Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Kimmerer Robin Wall

Author:Kimmerer, Robin Wall [Kimmerer, Robin Wall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, History, Spirituality
ISBN: 9780141991962
Amazon: 0141991968
Goodreads: 58369749
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2013-10-15T07:00:00+00:00

BRAIDING SWEETGRASS

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Sweetgrass, as the hair of Mother Earth, is traditionally braided to show loving care for her well-being. Braids, plaited of three strands, are given away as signs of kindness and gratitude.

In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place

Fog shrouds the land. There is just this rock in the half-darkness and the surf, rising and falling with a thunderous roar, reminding me how tenuous my perch is on this tiny island. I almost feel her feet on these cold, wet rocks instead of my own; Skywoman on a speck of land, alone in a cold dark sea, before she made our home. When she fell from Skyworld, Turtle Island was her Plymouth Rock, her Ellis Island. The Mother of the People was first an immigrant.

I’m new here too, on this shore at the western edge of the continent, new to how land appears and disappears in this place with the tides and with the fog. No one knows my name here, and I don’t know theirs. Without this exchange of the barest recognition, I feel like I could disappear in the fog along with everything else.

It is said that the Creator gathered together the four sacred elements and breathed life into them to give form to Original Man before setting him upon Turtle Island. The last of all beings to be created, First Man was given the name Nanabozho. The Creator called out the name to the four directions so that the others would know who was coming. Nanabozho, part man, part manido—a powerful spirit-being—is the personification of life forces, the Anishinaabe culture hero, and our great teacher of how to be human. In Nanabozho’s form as Original Man and in our own, we humans are the newest arrivals on earth, the youngsters, just learning to find our way.

I can imagine how it might have been for him in the beginning, before anyone knew him and he did not know them. I too was a stranger at first in this dark dripping forest perched at the edge of the sea, but I sought out an elder, my Sitka Spruce grandmother with a lap wide enough for many grandchildren. I introduced myself, told her my name and why I had come. I offered her tobacco from my pouch and asked if I might visit in her community for a time. She asked me to sit down, and there was a place right between her roots. Her canopy towers above the forest and her swaying foliage is constantly murmuring to her neighbors. I know she’ll eventually pass the word and my name on the wind.

Nanabozho did not know his parentage or his origins—only that he was set down into a fully peopled world of plants and animals, winds, and water. He was an immigrant too. Before he arrived, the world was all here, in balance and harmony, each one fulfilling their purpose in the Creation. He understood, as some did not, that this was not the “New World,” but one that was ancient before he came.

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