Braiding Sweetgrass

This is one of the most soothing books I've ever read despite the talk about environmental destruction. The way Robin describes nature is so wondrous and I can almost physically sense being in her environment from my reading chair. I ended the book with a motivation to give back to earth in any way I can.

I found Robin's mixing of science, indigenous wisdom and spirituality extremely compelling. Each is given respect within the pages of this book, as are the plants, animals and other parts of the earth alongside the humans who share them. This book gives me hope for a future where we can live harmoniously with the world around use - people, plants, animals and lands.

I loved so much about this book, but it also made me so mad, and as a result, took me 3 months to finish listening to. There were so many anecdotes and tidbits from the author that I really appreciated and a lot of things I simply had never heard about before that I'm glad that I know now. It made me start to brainstorm ways that I can be more connected and take care of the earth better even though I live in a huge urban center. But at the same time, there was this really icky undertone of classism in some of the chapters that I really think made this book less. Perhaps this would go unnoticed by someone who hasn't been exposed to people from many different places before, or lived in many different types of environments before, but it was really noticeable to me. I also found the author's somewhat interchangeable use of immigrant, settler, and colonialist, to be rather unsettling given the current political climate. I realize that this book is somewhat older, and that topics of Indigenous sovereignty can be fraught in the Americas and Australia in particular, but it nonetheless struck me as somewhat careless in contrast to how much care the author puts into expressing reciprocity in such explicit terms.

I was really excited about this book given how many good things I've heard about people who've read it in the past year so, but I'm feeling more on the negative side of lukewarm about it, which is a shame. Maybe I'll have to try it again at some point with some more education under my belt and see if I feel more positively about it then.

This book deftly mixes personal stories with an introduction to a wide variety of Native American creation stories, cultural practices, foodways, agricultural practices, and epistemologies (seriously). I also appreciated the academic botanical knowledge that Kimmerer brings here adds a solid additional dimension to the book. I was hoping for much less of a focus on the anecdotal stories here, but if that's what you're looking for you'll like the book even more than I did.

This book has enjoyed a lot of hype, but it wasn't really my cup of tea. I adored some of the essays -- especially the ones on parenting, and the ones that really delved into mixing botany with indigenous culture. Two things really got in the way of it being great for me, though: one was that I tend to read in chunks of time and by the end of half an hour the essays would feel very monotone and redundant. I suppose that Kimmerer would say that I wasn't reading as an honorable harvest and that what I should be doing was small moments of mindful reading over time to give the essays space to grow. Which, I guess, leads me to the second point: I found Kimmerer so disdainful - she tries to say she doesn't disdain people, just ways of life, but she also clearly looks down on her students, biologists who don't talk about love and beauty in their scientific presentations, city-dwellers, people who get bored during long speeches and so much more. She comes off as thinking that only her people have insights like "rituals that celebrate the whole community are good" (it turns out non-indigenous people also have spiritual and community rituals).

I got the strong sense reading the book that she would hate me, a biologist who thinks things are cool but not beautiful, who loves being with other people in dense urban cities, who is easily bored despite believing in gratitude. And I just didn't enjoy reading a book that made me feel bad about myself but not in a productive way.

This book is a golden opportunity to get to know a bit of First Nations world view and relationship with the environment, their mythology, traditions, even nuggets of linguistics. For this reason alone I'd recommend this as a read for anyone who hasn't made such contact before.

Some parts are definitely very emotional and touching, specially regarding the sorrows brought upon the land and people subject to such destruction brought by colonizers. I can't say it was a very engaging read, though. Some chapters felt very loosely connected, some sections read like rambling or very superficial criticism, borderline naturalistic platitudes. Reminded me a lot of the idealistic Brazilian Indian Romanticism, but in a modern essayist format with a touch of scientific backing special to the author.

Kimmerer spends a lot of time in this book comparing and contrasting Western science to indigenous ways of knowing, specifically from the Potawatomi tradition. As she's someone formally trained in western science, I understood her thesis being that indigenous ways of knowing can coexist with western science, but more than anything, I felt that this book did a really good job justifying why we shouldn't treat science as the end all be all of knowledge.

On one hand, I think this book reintroduced my very secular mind to the ways in which having a spiritual connection to nature can be extremely enriching and can add to our collective understanding of the natural world

On the other hand, it provides a basis for understanding where exactly science falls short in its attempt to catalogue the universe, as well as exposing its "objectivity" for the many ways in which it is actually ideologically motivated.

All in all, this book is definitely going to be a cornerstone of my worldview with respect to knowledge for the foreseeable future. Not to mention the fact that Kimmerer is just a really awesome writer in general

I missed out on the opportunity to borrow this book, highly recommended by a beautiful friend, in its original publication a couple of years ago so almost-literally leapt at the chance to review a NetGalley copy of the new Penguin publication. I'm so glad that I did! Robin Wall Kimmerer's life philosophies and the way in which she looks to plant wisdom for answers to human social and environmental problems are exactly what we need to be exploring right now, especially as people want new lifestyle choices in the wake of the epidemic. I began reading Braiding Sweetgrass wondering if this might be too 'hippy' a book for me to really get into. Within a hundred pages I was totally engrossed in every word Kimmerer wrote and frequently found myself nodding in enthusiastic agreement with her.

Kimmerer discusses ancient Native American ideas and practices, showing how the ideas behind them result in a completely different mindset to that of contemporary capitalist Western culture. I loved how she explains the influence of such basic concepts as our origin myths and was reminded strongly of Nesrine Malik's arguments in We Need New Stories. For the Potawatomi tribe, human life on Earth began with a woman whose fall from the sky was cushioned by geese catching her in their soft feathers and with all the animals helping her to create a home for herself. The Christian story begins in anger with a woman being evicted from paradise to cope as best she can in a lesser place. Our language also makes a huge difference to our worldview. In English, it is acceptable to refer to any nonhuman as 'it', ie. as a thing. For Native Americans, all animals have person status as do plants, rocks, water flows. It's much harder emotionally to mistreat someOne than someThing.

The combination of Kimmerer's philosophical approach together with her scientific knowledge and engaging, chatty tone made Braiding Sweetgrass an amazing read for me. While I was eager to keep reading what Kimmerer has to say, I also found myself frequently setting the book aside to appreciate a beautiful concept or to consider how I could apply a suggestion to my own lifestyle. I think it is generally accepted that humans have to make drastic changes to how we live and consume resources or we soon won't have a planet that's capable of supporting us all. I would highly recommend Braiding Sweetgrass as the perfect guide.

The most soulful book I've read in my life. The beauty of Kimmerer's words, braiding native, scientific, and modern life is an experience I want to keep going back to.

The chapters feel a bit disconnected and sometimes repetitive, but there's a lot of beautiful writing in this book. I especially enjoyed the chapter on maple syrup harvesting and the section on the symbiotic relationship of lichens.