Article: Robin Wall Kimmerer: Greed Does Not Have to Define Our Relationship to Land
We cannot solve problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. - Albert Einstein
1. Speaking specifically as a person who cares about/works on climate change, what theme or concept from “Braiding Sweetgrass” resonated the most with you—Eg: the gift economy, reciprocity, gratitude, etc.?
- Forgive self for mistakes we’ve done in the past and do what we can moving forward
- Gratitude journal, commitment, either in writing or by texting someone
- The salmon and people relearning at their “reunion” how to be in relationship
- Reciprocity isn’t automatic in U.S. culture, not tit for tat (transactional ledger)
- Building a community happens with interdependence and dependence. Would we treat the earth better if we saw this dependence?
2. In the beginning of the book, Kimmerer describes sweetgrass. “Breathe in its scent,” she writes, “and you start to remember things you didn't know you'd forgotten.” What did this book reinforce for you that you already knew, but had perhaps forgotten?
- “Our stories say that of all the plants, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the very first to grow on the earth, its fragrance a sweet memory of Skywoman’s hand. Accordingly, it is honored as one of the four sacred plants of my people. Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we “remember to remember”
- Sweetgrass has become dependent on humans, harvesting helps it grow
- “Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we “remember to remember”
- “Our stories say that of all the plants, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the very first to grow on the earth, its fragrance a sweet memory of Skywoman’s hand”
3. On page 327, Kimmerer criticizes an environmental movement that has become “synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings.” She reminds us that “Even a wounded world is feeding us … giving us moments of wonder and joy.” Do you agree that the environmental movement does not focus enough on the joy of the natural world? If so, how can that be fixed? Do you agree that the environmental movement does not focus enough on the joy of the natural world? If so, how can that be fixed?
- This is a good book to recommend to people who are feeling overwhelmed by climate change
4. In the story, ‘Skywoman Falling’--the indigenous Creation story (pp. 3-10), you learn that Skywoman lived as if her children’s future mattered. If you truly focus on the Earth that will be left for your grandchildren, how would you live differently?
- “They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food from light and water, and then they give it away. I like to imagine that when Skywoman scattered her handful of seeds across Turtle Island, she was sowing sustenance for the body and also for the mind, emotion, and spirit: she was leaving us teachers. The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to listen.”
5. Kimmerer states, in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” (p. 9) Do you agree that humans can learn from plants and animals? If so, how can we humble ourselves to ‘listen’ to the wisdom of the plants?
- It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness" - estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night. For a moment as we walked this road, those barriers dissolved and we began to relieve the loneliness and know each other once again.”
6. In the ‘Council of Pecans’ (pp. 11-21), we learn that trees teach the ‘Spirit of Community’ in which what is good for one is good for all. If you believed that the earth belongs to everybody as a community, would you be more invested in its health? Why?
- She highlights how they fed people at times of great need, such as during the time of the Indian Removal policies of the federal government. She moves on to discuss gifts, and she points out the cultural differences between indigenous people and modern Western societies. She recounts her father’s small ceremonies and their importance in showing respect.
- “until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
7. Does the concept of trees having a community relationship, and the scientific explanations of their possible means of communications change how you view our relationship with forests? If so, how?
- They communicate through their roots
- Might want to read Overstory
- “The trees act not as individuals,
but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But
what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We
can starve together or feast together.”
- “The mycorrhizae may form fungal bridges between individual trees, so that
all the trees in a forest are connected. These fungal networks appear to
redistribute the wealth of carbohydrates from tree to tree. A kind of Robin
Hood, they take from the rich and give to the poor so that all the trees arrive
at the same carbon surplus at the same time. They weave a web of reciprocity,
of giving and taking. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi
have connected them. Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual. Soil,
fungus, tree, squirrel, boy—all are the beneficiaries of reciprocity.”
8. The ‘Gift of Strawberries’ (pp. 22-32) introduces the reader to the concept of “the essence of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.” (p. 28) How can “the relationship of gratitude and reciprocity that has been developed increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal”? (p. 30)
- “Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.”
- “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.”
- “The listeners reciprocate the gift of the speaker’s words with their attention,”
- “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 the 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.”
- “How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again? I know we cannot all become hunter-gatherers—the living world could not bear our weight—but even in a market economy, can we behave “as if ” the living world were a gift?”
- “In a garden, food arises from partnership. If I don't pick rocks and pull weeds, I'm not fulfilling my end of the bargain. I can do these thing with my handy opposable thumb and capacity to use tools, to shovel manure. But I can no more create a tomato or embroider a trellis in beans than I can turn lead into gold. That is the plants' responsibility and their gift: animating the inanimate. Now there is a gift.”
9. Do you see the earth as property or as a gift? How does this perspective change the way in which you view the value of what you take from the earth?
- “Perhaps we can think of the Honorable Harvest as a mirror by which we judge our purchases. What do we see in the mirror? A purchase worthy of the lives consumed? Dollars become a surrogate, a proxy for the harvester with hands in the earth, and they can be used in support of the Honorable Harvest—or not.”
- “The hills of waste are the topographic inverse of the open pit mines— the largest open pit mines in New York State, still unreclaimed— where the limestone rocks were quarried, the earth gouged out in one place to bury the ground in another. If time could run backward, like a film in reverse, we would see this mess reassemble itself into lush green hills and moss-covered ledges of limestone. The streams would run back up the hills to the springs and the salt would stay glittering in underground rooms.”
10. ‘An Offering’ (pp. 33-38) provides insight into Kimmerer’s understanding of the meaning of ceremony that is “fed from the same bond with the land, founded on respect and gratitude.” (p. 36) How can we express our gratitude and responsibility for the gifts of the land? What can we offer earth in return?
- “What is the duty of humans? If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking “What is our responsibility?” is the same as asking “What is our gift?” It is said that only humans have the capacity for gratitude. This is among our gifts.”
- “Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren’t looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places.”
- “Among our Potawatomi people, women are the Keepers of Water. We carry the sacred water to ceremonies and act on its behalf. “Women have a natural bond with water, because we are both life bearers,” my sister said. “We carry our babies in internal ponds and they come forth into the world on a wave of water. It is our responsibility to safeguard the water for all our relations.”
11. ‘Asters and Goldenrod’ (pp. 39-47) delves into Kimmerer’s need to question and to know about the relationship between these flowers. “It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand.” (p. 46) She discovered a “lived reciprocity” between asters and goldenrod—“the pairing of purple and gold”. What is the interdependency between humans and plants? And, what happens if we don’t live up to our end of the relationship?
- “The human eye has three kinds. One type excels at detecting red and associated wavelengths. One is tuned to blue. The other optimally perceives light of two colors: purple and yellow. The human eye is superbly equipped to detect these colors and send a signal pulsing to the brain. This doesn’t explain why I perceive them as beautiful, but it does explain why that combination gets my undivided attention. I asked my artist buddies about the power of purple and gold, and they sent me right to the color wheel: these two are complementary colors, as different in nature as could be. In composing a palette, putting them together makes each more vivid; just a touch of one will bring out the other. In an 1890 treatise on color perception, Goethe, who was both a scientist and a poet, wrote that “the colors diametrically opposed to each other . . . are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.” Purple and yellow are a reciprocal pair.”
12. ‘Learning the Grammar of Animacy’ (pp. 48-59) introduces the concept of communing with nature by getting to know more about plants and recognizing that they are not inanimate objects. What can you do to start learning about the plants in your immediate environment? If you addressed the plants as something other than ‘it’, would that change your attitude? How?
- “A bay is a noun only if 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 wiikwegamaa—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. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.[…]This is the grammar of animacy.”
13. In the story ‘Maple Sugar Moon’ (pp. 63-71), Nanabozho finds that people have grown lazy due to the bounty of the first Maple trees. Nanabozho removes this culture of plenty by diluting the sap and teaching the people to honor and respect the gift of the Maple tree. Can you draw any parallels from this story and our consumer-driven economy? In what ways are we wasting earth’s gifts – its non-renewable, natural resources?
- “In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that”
- “Cities are like the mitochondria in our animal cells—they are consumers, fed by the autotrophs, the photosynthesis of a distant green landscape. We could lament that urban dwellers have little means of exercising direct reciprocity with the land. Yet while city folks may be separated from the sources of what they consume, they can exercise reciprocity through how they spend their money. While the digging of the leeks and the digging of the coal may be too far removed to see, we consumers have a potent tool of reciprocity right in our pockets. We can use our dollars as the indirect currency of reciprocity.”
- “When Nanabozho, the Anishinaabe Original Man, our teacher, part man, part manido, walked through the world, he took note of who was flourishing and who was not, of who was mindful of the Original Instructions and who was not. He was dismayed when he came upon villages where the gardens were not being tended, where the fishnets were not repaired and the children were not being taught the way to live. Instead of seeing piles of firewood and caches of corn, he found the people lying beneath maple trees with their mouths wide open, catching the thick, sweet syrup of the generous trees. They had become lazy and took for granted the gifts of the Creator. They did not do their ceremonies or care for one another. He knew his responsibility, so he went to the river and dipped up many buckets of water. He poured the water straight into the maple trees to dilute the syrup. Today, maple sap flows like a stream of water with only a trace of sweetness to remind the people both of possibility and of responsibility. And so it is that it takes forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.* * Adapted from oral tradition and Ritzenthaler and Ritzenthaler, 1983.”
14. In ‘Allegiance to Gratitude’ (pp. 103-117), Kimmerer introduces the Thanksgiving Address used by the indigenous people to give thanks to the land. She states, “...it is the credo for a culture of gratitude.” (p. 115) How does the Thanksgiving Address support the concept of “our mutual allegiance as human delegates to the democracy of the species”? (p. 116) What does that mean to you? "Imagine if our government meetings began with the Thanksgiving Address," Kimmerer wrote on page 113. "What if our leaders first found common ground before fighting over their differences?"
- “Of course you should write about it. It’s supposed to be shared, otherwise how can it work? We’ve been waiting five hundred years for people to listen. If they’d understood the Thanksgiving then, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
15. What does each of The Three Sisters – corn, beans, and squash - bring to their reciprocal relationship? How can this partnership create a stronger community? Can you think of other examples of such win-win situations?
- Using the science, I will rotate my “crop containers” and mark which ones grew beans so that the nitrogen will already be there. I will also use a tall rack, instead of actually planting corn.
- Even though a woodchuck ate a lot of the leaves in my garden, seeing a garden grow helps remember our source of food and the challenges of growing food
- Squash blossom can be stuffed and eaten.
16. In our consumer-driven society, how can we put into realistic practice the covenants of The Honorable Harvest? How can we teach people to “remember that what’s good for the land is also good for the people”? (p. 195)
- The grocery store makes it hard to practice being “honorable”
- In California, most of the produce is shipped out
- Oranges have a growing season (they are not on trees year round)
17. Kimmerer states that “we seem to be living in an era of Windigo economics of fabricated demand and compulsive overconsumption” (p. 308) In addition, “Our leaders willfully ignore the wisdom and the models of every other species on the planet—except of course those that have gone extinct. Windigo thinking.” (p. 309) Can you provide examples of unnecessary overconsumption? What would we need to change in our society to stop these practices?
- “modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest peoples.” The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated. The market system artificially creates scarcity by blocking the flow between the source and the consumer. Grain may rot in the warehouse while hungry people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some and diseases of excess for others. The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings: this is a Windigo economy.”
- Selling MMIW merchandise and not giving any money
- Consuming “stuff” even though it doesn’t fix the “hunger” (use mindfulness to stop and think about what you really need – is it to consume something else?)
- A hunger that is not satisfied
- Indigenous people continue to be killed. “When George Washington directed federal troops to exterminate the Onondaga during the Revolutionary War, a nation that had numbered in the tens of thousands was reduced to a few hundred people in a matter of one year.”
18. “The Onondaga people still live by the precepts of the Great Law and still believe that, in return for the gifts of Mother Earth, human people have responsibility for caring for the nonhuman people, for stewardship of the land.” (p. 319) What do you believe are the responsibilities of our government and our society in aiding the Onondaga Nation in its efforts to restore Onondaga Lake to a healthy state?
- The Windigo is a myth among the indigenous peoples, warning those who are starving to death in winter of the dangers of turning toward cannibalism. To the author, the myth is a reminder to “recoil from the greedy parts of ourselves” (233), which she takes to mean overconsumption. She describes the incredible pollution of a lake, though recent efforts have tried to address it.
19. Reflect upon Kimmerer’s statement “environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings.” (p. 327) What action can you take within your community to bring about positive environmentalism and ecological restoration/preservation?
- “In indigenous ways of knowing, it is understood that each living being has a particular role to play. Every being is endowed with certain gifts, its own intelligence, its own spirit, its own story. Our stories tell us that the Creator gave these to us, as original instructions. The foundation of education is to discover that gift within us and learn to use it well.”
20. Based upon the central themes as presented by Dr. Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, explain the differences between reciprocity and the current ecological movement known as sustainability.
- “That, I think, is the power of ceremony. It marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine; the coffee to a prayer.”
- “Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.”
- “That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage.”
- “From the very beginning of the world, the other species were a lifeboat for the people. Now, we must be theirs.”
- “People can take too much and exceed the capacity of the plants to share again. That’s the voice of hard experience that resonates in the teachings of “never take more than half.” And yet, they also teach that we can take too little. If we allow traditions to die, relationships to fade, the land will suffer.”
- “When a language dies, so much more than words are lost.
Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is
a prism through which to see the world.”
