Braiding Sweetgrass
By Robin Wall Kimmerer
I don’t normally gravitate to books that contain scientific classifications or cover the defense of a thesis on the biology of plants, but the only reason I’ll turn down a Book Club pick is already having read it, so here we were. I’m so grateful Braiding Sweetgrass was picked because it is so much more than technical jargon and the latin names of plants. Robin Wall Kimmerer is in conversation with how the nature of scientific language can be isolating, walking the reader through her own experience as an Indigenous woman who had her own history questioned by the institutions she sought to expand her knowledge of the natural world.
The book begins with a retelling of the oral tradition for how the land came to be. From that first chapter, you get an Indigenous perspective on the subject, how white settlers influenced it to meet their demands, and a modern imagining of how we could do things differently. The rest of the book plays out much like that first chapter, sometimes exclusively educating about a Native Tribe’s perspective on the topic Kimmerer chooses to write about, sometimes balancing multiple perspectives, but always giving an appropriate amount of attention to all applicable perspectives. It’s very scientific in that way. Even though she could spend the entire book defending one point of view, she doesn’t underplay the other side when something like the institution of higher education has ignored the Native approach on plant harvest for their entire existence.
Robin Wall Kimmerer might have set out to write a scientific book that backs up Native history, but in doing so she tells so many personal stories that it is in equal measure a memoir. Maybe my opinion of that is swayed by the fact that I listened to her read the audiobook. When she tells her personal stories of working in the education field, or returning to her neighbor’s old house to hold a Christmas meal, the compassion she holds for the world around her shines through, and you see the beauty of her heart found in her other more technical writing. An added bonus to hearing her read the audiobook is her ability to pronounce all unfamiliar words. Whether it comes from a made up fantasy world, an actual Native language, or the inspiration for English itself: Latin, my brain glosses over words I don’t speak on a day to day basis. There’s a chapter where Kimmerer talks about keeping an Indigenous language alive by continuing to speak it every day after the white ruling class did everything they could to erase it, and she carries that forward every time there is an opportunity to read any such word aloud. Even the Latin plant names.
Braiding Sweetgrass is a no question slam dunk for any aspiring botanist you may know, but I would encourage anyone interested in expanding their reading into non-fiction. The only non-fiction I’ve read since the textbooks of college have been memoirs, and the experience of reading this was like eating my dessert so I could have really well prepared vegetables.