Book Review: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Dr Robin Wall Kimmerer

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Non-Fiction, Environment, Indigenous Rights, Nature.

Publisher: Penguin Books

Review in one word: Poetic

I was absolutely thrilled to start reading this book which has the reputation of being a classic in the canon of environmental writing. This book makes an electrifying start with some powerful and poetic insights and then it falters a few chapters in for me. For this reason I only rate it a three stars.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Botanist and an Indigenous Woman of the Potawatomi Nation. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she weaves together the two strands of indigenous wisdom and scientific understanding to create a wonderous union of the two forms of knowledge.

“Puhpowee, she explained, translates as “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed.
The makers of this word understood a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything. I’ve cherished it for many years, as a talisman, and longed for the people who gave a name to the life force of mushrooms. The language that holds Puhpowee is one that I wanted to speak. So when I learned that the word for rising, for emergence, belonged to the language of my ancestors, it became a signpost for me.”

― Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Kimmerer’s poetic, literary and spiritual flourishes are absolutely incredible and something to be savoured. The first few chapters are packed with these.

The introductory chapters were riveting and told the story of the Potawatomi tale of the Skywoman and the creation of the earth. The author’s inner struggle between her indigenous learnings and the western orthodoxy of science education were particularly interesting and I can relate to this dichotomy of living in between two worlds. In the beginning chapters, she seeks to tap trees for maple syrup along with her children and to clean up the pond on her property. These stories were all deeply and profoundly moving.

“If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”

― Robin Wall Kimmerer

After this about a quarter of the way through the book, the insights and learnings of these short stories and vignettes seem to repeat over and over, but just in different narrative form. This book should have been edited to be way shorter and should have retained the punchy, compelling pace of the first few chapters, then it could justifiably be called a masterpiece.

I hate to say this but after these first few initial lyrical and poetic chapters I found the pace to slow down a lot and the book started to really lag. I almost feel guilty for saying that, like I am betraying an indigenous sister, but there it is. I got to chapter 4 and I just couldn’t find the motivation to continue.

A few chapters in, Wall Kimmerer begins talking about feminine archetypes like those discussed by Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola-Estes in Women Who Run with the Wolves. Although unlike Pinkola-Estes’ masterwork there isn’t a focus on fables and indigenous stories and their fascinating Jungian meanings and takeaways, but rather there’s a personal memoir style narrative that gets a bit tiresome, especially when the nuggets of insight are repetitive. I would have liked more indigenous stories and tighter prose throughout the whole book.