To her readers, Kimmerer is a plant star; her work, transformative.
In “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Kimmerer weaves Indigenous wisdom with scientific training.
The book is simultaneously meditative about the abundance of the natural world and bold in its call to action on “climate urgency.”
Kimmerer asks readers to reconsider how they view and treat the natural world. She entices us to honour the Earth’s glories, restore rather than take, and reject an economy and culture rooted in acquiring more.
Her work is “an invitation into reciprocity.” She invites us to learn from plants and other species, nature’s teachers. “If we use a plant respectfully, it will flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away,” she writes.
As a botanist, Kimmerer’s goal was to reach two specific audiences: science colleagues and students. (She is a professor at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, and the founder and director of its Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.) But she’s reached many, many more than that.
The book is a word-of-mouth publishing wonder, with more than 1.4 million copies in print and audio, it’s been translated into nearly 20 languages – and earned her a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant.”
As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer feels the weight of her family’s legacy, the imperative to honour the stories. At age 9, her father’s father was sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of many schools intended to force the assimilation of its Native students. Kimmerer speaks of her “deep responsibility to our knowledge,” Indigenous knowledge, “that they tried to eradicate from our people,” she says. “If the world is listening, I have a responsibility to speak.” And speak she has.
Richard Powers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author says: “I was driving across the country listening to her read the audio book, and I had to pull over several times. My eyes were filled with tears, and I couldn’t see the road.” He became a Kimmerer fan long before she settled onto the bestseller list.
As an homage, he named a character after her in his novel “Bewilderment.” He says that “she looks at things with a long sense of time. I wanted to hear that wisdom, that clear-eyed, level-headed, intensely knowledgeable voice expound on everything.”
Kimmerer is modest in assessing her talent when claiming she is not “a professional writer.”
She won the esteemed John Burroughs Medal honouring nature writing for her previous book “Gathering Moss,” a 2003 university press book rooted in academic research that served as inspiration for Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel “The Signature of All Things.”
Acknowledgement: Karen Heller