ISBN: 9781571313560Kimmerer is a distinguished professor of environmental biology, a recent MacArthur Fellowship recipient, a member of the Potawatomi Nation and, as she reminds us in her self-description, a mother. In Braiding Sweetgrass, her second book, she integrates modern science with traditional Native American wisdom, giving due respect to both. While most anyone would benefit from reading her book, I think NeoPagans will particularly benefit from doing so.
We grew up surrounded by, and often accepting, the modern world’s view of the world as a place where things — and even animals — were of importance primarily because we valued them as resources or companions. Plants were of even less concern. Today many of us seek to integrate this view with an older, deeper, understanding that the world is a place of relationships between all things. Grasping these relationships requires our respect for the earth and its myriad other-than-human inhabitants.
Here is where Braiding Sweetgrass can be of great help for us. On the one hand, Kimmerer is a serious biologist engaged in traditional scientific research. On the other, she endorses the wisdom of traditional Native American knowledge about the natural world. At a time when a number of biologists are beginning to encounter insights compatible with animism, Kimmerer is an animist with a long record of seeking to harmonize animism with modern science.
Many of Braiding Sweetgrass’ chapters are built around plants, be they sweetgrass, maples, or the “three sisters” of corn, beans, and squash. Each chapter is a kind of meditation on how an animist perspective enriches the daily tasks we encounter while living our lives. In doing so, Kimmerer weaves together science, the culture of her and other Native peoples (particularly the Thanksgiving Address) and her own experience, harmonizing these dimensions of the world, culture, and psychology. From this Pagan’s perspective, she is a wise elder offering a lifetime of experience of living with a foot in two worlds, and harmonizing that stance.
Kimmerer admires modern science, which “can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders.” (p. 252) But science privileges mind and body. It does not ask “who are you” but rather “what is it?” Indigenous knowing involves mind and body, but also emotion and spirit. (p. 47)
I think we NeoPagans can learn important insights into dealing with the other-than-human and more-than-human worlds by reading and absorbing Kimmerer. We are already partly there. In a volume of more than ordinary richness, I want to bring three themes to your attention.
Gifts
A commodity lacks intrinsic value. It is produced for sale, and its value is measured by the money the seller can receive for it, in other words, by what it is not. The final consumer may value their purchase for more than instrumental reasons, but those engaged in its creation and eventual sale do not. Online purchases symbolize this perfectly, for you can get what you want and never encounter a human being along the way.
Gifts are different.
Kimmerer writes “The essence of a gift is that it creates a set of relationships.” (p. 28) Gifts create open-ended connections and responsibilities. “Their life is their movement, the inhale and exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust what we put out to the universe will always come back.” (p. 104) Kimmerer does not mean these words in a simple ‘New Age-y’ way. For example, writing of many Native Americans’ practice of growing corn, beans, and squash together (the “three sisters”), she explains, “There are layers upon layers of reciprocity in the garden and between the bean and the bacterium, the bean and the corn, the corn and the squash, and ultimately with the people.” (p. 134) She emphasizes, “It is the human perspective that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed.”(p. 30)
That is the opposite of an anonymous online purchase.
As her strawberry example indicates, this attitude is not limited to purely human relations. The beings in the world, particularly those that we consume in order to live, make up a more-than-human gift economy. Thus, each such being gives of itself and in return we are called upon to both honor it and others like it. This is only appropriate.
Honoring does not preclude using or even consuming. She writes that pecans are honored at Thanksgiving. (p. 10) Northwestern tribes long had a first salmon ceremony. Using a graduation ceremony as an analogy, Kimmerer writes “imagine standing by the river, flooded by those same feelings as the Salmon march into the auditorium of their estuary. Rise in their honor . . .” (p. 250)
In such a world, shaped by gifts both human and otherwise, gratitude is the most appropriate basis for living a life.
Ceremony
The salmon example brings us to another element central to Potawatomie and similar indigenous peoples that survives in an impoverished state within our own culture. In the secular world, ceremony plays almost no role. From honoring the turning of the seasons, to initiations into new stages of life, to honoring the plants and animals that sustain us, the daily rhythms of animist cultures are immersed in a sacred context that frequently reminds their members of the larger contexts within which they live. Ceremony, in this sense, is largely absent from a world where we are surrounded by resources and things. In the few cases where ceremony survives, it usually recognizes stages in a life or individual achievements, such as marriage, graduation, funerals, or the awarding of medals. Many of us witnessed a different kind of ceremony with Elizabeth II’s passing. It honored Elizabeth not as the woman she was but as the queen she was, a link in a many-centuries-long chain of relationships symbolizing Britain as a community and an identity. Even so, that ceremony focused on the purely human world, even if recognizing ancient bonds most people ignore.
It is different in an animist world.
Ceremony, Kimmerer writes, “marries the mundane to the sacred.” (p. 37) In an animate world not only is everything immersed in and shaped by relationships, but those relationships participate in other relationships, eventually encompassing the whole. And every part of this whole is sacred in its own way. We often lose sight of this deeper reality, even when we grant its existence. We are beings often defined by our needs, such as hunger, sleep, sex, and shelter. It is easy to lose sight of the larger context within which all this exists. Ceremonies enable us to appreciate these contexts.
We Pagans often do ceremonies around the solstices and equinoxes, as well as around the cycles of life and death. In this way we have broken free from the purely human-focused mindset that treats the rest of the world as either resources, hindrances, or irrelevant. But our Sabbats honoring the various phases of life and death are removed from most of the places where we actually live. Beltane is celebrated on the same day in Florida and Alaska. So is Samhain. Taking Kimmerer’s insights seriously deepens our capacity to integrate ceremony and the sacred with the world around us as we seek to honor the sacred in its concrete manifestations. As dates symbolizing universal patterns, the cross-quarter Sabbats hold a universal meaning. But we can also integrate the places we dwell into a ceremonial cycle. When visiting the Canyons of the Ancients Museum in Dolores, Colorado, I took this picture of such a circle for the ancient Puebloan people of the region:
Here in Northern New Mexico, where I live, the rain of the monsoon calls out for recognition and honor. Our harvest season is noted for its chilis, as well as the abundance of other good crops when conditions are good. In Sonoma County the rains normally return at a different time. Different crops are harvested, including ones central to the place’s identity, such as grapes and apples. Salmon still survive, barely, and this totem fish of the North Pacific calls out for honoring. One size does not fit all.
I think the biggest spiritual difference we NeoPagans bring to our culture is the belief, for most of us, that our ceremonies are not merely symbolic, that they actually help us establish relationships with the powers and presences of the world, as well as with our major deities. But as a culture, we tend to perceive the world in abstractions, and our Wheel of the Year reflects this. Kimmerer shows how she and other native peoples weave the sacred into their day-to-day lives, and in doing so she helps us do the same in ours.
Language
“Language” she writes, “is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else.” (p. 258)
As she tells the story, one weekend she attended a pow wow in which her tribe participated. There was a panel on the Potawatomie language and when she walked in to listen she saw several elderly Indians, a man and some women, sitting at a table. The man said something that no one in the audience could understand, but the women laughed. He than said, in English, “What will happen to a joke when there is no one to hear it anymore?” (p. 51)
As a result of her experience, Kimmerer decided to learn her ancestral tongue. Languages like Potawatomie are very difficult for speakers of European languages because whereas English and similar languages are heavy on nouns and relatively short on verbs, Potawatomie and similar native languages are heavy on verbs and short on nouns. This difference shapes the speakers’ perceptions.
English has long treated what is non-human as a kind of thing, except sometimes for pets. A thing is an ‘it,’ and to call a person an ‘it’ is an act of profound disrespect. But this terminology is considered acceptable for everything else. “The arrogance of English is the only way to be . . . worthy of respect and moral concern is to be human.” (p. 57) To be sure, this is not true for all of us, but it has long been the dominant attitude, and is still reflected within every level of society. By contrast, as Kimmerer became increasingly proficient in Potawatomie (though still far from fluent) her perceptions of the world shifted. It became more animate.
Languages helps open us up, or blinds us to what others can see.
With this I will close by saying I have only dug a little into the insights and wisdom Kimmerer offers us in Braiding Sweetgrass. There is far more to learn and appreciate if you read it yourself.
