Robin Wall Kimmerer

Drawing from her experiences as an Indigenous scientist, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer demonstrated how all living things--from strawberries and witch hazel to water lilies and lichen--provide us with gifts and lessons every day in her best-selling book Braiding Sweetgrass. Adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith, this new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth's oldest teachers: the plants around us. With informative sidebars, reflection questions, and art from illustrator Nicole Neidhardt, Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults brings Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the lessons of plant life to a new generation.

A Guide to the Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults

Sophia 

When we call a place by name, it is transformed from wilderness to homeland.

Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in Indigenous ways of knowing we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit. When I began my training as a scientist, I came to understand that science privileges only one, possibly two, of those ways of knowing: mind and body. But it is a whole human being, all four aspects of us, who finds the beautiful path.

You can’t listen to the Thanksgiving Address without feeling wealthy. And while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness. The Thanksgiving Address reminds you that you already have everything you need. Gratitude doesn't send you out shopping to find satisfaction. That's good medicine for land and people alike.

I live vicariously through the photosynthesis of others. I am not the vibrant leaves on the forest floor -I am the woman with the basket, and how I fill it is a question that matters. If we are fully awake, a moral question arises as we extinguish the other lives around us on behalf of our own. Whether we are digging wild leeks or going to the mall, how do we consume in a way that does Justice to the lives that we take?

The market system artificially creates scarcity by blocking the flow between the source and the consumer. For example, grain may rot in the warehouse while people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some and wealth 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 is a Windigo economy.

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