Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub

Product Code: 6543
ISBN: 9781571313560
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published Date: 08/11/2015
Availability:In stock
N/A
Price: $20.00

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

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.


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Contents

Preface

Planting Sweetgrass
Skywoman Falling
The Council of Pecans
The Gift of Strawberries
An Offering
Asters and Goldenrod
Learning the Grammar of Animacy

Tending Sweetgrass
Maple Sugar Moon
Witch Hazel
A Mother’s Work
The Consolation of Water Lilies
Allegiance to Gratitude

Picking Sweetgrass
Epiphany in the Beans
The Three Sisters
Wisgaak Gokpenagen:A Black Ash Basket
Mishkos Kenomagwen:The Teachings of Grass
Maple Nation: A Citizenship Guide
The Honorable Harvest

Braiding Sweetgrass
In the Footsteps of Nanabozho
Becoming Indigenous to Place
The Sound of Silverbells
Sitting in a Circle
Burning Cascade Head
Putting Down Roots
Umbilicaria: The Belly Button of the World
Old-Growth Children
Witness to the Rain
Burning Sweetgrass
Windigo Footprints
The Sacred and the Superfun
People of Corn, People of Light
Collateral Damage
Shkitagen: People of the Seventh Fire
Defeating Windigo

Epilogue: Returning the Gift
Notes
Sources
Acknowledgements
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