November 2025 - Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

(… a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world.)

Post Composed by Ralph Edwards

The S.U.R.E. Book Club was formed in response to S.U.R.E.’s effort to acknowledge and celebrate various national ethnic and cultural holidays: Autism Awareness, Black History, Women’s History, Hispanic Heritage, Native American Heritage, PRIDE, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Developmental Disabilities Month, Arab American Heritage, etc. A book related to that month’s focus was selected and discussed.

THANK YOU, Rachel, for your vision and inspiration, organizational skills and curating books for the book club.

November is Native American Heritage Month.  The selection is BRAIDING SWEETGRASS, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.  The author embodies a unique combination: Native woman, botanist, Poet, which enables her to contemplate and elucidate on Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants (the book’s subtitle). 

If you read a book as I do, you skip the Introduction and Preface or any pages with Roman numerals rather than Arabic.  With BRAIDING SWEETGRASS, that would be a mistake.   Right at the start, Kimmerer introduces us to sweetgrass, its origin, description, aroma, niche in Nature, and roles that it plays with forest plants and those (spiritual and practical) with humans, especially in Native cultures. 

Stories of the interactions between the Pilgrims and their descendants and Native peoples are contextualized through examination of the lives of sweetgrass, strawberry, pecans and other plants. The plants’ symbiotic, reciprocal relationships replicate the pre-Pilgrim values and norms of Native peoples.  Contemporary efforts are necessary to recover and restore those cultures.

In addition to describing the histories of Native cultures and their multiple transformations, Kimmerer, the scientist, adds the ears of a philosopher to supplement scientific facts and objectiveness with the voice and teaching of the plants, “learning the language of animacy.” Current research suggests that plants communicate with each other, share resources and display characteristics previously attributed only to humans.  As the Native culture was premeditatively, systemically destroyed, this ancient knowledge was lost.

Most importantly, Kimmerer is a poet.  Her storytelling lyricism evokes a sensory compendium that produces goosebumps because of the innate reaction to the perceived night chill or angst from the combined loss of land, language and identity; with Hope, eternal as the guiding light. 

The story of plants, culture, and personal experience conflux (re)discovering the common unity of all creation.