Section 1: Planting Sweetgrass

Summary

In the opening chapter, “Skywoman Falling,” Kimmerer recounts the creation story of Skywoman, who creates a vast island on the back of a turtle with the help of many animals. She contrasts the lessons to be learned from Skywoman’s story with those of the biblical creation story, which instructs humans to dominate the earth. Kimmerer argues that Skywoman’s lesson of humility toward nature is needed if human beings are to heal their relationship with the planet. 

“The Council of Pecans” begins with an anecdote about the boyhood of Kimmerer’s grandfather, who lived on the Oklahoma prairie following the displacement of Indigenous peoples by the United States government. A pecan harvest leads Kimmerer to ponder the lessons to be learned from pecan trees, which fruit all at once so that their seeds will overwhelm the appetite of predators such as squirrels. Pecans, she suggests, have much to teach about mutual flourishing and reciprocal gift giving. 

In “The Gift of Strawberries,” Kimmerer muses about the difference between freely given gifts and commodities that are bought and sold. She describes her own childhood experience of the wild strawberry harvest, noting that her impatience sometimes led her to eat the fruit unripe even though it was sour. A self-proclaimed “gift thinker,” Kimmerer invites the reader to consider what the world would be like if gift economies supplanted market economies. 

“An Offering” begins with another family story, this time of the summer canoe camping trips that the author took as a child. She tells how her father would always pour out the first coffee of the morning as an offering to the local gods of the landscape. This, combined with her mother’s leave-no-trace ethics, led the young Kimmerer to develop an attitude of reverence toward the natural world. Kimmerer says she used to lament the “secondhand” nature of actions like the coffee ritual, but she now thinks of them as “homemade ceremonies” with their own meaning and worth. 

“Asters and Goldenrod” continues Kimmerer’s narrative of her upbringing by telling of her college and graduate-school experiences in botany. She tells of learning a new way of viewing the natural world—that of empirical science —and gradually losing her old way informed by Indigenous customs and a personal sense of wonder. Kimmerer, a practicing environmental biologist, states that although a scientific perspective is valuable, it can be (and has been) mistaken for the whole truth. She calls for a “cross-pollination” of scientific knowledge and Indigenous wisdom. 

The final chapter of the section, “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” contrasts the ways that the English and Potawatomi languages describe the natural world. Kimmerer tells of her struggles as an adult learner of Potawatomi, an ancestral language of hers. In Potawatomi, she notes, many phenomena that count as nouns in English are expressed instead as verbs: “to be a bay” is its own word, as is “to be a Saturday.” For Kimmerer, this points to a worldview in which water, sand, and soil are animate agents, not mere matter. She is careful to point out, however, that this does not mean only Potawatomi speakers can embrace this mindset. Indeed, she invites all her readers to do so. 

Analysis

The opening section of Braiding Sweetgrass introduces the goal of the book: to bring together two distinct worldviews in search of a way to heal humanity’s relationship to the earth. The worldviews in question are “Indigenous wisdom,” meaning a broad set of Indigenous North American wisdom traditions, and modern empirical science. In this section and the next, Kimmerer works to establish that the scientific “way of knowing” the natural world is not the only one. She cites examples (especially in “Asters and Goldenrod”) of supposedly unscientific ideas that turn out to have a sound empirical basis. Yet Kimmerer’s argument is not anti-scientific or anti-intellectual; she is asking readers to put science alongside Indigenous traditions—not above them (the typical modern arrangement, she notes) but not beneath them either. 

These first chapters also set the reader up to understand how Kimmerer will make her case for this merging of worldviews. As both an Indigenous woman and a professor of biology, Kimmerer relies on her own life story—from childhood (“The Gift of Strawberries”) through her current teaching and research career (“Asters and Goldenrod”)—to get her points across. The book is full, too, of traditional tales from the Anishinaabe (a group that includes Kimmerer’s own Potawatomi nation) and other Indigenous cultures. These show the continuity of the Indigenous traditions, and they illustrate some common values that can be said to be the basis of Indigenous wisdom as Kimmerer understands it. The Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Métis, and other groups all contribute to the book’s fund of stories.