Braiding Sweetgrass Lib/E

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

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audio cd

Published March 1, 2021 by Tantor Audio.

ISBN:
978-1-7999-8314-9
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(8 reviews)

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 lenses of knowledge together to show 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 are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.

8 editions

reviewed Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

A Transformative Treatise of Indigenous Wisdom

Braiding Sweetgrass was the most impactful book I read in 2025. Kimmerer's poetic writing is both moving and precise, and reveals the inner workings of heart with true reverence for the magic and mystery of the natural world. She will open your mind to animism with the spirit she infuses into her stories, and bolster her statements with sound science. The book has completely rewired my nervous system with a felt appreciation for the living essence in all things and has improved my outlook on our situation as the natural world now seems to come alive in service of a newly shared understanding or mutual respect and reciprocity. This book is truly for everyone - we all emerged from this indigenous interconnection with the natural world and the yearning to remember these lifeways is deep within our bones!

reviewed Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Review of 'Braiding Sweetgrass' on 'Storygraph'

This book has permanently changed the way I think about the world. It made me so overwhelmed with emotions that at times I had to set down my phone and cry for a few minutes. But it is beautiful. It is poignant and important and it has given me renewed hope for a world that is increasingly terrifying. 

reviewed Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

A strong argument for other ways of knowing

Kimmerer spends a lot of time in this book comparing and contrasting Western science to indigenous ways of knowing, specifically from the Potawatomi tradition. As she's someone formally trained in western science, I understood her thesis being that indigenous ways of knowing can coexist with western science, but more than anything, I felt that this book did a really good job justifying why we shouldn't treat science as the end all be all of knowledge.

On one hand, I think this book reintroduced my very secular mind to the ways in which having a spiritual connection to nature can be extremely enriching and can add to our collective understanding of the natural world

On the other hand, it provides a basis for understanding where exactly science falls short in its attempt to catalogue the universe, as well as exposing its "objectivity" for the many ways in which it is actually …

reviewed Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Care in a time of crisis

Robin Wall Kimmerer is undoubtedly one of the best writers and storytellers on the topic of human life in the nonhuman (natural) world. Braiding Sweetgrass takes all of her best ability as a writer and converts it into an epic object that blends her scientific self as a botanist, her pedagogical self as an educator, and her storytelling self as a Potowatomi native American. None of these selves is a whole, and this entanglement of identity is central to how Wall Kimmerer explores environmental damage, the postcolonial American landscape, healing and our relationship with the natural world.

Central to the book is the argument that we cannot repair environmental damage without m,bracing care and love of the natural world. Particular criticism is levelled at the scientific institutes and western colonial practices, and their dismissal of love as part of life. The chapters blend native American myth/story with contemporary environmental and …

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