Braiding Sweetgrass

A collection of essays, subtitled Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by a botanist who is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The book is arranged in five parts named after the stages of tending a braid of sweetgrass, from planting to burning. Kimmerer begins with the Skywoman creation story and sets it against the Genesis story of exile from a garden. Through essays on wild strawberries, pecans, the Three Sisters of corn, beans and squash, and her own fieldwork, she argues that scientific knowledge and Indigenous knowledge can work together. Her central idea is reciprocity: the land offers gifts, and gifts create obligations. In 'Learning the Grammar of Animacy' she uses the Potawatomi language to show how speaking of plants and animals as beings rather than things changes how we treat them. 'The Honorable Harvest' sets out rules for taking only what is given, and later essays confront the Windigo, a figure of endless consumption.

It gives an accessible, practical ethics of gratitude and reciprocity with the living world, and shows how Indigenous knowledge and science can inform each other on environmental questions.