Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
A botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation braids three strands — Indigenous teachings, plant science, and personal narrative — through a sequence of linked essays about what humans owe the living world. The book runs in five sections named for the life of sweetgrass (Planting, Tending, Picking, Braiding, Burning), closing with an epilogue, "Returning the Gift." Page count cited from the standard current edition: Milkweed Editions paperback, August 11, 2015, ISBN 978-1-57131-356-0, 408 pages.
A botanist and Indigenous reader who disputes none of the content still came out the other side holding a number: "This is 200 pages longer than it needs to be." Part of that length is vocabulary rather than argument, since "the author used the word reciprocity at least 50 times" and a word that repeats that often stops meaning anything. Three books run inside this one, sweetgrass ceremony and a scientist's career and a mother's memoir, interleaved without any order that explains itself, which is why even an admirer wishes "Robin Wall Kimmerer had written three short books instead of one long book." Readers who share her politics down to the last plank still object to "its over-reliance on spirituality as a solution to very material problems."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
