“In some Native languages the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us.’”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a trained botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Braiding Sweetgrass poetically weaves her two worldviews: ecological consciousness requires our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.
As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning to use the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, and other indigenous cultures, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these ways of knowing together. Once we begin to listen for the languages of other beings, we can begin to understand the innumerable life-giving gifts the world provides us and learn to offer our thanks, our care, and our own gifts in return.
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. 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.
More about Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Website
On Being with Krista Tippett, February 25, 2016
Robin Wall Kimmerer The Intelligence of Plants
Citizen Potawatomi Nation, November 3, 2015
Q&A with Robin Wall Kimmerer, PH.D.
Orion Magazine, June 12, 2017
Speaking of Nature, Finding language that affirms our kinship with the natural world
“I give daily thanks for Robin Wall Kimmerer for being a font of endless knowledge, both mental and spiritual.”
Richard Powers, New York Times
Books
Braiding Sweetgrass is available from White Whale Bookstore.