Botany and Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. As scientist and Citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, she combines botanical facts with Indigenous wisdom in Braiding Sweetgrass. A book to ponder chapter by chapter. it has given me fresh insights into many subjects that interest me. Of these, I choose three as examples:  nature, history, and religion.

Nature:  Kimmerer has looked through plenty of microscopes, but above all, she has looked for beauty in Nature.  Her description of Umbilicaria americana demonstrates her skill as a writer and inspires me to look more closely at all growing organisms wherever I walk and to consider how they interact with each other.

Lichens have no roots, no leaves, no flowers. They are life at its most basic. Umbilicaria is the most magnificent of northeastern lichens–simply a thallus, roughly circular in shape, like a tattered scrap of brown suede. Its upper surface when dry is a mousy shade of taupe. The thallus edges curl up in a chaotic sort of ruffle, as large as an outstretched hand, exposing the black underside, which is crisp and grainy like a charred potato chip. It is anchored tightly to the rock at its center by a short stalk, like a very short-handled umbrella. Lichens are not plants. They blur the definition of what it means to be an individual, as a lichen is not one being, but two: a fungus and an alga. These partners are as different as could be and yet are joined in a symbiosis so close that their union becomes a wholly new organism. Lichens are a couple in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

History:  The Iroquois Confederacy of upper New York state and southeastern Canada is often characterized as one of the world’s oldest participatory democracies. The confederacy’s constitution, the Great Law of Peace, adopted in about 1450 CE, is believed to have been a model for the U.S. Constitution, partly because Benjamin Franklin was known to have been interested in the structure of the confederacy and partly because of the balance of power embodied in the Great Law. The Confederacy is made up of six nations: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. I never knew before that Indigenous people had influenced the Constitution of the United States! Unfortunately, our country failed to respect its ancestors.

When George Washington directed federal troops to exterminate the Onondaga during the Revolutionary War, a nation that had numbered in the tens of thousands was reduced to a few hundred people in a matter of one year. Afterward, every single treaty was broken. Today the ground where the Onondaga people lived, near Syracuse, New York, consists of nine Superfund sites. Thanks to more than a century of industrial development, the lake known as one of North America’s most sacred sites is now one of the most polluted lakes in the United States. Beds of industrial waste sixty feet deep stick to shoes like thick white school paste.

Kimmerer writes many more pages about how this land might be restored. She returns to the sites again and again with people trying to help. On one visit, she is surprised and exultant to smell sweetgrass–“tentatively sending out rhizomes through the sludge, slender tillers marching bravely away, sweetgrass is a teacher of healing, a symbol of kindness and compassion…it is not the land that has been broken, but our relationship to it.” She quotes Naturalist E. O. Wilson: “There can be no purpose more inspiring than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.”

Religion: Indigenous storytellers tell of Skywoman Falling from the Skyworld clutching branches of the Tree of Life: “She scattered seeds onto the new ground and carefully tended each one until the world turned from brown to green. Sunlight streamed through the hole from the Skyworld, allowing the seeds to flourish. Wild grasses, flowers, trees, and medicines spread everywhere. And now that the animals, too, had plenty to eat, many came to live with her on Turtle Island. Of all the plants, sweetgrass was the very first to grow on the earth, its fragrance a sweet memory of Skywoman’s hand.” What a contrast with Genesis!

On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, Eve was banished from the Garden of Eden. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.

Besides these new concepts of nature, history and religion, I discovered a new way to consider Thanksgiving. When children in Native schools or members of the Iroquois Confederacy meet, they begin not with the Pledge of Allegiance, but with the Thanksgiving Address, or the Words That Come Before All Else:

The People.  Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as people. Now our minds are one.

The Earth Mother.  We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time. To our mother, we send greetings and thanks. Now our minds are one.

The Waters.  We give thanks to all the waters of the world for quenching our thirst and providing us with strength. Water is life. We know its power in many forms- waterfalls and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to the spirit of Water. Now our minds are one.

Notice how this address brings people together in common purpose? The Address goes on to express gratitude to the Earth’s Fish, Animals, and Plants, the Four Winds, the Sun and the Moon. Each element of the ecosystem is named in its turn, along with its function. It is a lesson in Native science that can be done in abbreviated form or in long and loving detail. You can see the text and read more about it here.  As Kimmerer says, “You can’t listen to the Thanksgiving Address without feeling wealthy. It reminds you that you already have everything you need.”

She goes on to say “while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude don’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it come as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That’s good medicine for land and people alike.”

On October 10 my friend Kirsten Lodal gave a sermon entitled “Radical Gratitude” at the River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland, where she is interning while studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York. You can listen to it between 34:00 and 48:30 on this video. Having read Kimmerer, she recognized that the Thanksgiving Address could be a powerful approach to the challenges civilization now faces. Kirsten concluded with questions worth pondering:

How are we called to live when we recognize that we live in a world of gifts? Here we are surrounded by the bounty of life on this planet, bounty that we didn’t create. Who knows if we deserve it? Reciprocity demands that we give the kind of radical gratitude that reshapes how we live in the world.

The Climate Summit in Glasgow has clearly shown how important it is that we take care to prevent our earth from getting too hot. Thirty-two years ago my family rafted down the Colorado River, admiring Grand Canyon from the bottom and learning the critical importance of the river to agriculture and power generation in seven Western States. The Colorado provides water to 40 million people. This year, after 22 years of drought, it is at its lowest level ever. This Thanksgiving let’s all be filled with Radical Gratitude and commit ourselves to taking better care of our Earth.