838, the US military forcibly removed the Potawatomi from their ancestral home in Illinois to a reservation in eastern Kansas. Kimmerer’s great-grandmother was among the individuals displaced on the so-called Trail of Death. In Kansas, the Potawatomi discovered a fruitful nut tree unknown to them: they called it pigan, meaning nut. The word eventually became morphed into “pecan” as the government forced Indigenous people to assimilate into American culture and speak English.
Kimmerer points to collecting ripe pecans as an example of Honorable Harvest: gratefully taking only what is given by the tree and reciprocating the gift by leaving enough for others. Potawatomi elders taught that trees speak to each other. Modern science shows that trees can communicate in times of crisis (such as insect infestation) using pheromones carried in the wind. They also use underground fungal connections to share resources such as carbohydrates. As a result, individual trees within a grove fruit at the same time regardless of their specific circumstances. This mutual flourishing creates an abundance of fruit, ensuring that some are left behind to germinate and grow into new trees. Kimmerer encourages readers to consider the effect of this kind of codependence on human communities.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “The Gift of Strawberries”
The Potawatomi word for strawberry is ode min, or heart berry. The name points to the belief that the first strawberry grew from Skywoman’s daughter’s heart. As a child, Kimmerer thought of the wild strawberries she picked as a gift. She encourages readers to think of natural resources like fruits as a gift from the Earth rather than a commodity to be purchased. Reframing these natural resources as gifts rather than commodities creates a sense of reciprocity and a space for gratitude for the Earth. This reciprocity is necessary for continued life on Earth. She contrasts this gift economy with the capitalist market economy, which creates a sense of scarcity and competition rather than generosity and reciprocity.
Kimmerer argues that certain resources cannot be bought or sold but must be given as a gift. For sweetgrass to be used in sacred ceremonies, it must be picked properly and given as a gift; it cannot be purchased and remain sacred. Kimmerer suggests that modern meat production does not treat life as a gift, but instead represents a theft of life. She encourages readers to reconsider their food commodities as gifts and join the global reconsideration of modern food and farming practices.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “An Offering”
Kimmerer’s father started every morning of their annual canoe camping trips the same way: by pouring coffee onto the ground as an offering to “the gods of Tahawus” (50). Tahawus, or cloud-splitter, is the Algonquin name for Mount Marcy, the highest point in the Adirondacks, where Kimmerer’s family camped. Her father repeated the ceremony every time they traveled, offering a gift of coffee in thanks and respect for the landscapes they visited. Even as a child, Kimmerer knew that there were sacred rituals behind this family ceremony. Her family’s connection to these rituals was fractured when her grandfather was taken from his family and sent to a residential school. She argues that ceremonies have the power to help people live in gratitude and awareness of the gifts of the Earth.
As an adult, Kimmerer and her family reestablished their tribal connections and experienced formal ceremonies, such as the sending of thanks to the four directions. She imagines that the circle drawn by her father’s ceremony now encompasses a larger number of people. His simple ceremony had the same intention as the larger gathering and was equally sacred. She encourages readers to find their own spaces to cultivate ceremonies of respect and gratitude.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Asters and Goldenrod”
Kimmerer reflects on her career as a botanist. As a freshman in college, she told an advisor that she wanted to major in botany because she wanted to know why asters and goldenrods grew together so beautifully. Her childhood had given her countless questions about plants and their relationships with humans. The advisor told her that botany was not about beauty and told her to go to art school. Kimmerer compares her dismissal with her grandfather’s entrance to residential school: In both cases, the Indigenous person was told to abandon their ways of thinking to assimilate into the dominant culture.
As a botanist, Kimmerer learned that asters and goldenrods grow together because the complementary colors purple and gold attract more pollinators together than they would alone. Her career as a botanist shifted Kimmerer’s way of thinking from an Indigenous worldview that saw plants as teachers and companions to a scientific worldview that saw plants as an object of study. She began to think of plants as puzzles to solve rather than relationships to maintain. Kimmerer encounters a Navajo woman with a vast knowledge of local plant life and no formal training in botany. Her deep knowledge of plant wisdom reenergizes Kimmerer’s love of botany.
Part 2 Analysis
In the first section of Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer describes the book as a braid of sweetgrass, a plant sacred to the Potawatomi. As she weaves together threads of personal memoir, scientific knowledge, and Indigenous wisdom, she imagines the book as a gift from Kimmerer to readers. As the title suggests, the second section of the book, “Planting Sweetgrass,” explores Kimmerer’s introduction to both her Indigenous heritage and her career as a botanist. The pressure Kimmerer experiences in academic botany circles to reject her Indigenous ways of relating to plants reflects the ongoing impact of The Injustice of the American Government’s Treatment of Indigenous Americans, which her ancestors experienced first-hand. The chapters in this section describe how Kimmerer learns to reintegrate the different parts of her identity, bringing Indigenous ways of knowing into all parts of her life, including her life as a scientist.
In “An Offering,” Kimmerer remembers her father’s daily ritual of pouring coffee as a sign of gratitude while camping. The memory weaves together the themes of the injustice of the American government’s treatment of Indigenous Americans and The Importance of Storytelling in Indigenous Communities. She describes watching as her father “lifts his face to the morning sun and speaks into the stillness, ‘Here’s to the gods of Tahawus’” (50). Although Kimmerer “never questioned the source of those words,” (51) she knew intrinsically that they were unique to her family and those like her. She later learns that the sacred ceremonies her father was imitating had “been taken away from my grandfather at the doors of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School” after he was removed from his family by US policies meant to eradicate Indigenous culture (52). When Kimmerer first engaged with Indigenous ceremonies in Indigenous languages as an adult, she heard the unfamiliar words “as if in my father’s voice. The language was different, but the heart was the same” (53). In drawing an explicit connection between these communal ceremonies and her father’s personal practices, Kimmerer frames her relationship with her Indigenous identity as a return to things she already knew, rather than brand new knowledge. This perspective suggests that something about the sacred ceremonies Kimmerer describes is intrinsic to her family and her worldview, and cannot be separated by outside intervention, such as the forces that removed her grandfather from his family. Despite attempts by the US government to destroy Indigenous knowledge, it survived through the storytelling and ritual practices families like the Kimmerers preserved.
Similarly, “Asters and Goldenrod” frames Kimmerer’s sense of kinship with plants as a return to a worldview centering The Interconnectedness of Life on Earth, rather than an abandonment of the scientific knowledge she gained as an adult. As a young adult, Kimmerer decided to study botany because she was interested in the relationship between plants and humans: “I wanted to know why certain stems bent easily for baskets and some would break, why the biggest berries grew in the shade, and why they made us medicines” (57). As her career in botany progressed, she was forced to adopt a worldview in which “the primary question was ‘how does it work?’” (60). Within this worldview, “plants were reduced to objects. They were not subjects” (60). Removed from the Indigenous worldview in which she was raised, Kimmerer “was teaching the names of plants but ignoring their songs” (62). It is only after a chance meeting with an untrained Navajo botanist that Kimmerer feels called to bring Indigenous ways of knowing “back into harmony” with her research. Here, as in “An Offering,” exchange and community with Indigenous thinkers allow Kimmerer to remember a worldview that assimilation caused her to discard.
