Initially she was discouraged from focusing on anything but total scientific objectivity, but after many years she returned to Native ways of knowing and now tries to combine the that with science to paint a fuller picture of the world. In “Asters and Goldenrod,” Kimmerer details her attempts to reconcile her field of botanical science with Indigenous knowledge and her own sense of wonder. In a similar vein, Kimmerer describes her father’s ritual of pouring the morning’s first coffee onto the ground as an offering to the land.

She hopes that more people will come to see our relationship to the world as a relationship of giving and receiving. This leads her to consider the difference between gift economies and market economies, and how the nature of an object changes if it is considered a gift or a commodity. Growing up, she loved picking wild strawberries, and she thinks of them as gifts from the earth. In “The Gift of Strawberries,” Kimmerer elaborates further on her worldview that the land can be a place of generosity and wonder. Yet despite the federal government’s best efforts and the many tragic injustices that Indigenous Americans have faced over the centuries, they remain resilient, as shown by the Potawatomi Gathering of Nations that Kimmerer attends with her family. Her Potawatomi grandfather was sent to Carlisle boarding school, where he and other Native children were given new names and subjected to various abuses in an attempt to rid them of their culture. In “The Council of Pecans,” Kimmerer relates some of her family history while also discussing how trees communicate with each other. At the same time, the world is a place of gifts and generosity, and people should give gifts back to the earth as well. Robin Wall Kimmerer explains how this story informs the Indigenous attitude towards the land itself: human beings are “the younger brothers of creation” and so should humbly learn from the plants and animals that were here first. The book opens with a retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story, in which Skywoman falls to earth and is aided by the animals to create a new land called Turtle Island. Braiding Sweetgrass is a combination of memoir, science writing, and Indigenous American philosophy and history.

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