Braiding Sweetgrass

braiding sweetgrass

“Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.”

There is poetry and metaphor also int he way the books I’ve included on this site talk to each other, across time and discipline. So when Kimmerer talks about the gift economy as way of being in the world, her ideas resonate with Lewis Hyde’s mythologically based premises in The Gift. Kimmerer explains that the essence of a gift creates a set of relationships. The currency of the gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. So in Western thinking, for example, private land is understood to be a “bundle of rights,” whereas in a gift economy property has a “bundle of responsibilities” attached.