"Braiding Sweetgrass"

[fiefoe]

I mean no disrespect for Robin Wall Kimmerer, but surely reading any book on ecology in 2020 is an act of self-punishment, for being a human engaged in a market economy. And I say this by way of a recommendation.

• (The original instructions) provide an orientation but not a map. The work of living is creating that map yourself.
• In Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example.
• The tree does not mean for you to eat them right away with juice dripping down your chin. They are designed to be food for winter, when you need fat and protein, heavy calories to keep you warm. They are safety for hard times, the embryo of survival. So rich is the reward that the contents are protected in a vault, double locked, a box inside a box.
• (Mast fruiting:) The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.
• The leaders were offered the American Dream, the right to own their own property as individuals, inviolate from the vagaries of shifting Indian policy. They’d never be forced off their lands again. There would be no more graves along a dusty road. All they had to do was agree to surrender their allegiance to land held in common and agree to private property. With heavy hearts, they sat in council all summer, struggling to decide and weighing the options, which were few. Families were divided against families. Stay in Kansas on communal land and run the risk of losing it all, or go to Indian Territory as individual landowners with a legal guarantee. This historic council met all that hot summer in a shady place that came to be known as Pecan Grove.
• During the allotment era, more than two-thirds of the reservation lands were lost. Barely a generation after land was “guaranteed” through the sacrifice of common land converted to private property, most of it was gone.
• The exchange ends once parity has been established, an equal exchange. They become my property. I don’t write a thank-you note to JC Penney. But what if those very same socks, red and gray striped, were knitted by my grandmother and given to me as a gift? That changes everything. A gift creates ongoing relationship.
• Lewis Hyde wonderfully illustrates this dissonance in his exploration of the “Indian giver.” This expression,... actually derives from a fascinating cross-cultural misinterpretation between an indigenous culture operating in a gift economy and a colonial culture predicated on the concept of private property. When gifts were given to the settlers by the Native inhabitants, the recipients understood that they were valuable and were intended to be retained. Giving them away would have been an affront. But the indigenous people understood the value of the gift to be based in reciprocity and would be affronted if the gifts did not circulate back to them. Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again.
• Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft.
• Among our Potawatomi people, there are public names and true names. True names are used only by intimates and in ceremony... When we call a place by name it is transformed from wilderness to homeland.
• If a fountain could jet bouquets of chrome yellow in dazzling arches of chrysanthemum fireworks, that would be Canada Goldenrod. Each three-foot stem is a geyser of tiny gold daisies, ladylike in miniature, exuberant en masse. Where the soil is damp enough, they stand side by side with their perfect counterpart, New England Asters... The daisylike fringe of purple petals surrounds a disc as bright as the sun at high noon, a golden-orange pool, just a tantalizing shade darker than the surrounding goldenrod. Alone, each is a botanical superlative. Together, the visual effect is stunning. Purple and gold, the heraldic colors of the king and queen of the meadow, a regal procession in complementary colors.
• Goethe, who was both a scientist and a poet, wrote that “the colors diametrically opposed to each other .. . are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.” ... This phenomenon—the colored afterimage— occurs because there is energetic reciprocity between purple and yellow pigments, which goldenrod and asters knew well before we did.
• Science can be a language of distance which reduces a being to its working parts; it is a language of objects. The language scientists speak, however precise, is based on a profound error in grammar, an omission, a grave loss in translation from the native languages of these shores.
• By the time we’re done setting them up, the first bucket is already singing a different tune, the plink of another drop into the half inch of sap. All day long they change pitch as the buckets fill, like water glasses of different pitch. Plink, ploink, plonk— the tin buckets and their tented tops reverberate with every drop and the yard is singing. This is spring music as surely as the cardinal’s insistent whistle.
• People of the Maple Nation made sugar long before they possessed trade kettles for boiling. Instead, they collected sap in birch bark pails and poured it into log troughs hollowed from basswood trees. The large surface area and shallow depth of the troughs was ideal for ice formation. Every morning, ice was removed, leaving a more concentrated sugar solution behind. The concentrated solution could then be boiled to sugar with far less energy required. The freezing nights did the work of many cords of firewood, a reminder of elegant connections: maple sap runs at the one time of year when this method is possible.
• This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.
• The corn is the firstborn and grows straight and stiff; it is a stem with a lofty goal... Had the corn not started early, the bean vine would strangle it, but if the timing is right, the corn can easily carry the bean. Meanwhile, the squash, the late bloomer of the family, is steadily extending herself over the ground,.. Native people speak of this gardening style as the Three Sisters.
• Spread around the feet of the corn and beans is a carpet of big broad squash leaves that intercept the light that falls among the pillars of corn. Their layered spacing uses the light, a gift from the sun, efficiently, with no waste. The organic symmetry of forms belongs together; the placement of every leaf, the harmony of shapes speak their message. Respect one another, support one another, bring your gift to the world and receive the gifts of others, and there will be enough for all.
• Every tree is different, but as the basket makers pound and peel, he is always moving back through time. The tree’s life is coming off in his hands, layer by layer... “Don’t ever forget that. It’s the whole life of that tree you’ve got piled up there.”
• “If we remove 50 percent of the plant biomass, the stems are released from resource competition. The stimulus of compensatory growth causes an increase in population density and plant vigor.
• Sustainable harvesting can be the way we treat a plant with respect, by respectfully receiving its gift.
• And yet, they also teach that we can take too little. If we allow traditions to die, relationships to fade, the land will suffer.
• I’ve often heard herbalists say that “the cure grows near to the cause,” and, accordingly, though gathering cattails is guaranteed to get you sunburned and itchy, the antidote to discomfort is in the  Clear and cool and clean, the gel is refreshing and antimicrobial, the swamp’s answer to aloe vera gel. The cattails make the gel as a defense against microbes and to keep the leaf bases moist when water levels drop. These same properties that protect the plant protect us too.
• The cattails have made a superb material for shelter in leaves that are long, water repellent, and packed with closed-cell foam for insulation. In the old times, fine mats of cattail leaves were sewn or twined to sheathe a summer wigwam. In dry weather, the leaves shrink apart from one another and let the breeze waft between them for ventilation. When the rains come, they swell and close the gap, making the mat waterproof.
• The parallels between the adaptations evolved by the plants and the needs of the people are indeed striking. In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.”
• Pollen (and bugs) are almost pure protein, a high-quality food to complement the starchy rhizomes back in the canoe.
• Laying open the soil is like a careful dissection and there is the same astonishment among the students at the orderly beauty of the organs, the harmony of how they rest against one another, form to function. These are the viscera of the forest. Against the black humus, colors stand out like neon lights on a dark wet street. Juicy school bus orange, goldthread root scrisscross the ground. A web of creamy roots, each as thick as a pencil, connects all the sarsaparillas.
• In our time together, we’ve built our classroom, feasted on cattail kebabs, roasted rhizomes, and eaten pollen pancakes. Our bug bites were soothed by cattail gel. And there are cordage and baskets to finish, so in the roundness of the wigwam, we sit together, twining and talking.
• Swimming many miles inland, they brought a much-needed resource for the trees: nitrogen. The spent carcasses of spawned-out salmon, dragged into the woods by bears and eagles and people, fertilized the trees as well as Skunk Cabbage. Using stable isotope analysis, scientists traced the source of nitrogen in the wood of ancient forests all the way back to the ocean. Salmon fed everyone.
• The transition to salt water is a major assault on the body chemistry of a salmon born in freshwater. One fish biologist likens it to the rigors of a chemotherapy transfusion. The fish need a gradual transition zone, a halfway house of sorts. The brackish water of estuaries, the wetland buffer between river and ocean, plays a critical role in salmon survival.
• The feasts of love and gratitude were not just internal emotional expressions but actually aided the upstream passage of the fish by releasing them from predation for a critical time. Laying salmon bones back in the streams returned nutrients to the system. These are ceremonies of practical reverence.
• People loved the salmon the way fire loves grass / and the blaze loves the darkness of the sea.
• These are just ways we have of crossing the species boundary, of slipping off our human skin and wearing fins or feathers or foliage, trying to know others as fully as we can. Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders. It can be a path to kinship. These too are my people.
• Some fungal threads actually penetrate the green cells, as if they were long slender fingers reaching into a piggy bank. These fungal pickpockets help themselves to the sugars made by the alga and distribute them throughout the lichen... Lichens have been described as “fungi who discovered agriculture” by capturing photosynthetic beings within their fences of hyphae.
• Nearly twenty thousand species of fungus are known to occur only as obligate members of a lichen symbiosis.
• If not, I imagine Umbilicaria will cover the rocky ruins of our time long after our delusions of separateness have relegated us to the fossil record, a ruffled green skin adorning the crumbling halls of power. Rock tripe, oak leaf lichen, navel lichen. I’m told that Umbilicaria is known in Asia by another name: the ear of the stone.
• In this wet climate, where everything is on its way back to decay, rot-resistant cedar is the ideal material. The wood is easily worked and buoyant... And everything that was carried in those canoes was also the gift of cedar: paddles, fishing floats, nets, ropes, arrows, and harpoons. The paddlers even wore hats and capes of cedar, warm and soft against the wind and rain.
• Shakebolting, they call it, turning old logs into high-priced cedar shakes. The grain is so straight the shakes split right off. It’s amazing to think that, within the lifetime of those old trees on the ground, they have gone from being revered to being rejected ton early being eliminated, and then somebody looked up and noticed they were gone and wanted them again.
• As Franz wrote, “It is important to engage in restoration with development of a personal relationship with the land and its living things.” In working with the land, he wrote of the loving relationship that grew between them: “It was as if I discovered a lost part of myself.”
• Maybe there is no such thing as rain; there are only raindrops, each with its own story. Listening to rain, time disappears. If time is measured by the period between events, alder drip time is different from maple drip. This forest is textured with different kinds of time, as the surface of the pool is dimpled with different kinds of rain. Fir needles fall with the high-frequency hiss of rain, branches fall with the bloink of big drops, and trees fall with a rare but thunderous thud. Rare, unless you measure time like a river.
• The Onondaga elders remember when, not so long ago, Onondaga Creek ran so clear through their Nation that they could spearfish by lantern light. They know that there was no mud in the creek until salt mining began upstream.
• It turns out that tallying death is easy: they’ve developed a system for identifying the species of animal by the size of the blotch it leaves on the road, which is then scraped up to avoid counting it again on the next traverse of the road. ... Salamanders are so soft bodied that merely the pressure wave generated by a passing vehicle can be fatal. The missing number is the denominator of the death equation—the number of animals who do make it safely across.
• Our well-intentioned salamander rescues have in fact biased the experiment tonight, as we decreased the number who normally would have been hit, causing an underestimate in the serious losses that occur. It poses an ethical dilemma for the students. The dead who could have been saved become the collateral damage of the study.
• Gibbs confesses that sometimes, on rainy nights when he knows the salamanders are moving—and dying—he can’t sleep. He puts on a raincoat and goes out to carry them across. Aldo Leopold had it right: naturalists live in a world of wounds that only they can see.
• Shkitagen is a tinder fungus, a firekeeper, and a good friend to the People of the Fire. Once an ember meets shkitagen it will not go out but smolders slowly in the fungal matrix, holding its heat. Even the smallest spark, so fleeting and easily lost, will be held and nurtured if it lands on a cube of shkitagen. And yet, as forests are felled and fire suppression jeopardizes species that depend upon burned ground, it is getting harder and harder to find.
• Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.