Traditional Wisdom and Modern Choices: Why You Should Reconsider Buyin (2024)

FAQs

What is the main idea of braiding sweetgrass? ›

Braiding Sweetgrass explores reciprocal relationships between humans and the land, with a focus on the role of plants and botany in both Native American and Western European traditions.

“Sitting in a Circle” focuses on two main plant species: the cattail and the white spruce. Robin has learned her lesson from the trip in the previous chapter and now humbly points her students to the plants themselves, letting the plants share their wisdom directly as they work together.

For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from someplace else.

Ethnobotanic: Sweetgrass was and still is used ceremonially through burning the dried and braided grass stems for an incense or smudge. The fragrant smoke is used for purification and to carry prayers to the Great Spirit.

Each of the three sections of the braid contains seven strands. (3x7=21) The first section represents the seven generations behind us. (parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.) The second represents the seven sacred teachings (Love, respect, honest, courage, wisdom, truth, and humility.)

The primary message introduced here, which Kimmerer explores throughout the rest of the book, is that human beings are part of a communal ecosystem with plants, animals, and the land itself, and that we all flourish better when working together, giving our own unique gifts and receiving the gifts of others as part of a ...

Following the lead of her grandmother, Sweetgrass helps her family survive the attack by hiding in the grass that surrounds the settlement. Although no one is killed, the experience proves to be one of the first tests that the maturing Sweetgrass faces.

Book Review: In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer writes, “All flourishing is mutual,” reflecting the essence of interdependence — for nature to continue bestowing us with its abundant gifts, humans need to foster a reciprocal relationship of respect and care with nature around us.

In “The Gift of Strawberries,” Kimmerer describes how picking wild strawberries in her childhood instilled her with the idea of the world as a generous place—she thinks of the strawberries as being like personal gifts given to people from the land itself.

When we call a place by name, it is transformed from wilderness to homeland.? ›

When we call a place by name it is transformed from wilderness to homeland. History moves in a circle. The land knows you, even when you are lost. A people's story moves along like a canoe caught in the current, being carried closer and closer to where we had begun.

Sweetgrass is known as the hair of mother earth, used to represent resilience, strength, and healing through truthful dialogue. Employed by almost all Indigenous people within North America as a sacred medicine, for ritual cleansing and ceremony, sweetgrass when burned purifies and eliminates negative energies.

Kimmerer: Well, sweetgrass or Wiingasshk, as we call her in our language, is a really important cultural plant for us. That plant, ecologically, is a land healer. It comes in on broken ground and binds the soil back together again, but we also view it as a spiritual healing plant.

Fittingly given its title, this is the section of the book where the different ideas Kimmerer has introduced are “woven together” and shown to interrelate. One such thread is the apparent conflict between Indigenous and “settler” attitudes toward the land.