Indigenous Voices Book Club: "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer
About this Event
The Indigenous Voices Book Club is devoted to reading and discussing books by Indigenous writers, bringing together fiction, memoir, history, poetry, and more. Each month, we'll encounter stories and perspectives that deepen our understanding of Indigenous experiences, histories, cultures, and contemporary life.
This month, we're reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants—a beloved collection of essays about the natural world and what might change if we stopped thinking of it as a collection of resources and started thinking of it as a community to which we belong. Kimmerer, a botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, brings together her scientific training, Indigenous knowledge, family stories, and her own close attention to the plants and places around her. She writes about strawberries and asters, maple sugaring and restoring sweetgrass, learning her ancestral language, raising daughters, and the responsibilities that come with receiving the earth's gifts. At the heart of Braiding Sweetgrass is the idea of reciprocity: that our relationship with the living world shouldn't be one of taking alone. Generous, curious, and full of wonder, it's a book that asks us to pay better attention—to plants, to one another, and to what it means to be a good member of the natural world.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Readers Pick
#1 New York Times Bestseller
A Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Bestseller
A Los Angeles Times Best Book Club Pick
Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a deckled edge and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book—gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred—and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants.
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the international bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants and The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. Kimmerer is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 25.78
