Braiding Sweetgrass

Braiding Sweetgrass is a beautiful collection of stories that, broadly, follow the life of the author, Robin Wall Kimmerer (a botanist and professor of environmental biology who is of Native American descent), and her evolving understanding of the relationship between scientific and indigenous ways of knowing, along with the implications for culture and ethics therein.

I was gifted this book as part of a Secret Santa by someone who knew that I had been struggling to reconcile my antihierarchy/pro-intersectional-empathy world view with the work I do as a PhD in computing, where much research is, in some way, guided by the demands of tech giants looking to seize ever more control over our culture and societal power structures. Thankfully, through Braiding Sweetgrass’s exploration of indigenous relationships with the environment, ecology, and fellow people, coupled with science’s yearning for observation, the book describes a beautiful framework for tackling societal inequities using unabashed reciprocation.

This book reminded me that one of the most radical and progressive actions you can take is to continually and relentlessly aim for respect and empathy in all the relationships around you: from the trees that provide you with shade in the summer and conkers in the autumn to the people leaving room for you in a conversation so that you may talk together. If you want something to re-teach you what it means to appreciate the world around you, then I cannot recommend Braiding Sweetgrass enough.