For the first part of my last semester of graduate school, I listened to the audiobook of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Her voice, both on the page and in my ear, was warm, and funny, and wise. Braiding Sweetgrass is arguably her best known work: a book of deeply interconnected short essays that forge links between Kimmerer's training as a biologist and traditional ways of knowing passed along not only by her own family's Potawatomi traditions but those cultivated by native peoples across North America. More than that though, more than anything, what Kimmerer is arguing for is considering yourself a part of the radical embodied network of the natural world. Kimmerer's entire ethic is based on raising into the light what has been laughed out of laboratories, raising up native knowledge as kin to scientific understanding, raising up the maple trees in her back yard and her daughters and cattails and salmon rushing upriver as kin to each other and to her. The fundamental question her work asks of us is what would it look like to relate to
#14: Robin Wall Kimmerer and Porousness
#14: Robin Wall Kimmerer and Porousness
#14: Robin Wall Kimmerer and Porousness
For the first part of my last semester of graduate school, I listened to the audiobook of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Her voice, both on the page and in my ear, was warm, and funny, and wise. Braiding Sweetgrass is arguably her best known work: a book of deeply interconnected short essays that forge links between Kimmerer's training as a biologist and traditional ways of knowing passed along not only by her own family's Potawatomi traditions but those cultivated by native peoples across North America. More than that though, more than anything, what Kimmerer is arguing for is considering yourself a part of the radical embodied network of the natural world. Kimmerer's entire ethic is based on raising into the light what has been laughed out of laboratories, raising up native knowledge as kin to scientific understanding, raising up the maple trees in her back yard and her daughters and cattails and salmon rushing upriver as kin to each other and to her. The fundamental question her work asks of us is what would it look like to relate to