Braiding Sweetgrass

tables to demonstrate that sweetgrass flourishes when it’s harvested and declines when it is not. The doubting dean was silent. ...

growing points just beneath the soil surface so that when their leaves are lost to a mower, a grazing animal, or a fire, they qu ...

conditions for sweetgrass to flourish. It’s intriguing to wonder whether the regional decline in sweetgrass might be due not to ...

the answer as we experimented: sustainable harvesting can be the way we treat a plant with respect, by respectfully receiving it ...

viii. Acknowledgments In a field of tall grass, with only the wind for company, there is a language that transcends the differen ...

Maple Nation: A Citizenship Guide There’s just one gas station in my community. It’s right there at the stoplight, also the only ...

greasy Carhartts. “Now they want to raise taxes for a windmill down to the school? All on account of global warming. Not on my d ...

Maple Nation. Kerm would probably answer with two terse words of resentment: pay taxes. And he’s right, being a citizen does mea ...

Fortunately, there are those in every organization, few but invaluable, who know their responsibilities and seem to thrive on me ...

vents, signaling to folks down the road and across the valley that they’re boiling today. While I’m there, a steady stream of pe ...

The woodpile is easily as big as the sugar house itself, stacked ten feet high with cord upon cord of dry split ash and birch an ...

boiling syrup to quell the foam. He doesn’t answer, but opens the spigot at the bottom of the finishing pan, filling a bucket wi ...

base of trees, and geese race by, their V in disarray with their eagerness to be home. As we drive back with a brimming tank, he ...

if they are called to do so. If that same oath held in Maple Nation, the trumpet call would be echoing through these wooded hill ...

wisdom of Maples. ...

The Honorable Harvest The crows see me coming across the field, a woman with a basket, and argue my provenance loudly among them ...

sign: pick me! I resist the urge to answer their call immediately and instead address the plants the way I’ve been taught: intro ...

confess to fullblown chlorophyll envy. Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the ...

a thought. The cultural landscape may have changed, but the conundrum has not—the need to resolve the inescapable tension betwee ...

analytic left reads the empirical signs to judge whether the population is large and healthy enough to sustain a harvest, whethe ...