Every summer, the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer takes a group of students on a two-week field trip deep into the woods and bogs of the Adirondacks.
For their final exam, students prepare a feast from foraged plants, dining on a wild menu of boiled cattail kebabs, roasted rhizomes, stir-fried day lily buds, lichen noodles in a gelatinous broth of boiled rock tripe. For dessert there are serviceberry and cattail pollen pancakes, smothered in pine-scented spruce needle syrup.
Before digging in, the group recites the Thanksgiving address — an invocation within Indigenous Haudenosaunee communities that gives thanks to the earth and its abundance.
“We start the class with a Thanksgiving address to share our sense of gratitude for the plants, and we end the same way,” said Kimmerer, a professor of environmental biology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, who is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. “So we learn about the gifts of plants and how to receive them.”
Kimmerer often says that plants have been her teachers throughout her life. As a little girl, she stashed shoe boxes of pressed leaves and seeds under her bed. Later, as a young botanist, she studied the mysteries of moss reproduction. Throughout her decades of research and environmental advocacy, as she’s pushed to bring Indigenous knowledge into ecological conservation work, she’s learned about the delicate web of relationships between plants and their surroundings.
Now, as a renowned plant ecologist and best-selling author, Kimmerer is teaching millions of people how to learn from plants.
With her blockbuster book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Kimmerer’s ideas about how to repair humanity’s broken relationship with the natural world have spread far. Published in 2013 by Milkweed Editions, “Braiding Sweetgrass” became a sleeper hit and word-of-mouth phenomenon that went on to sell nearly 3 million copies in North America. It has been published in more than 20 languages.
“At this moment of societal anxiety around a growing sense that the way we live on earth needs to change, the book has become kind of a movement book,” said Daniel Slager, publisher and chief executive of Milkweed Editions.
Part memoir, part manifesto, “Braiding Sweetgrass” calls for radically changing our relationship with plants and ecosystems from one of unchecked consumption into one of reciprocity and care. It’s also a tender and poignant love letter to Kimmerer’s plant teachers — from the humble mosses that captivated her as a graduate student to majestic western red cedars with trunks that can span 50 feet, which Kimmerer calls by their Salish name, Mother Cedar.
This month, Kimmerer released her first new book in more than a decade, a slim, illustrated volume titled “The Serviceberry,” in which she argues that we should abandon an economy and a way of life that built around exploiting the natural world. Instead, Kimmerer proposes a shift toward a gift economy based on mutual flourishing and a sense of gratitude.
She uses the serviceberry tree as a model, describing how the they provide nourishment for birds, which feast on its berries and, in turn, spread serviceberry seeds, and how the serviceberries sustain the bees that pollinate the trees’ flowers and the microorganisms that live around its roots.
Kimmerer, who at 71 is soft-spoken and has wavy gray hair, didn’t have to look far for inspiration. Just outside her house, there’s a thicket of serviceberry trees, which blossom in spring and produce sweet, juicy red berries in the summertime, feeding deer, robins, cedar waxwings, catbirds and Kimmerer herself.
The trees sit on her seven-acre plot of land in central New York, where she lives in a 200-year-old white farmhouse that she bought more than 30 years ago. She was drawn to the house because it’s surrounded by seven huge sugar maples, which Kimmerer tapped to make syrup when her two daughters were young. Lately, Kimmerer has begun cultivating what she calls “a climate change forest” on her land by planting dozens of trees that can withstand warmer temperatures: a medley of oaks, basswoods, Kentucky coffeetrees and tulip poplars.
These days, her only housemates are her two cats, named Ishkodenhs — which means little fire in Potawatomi — and Ziiziibaskwet, which means maple sugar. She writes in a small room upstairs that looks out over her neighbors’ corn fields and pastures where alpacas and sheep graze.
Kimmerer was raised about a hundred miles away in Ballston Lake, where her father worked as a mechanical engineer, and her mother, who had a degree in chemical engineering, took care of Kimmerer and her three siblings. Growing up, she knew her ancestors’ history and stories; her aunt would often send the children treasures like buckskin dolls and jewelry to remind them of their family’s origins. But she felt cut off from her ancestral language and ceremonies.
Her paternal grandfather, who lived on a Potawatomi reservation in Oklahoma as a boy, was taken from his family at age 9 and sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where students were forced to assimilate. Whenever Kimmerer’s father made an offering to the earth, he did so in English.
It took a while for Kimmerer to discover the connections between her Indigenous roots and her interest in plants. When she enrolled in graduate school for botany at the University of Wisconsin in 1975, she was one of the few women in the forestry school, and the only Indigenous person. She went on to get her Ph.D. in plant ecology; in a letter of recommendation, her adviser wrote that she had “done remarkably well for an Indian girl.”
She later distinguished herself as a bryologist — an expert on moss. But at times, she was so immersed in gathering data that she almost lost touch with the way plants enchanted her as a child.
As a graduate student in Wisconsin, Kimmerer was invited to a small gathering of Native elders, where she met a Navajo woman who introduced her the native names of the plants in her valley, along with their medicinal properties and origin stories. She realized there was a vast body of traditional knowledge that would deepen her understanding of plants.
Later, she decided to study the language her ancestors spoke. She was astonished to learn that in Potawatomi, a plant or animal is referred to as “who” rather than “it,” giving them agency and individuality as living beings.
“Braiding Sweetgrass” began as an essay collection, a way for Kimmerer to outline how Indigenous knowledge could help us understand and address environmental problems. Kimmererwove in her own story about her relationship to plants and to her Indigenous heritage, describing how her ancestors’ beliefs and practices have made her a more fluent scientist.
“It was really liberating to write about my relationship with plants and what I’ve learned from them, not what I’ve learned about them,” Kimmerer said.
Kimmerer didn’t have a literary agent when she submitted the manuscript to Milkweed Editions, an independent press based in Minneapolis. In a stroke of luck, her manuscript was plucked from the slush pile by a staff member who saw its potential.
When “Braiding Sweetgrass” came out in the fall of 2013, it had a print run of 8,000 copies, and wasn’t reviewed by any major newspapers or magazines. But booksellers were wildly enthusiastic, and the book sold steadily year after year. In February 2020, seven years after its release, it hit the New York Times best-seller list, where it has spent 241 weeks.
The novelist Richard Powers said “Braiding Sweetgrass” moved him — he had to pull over when he was listening to the audiobook in his car because he was crying so hard. The book profoundly shaped his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Overstory,” which centers on the lives of trees.
“So much of ‘The Overstory’ is imbued with Robin’s vision of the agency of plants, seeing them as complex creatures that have a kind of intelligence,” Powers said.
As her profile and influence have grown, Kimmerer has helped turn a lonely pursuit into a growing field of study and research.
Kimmerer now gives 80 to 100 talks a year, addressing universities, environmental groups, and state and federal conservation agencies. She founded the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Universities around the country have created programs and centers dedicated to traditional ecological knowledge. Some Indigenous leaders credit her with paving the way for more Indigenous people to pursue careers in science and ecology.
Still, some Indigenous scientists are skeptical of the way she describes Indigenous people’s relationship to the natural world.
Rosalyn LaPier, an ethnobotanist and enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis, credits Kimmerer with helping to expand what was once an overlooked field. At the same time, LaPier said that in her books, Kimmerer often fails to capture the complexity of Indigenous land management and economic systems, reinforcing stereotypes of native people as unsophisticated and passive.
“She’s implying that nature is supplying Indigenous people with this abundance, without recognizing that they changed the land and landscape,” said LaPier.
At times, Kimmerer has struggled with her role as an ambassador of sorts for Indigenous beliefs and ideas. She has to strike a difficult balance, bringing an Indigenous viewpoint into the mainstream, while at the same time protecting parts of her heritage that are not meant to be widely shared, like sacred stories and beliefs.
“I’m always writing through that filter of what to share and what not to,” she said. “I’m not just accountable to my story, I’m accountable to my family, to my nation, to Indigenous people’s worldview.”
While writing “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Kimmerer wanted to describe the significance of the Haudenosaunee’s Thanksgiving address, but wasn’t sure she should broadcast those sacred beliefs. So she asked for permission from Oren Lyons, a spiritual leader of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation. Lyons emphatically urged her to write about the Thanksgiving address, and told her the Haudenosaunee had been waiting 500 years for other people to listen.
Kimmerer now often highlights the Thanksgiving address during her classes and talks, and holds up the Haudenosaunee expression of gratitude as an antidote to misguided views of the natural world as a commodity.
It’s an attitude that Kimmerer thinks we should adopt more broadly, not just on occasions like Thanksgiving, she said.
“This tendency that we have to think of the world as our property, as if the world was a big old Amazon warehouse and everything is there for us to take, that is not grounded in gratitude for gifts of the land,” she said. “The Thanksgiving address is not just used one day a year. It is a worldview.”
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