Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

"Robin Kimmerer is another scientist; she is at State University of New York at Syracuse. She’s a botanist and her expertise is vast and wide. She has a previous book called Gathering Moss , which is a very beautiful book. Braiding Sweetgrass caught on because she tries to balance her scientific expertise with indigenous wisdom, especially as based in her own heritage and traditions. She writes it from the perspective of a family member, a woman, a mother and a daughter. She weaves this together into a domestic ecology of sorts, the indigenous traditions that she’s familiar with in her own history and her very deep understanding of botany and environmental science more broadly. She’s a wonderful writer, a fine essayist. This book has really hit a chord. It’s become very popular because people are interested in understanding how to integrate indigenous wisdom with science. They’re very interested in a woman’s perspective on family and natural history. At the same time, when you read her work, every time you finish an essay and you go outside—wherever you are, you could be in a city, or you can be out in the woods—you see the world a little bit differently. That’s what I’ve tried to do with all the books I’ve chosen. They are books that you just read for 15 minutes, half an hour, and suddenly you’ve changed your perception of the way the world is, the way it works, the way the natural world is. Kimmerer does that very well in this book and that’s why I chose it. I think that one of the trends that we’re seeing in the environmental field right now is the importance of the multiplicity of voices. So I tried to select books that gave us a great variety of cultural voices."