Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom Meets Botanical Science

November 14, 2025 ·

Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves two ways of knowing into one beautiful tapestry

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Robin Wall Kimmerer is both a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Braiding Sweetgrass is what happens when you braid together Western scientific training with indigenous ways of knowing — and the result is unlike any science book you've read.

Two Ways of Seeing

Science asks "How does this work?" Indigenous knowledge asks "How do we live well together?"

Kimmerer was taught to see plants as objects to study — specimens, data points, mechanisms. But she was also raised with stories of plants as teachers, as relatives, as beings with their own agency and gifts.

The book explores the tension and the harmony between these perspectives.

Western science gives us:

Mechanisms and processes
Testable hypotheses
Replicable results
Understanding through reduction

Indigenous knowledge offers:

Relationships and reciprocity
Accumulated wisdom over millennia
Holistic understanding
Kinship with the more-than-human world

Kimmerer argues we need both.She calls this “Two-Eyed Seeing” — using one eye for indigenous knowledge and one eye for Western science to see more completely.

The Grammar of Animacy

One chapter stopped me cold: Kimmerer points out that in English, we have “it” for everything that isn’t human. A river is an “it.” A tree is an “it.”

In Potawatomi, 70% of words are verbs — the world is described not as things, but as processes and relationships. And the grammar has different pronouns for animate and inanimate beings.

A bay is animate. A tree is animate. They’re not “it” — they’re kin.

"What if we spoke of bay and maple as persons, as members of the democracy of species? What would change if we said 'she' instead of 'it'?"

Language shapes how we think. And how we think shapes how we treat the world.

The Honorable Harvest

One of the book’s central teachings: the principles of the Honorable Harvest.

When gathering plants, you:

Ask permission
Take only what you need
Never take the first or the last
Harvest in a way that minimizes harm
Use everything you take
Give a gift in reciprocity
Express gratitude
Sustain the ones who sustain you

This isn’t mysticism — it’s practical ecology refined over thousands of years. It’s sustainability embedded in cultural practice.

Science as a Path to Wonder

Here’s what’s beautiful: Kimmerer never suggests we abandon science. She’s a rigorous botanist who loves the precision of the scientific method.

But she shows how science can deepen — not diminish — our sense of relationship with the living world.She describes photosynthesis not as a cold mechanism, but as “the most beautiful conversation on Earth” — light talking to leaves.

Understanding moss reproduction at a cellular level doesn’t make it less wondrous. It makes it more wondrous.

Stories as Science

The book is structured around stories — some personal, some traditional, all teaching something.

Three Sisters: Corn, beans, and squash aren’t just companion plants — they’re teachers showing us how to live in reciprocal relationship.

Skywoman Falling: The Potawatomi creation story about cooperation and gratitude, contrasted with the Western story of Eden (scarcity and punishment).

Asters and Goldenrod: Why these flowers bloom together, creating the fall palette of purple and gold, teaching us about symbiosis.

Each story carries ecological knowledge, but also ethical knowledge about how to be in the world.

The Hard Truths

Kimmerer doesn't shy away from colonialism's impact on indigenous knowledge systems, language loss, and ongoing environmental destruction. But the book isn't heavy with despair — it's grounded in hope and responsibility.

She writes about:

The near-extinction of sweetgrass from overharvesting
The boarding schools that tried to erase indigenous languages
The legal systems that treat land as property rather than kin
The ongoing struggle to protect sacred places

But always with the question: What can we do now? How do we repair our relationship with the Earth?

What This Book Changed for Me

I can’t look at plants the same way anymore. Not because I’ve anthropomorphized them, but because I’ve started to see the relationships — between species, between humans and more-than-human beings, between knowledge systems.

Reciprocity has become a guiding principle: What am I giving back? Not just in environmental terms, but in all relationships.

Gratitude as practice, not performance: Actually noticing, actually appreciating.

Kinship extending beyond the human: We’re part of a web, not lords of a hierarchy.

Who Should Read This

Anyone interested in ecology, botany, or environmental science
People seeking different frameworks for relating to nature
Educators looking to decolonize science curricula
Anyone who loved Aldo Leopold's "Sand County Almanac"
Those feeling disconnected from the natural world

Skip it if you want purely technical botany or if you’re not open to indigenous perspectives on science and knowledge.

The Writing

Kimmerer writes like water — clear, flowing, nourishing. Every chapter is a small masterpiece of nature writing. She can describe the lifecycle of moss with the same care and beauty that she brings to personal stories of her daughters or her elders’ teachings.

It’s slow reading, in the best way. You want to pause, think, sometimes go outside and actually look at a plant differently.

Why This Matters Now

As we face climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, and environmental catastrophe, Kimmerer offers more than doom or technical fixes. She offers a different relationship to the living world.

Not nature as resource to exploit. Not nature as museum to preserve. But nature as community we belong to — with responsibilities, gifts, and reciprocal relationships.

Indigenous peoples have sustained their lands for millennia. Maybe it’s time to listen.

Also recommended: “The Mushroom at the End of the World” by Anna Tsing, and anything by Ursula K. Le Guin on ecological imagination.