Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer: book review

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2013) is a ‘braid of stories’ from Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and storytelling.

The book begins with sweetgrass, believed to be the first plant to grow on Earth – a sacred plant. The author tells us about other important plants too: pecan, strawberry, maple, witch hazel, freshwater green algae (‘the water net’), water lily, corn, and so on.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a plant scientist, and she adds, ‘but I am also a poet and the world speaks to me in metaphor.’

She talks in powerful poetic prose of the ‘communal generosity’ of plants, a ‘mycorrhizal network’ that unites people to land and ancestral responsibility, and the gifts of plants that go beyond food and shelter to songs of wisdom. She tells of the ‘grammar of animacy’ and indigenous words that encapsulate all meaning: such as ‘puhpowee’ meaning ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.’ Puhowee is a word of action, purpose, and process. English has no equivalent.

Robin Wall Kimmerer talks of the potential of photosynthesis, ecological consciousness, balance, and ‘returning the gift.’ She talks of ‘minidewak’ meaning ‘they give from the heart.’ She talks of the power of gratitude.

This is an interesting book, blending sacred and spiritual knowledge with the scientific world of botany in storybook form. It brings people back to poetry and back to nature.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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