Braiding Sweetgrass

something you made for someone else. We made all our Christmas gifts: piggy banks from old Clorox bottles, hot pads from broken ...

enough, tiny little roots would emerge from the runner and by the end of the season there were even more plants, ready to bloom ...

obligation to those socks as a commodity, as private property. There is no bond beyond the politely exchanged “thank yous” with ...

see our own people selling sweetgrass for ten bucks a braid. When Wally really needs wiingashk for a ceremony, he may visit one ...

economy where land is seen as a gift to all. Lewis Hyde wonderfully illustrates this dissonance in his exploration of the “India ...

from flip-flops to woven palm hats. Squatting behind her red blanket, a woman in a striped shawl and navy blue bowler spread out ...

could. But when everything became a gift, I felt self-restraint. I didn’t want to take too much. And I began thinking of what sm ...

The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal. A s ...

How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacr ...

to eat the sour white ones, sometimes out of hunger but mostly from impatience. I knew the long-term results of my short-term gr ...

An Offering Our people were canoe people. Until they made us walk. Until our lakeshore lodges were signed away for shanties and ...

I can picture my father, in his red-checked wool shirt, standing atop the rocks above the lake. When he lifts the coffeepot from ...

names. True names are used only by intimates and in ceremony. My father had been on Tahawus’s summit many times and knew it well ...

pile of fuel to warm their evening meal. My mother’s ceremony connected us to them, too. The offering was made only under an ope ...

A people’s story moves along like a canoe caught in the current, being carried closer and closer to where we had begun. As I gre ...

gifts and our responsibility to those gifts. Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging—to a family, to a people, and to the land. At l ...

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, ...

Asters and Goldenrod The girl in the picture holds a slate with her name and “class of ’75” chalked in, a girl the color of deer ...

me? So I told him the truth. I was proud of my well-planned answer, its freshman sophistication apparent to anyone, the way it s ...

time were not enough—peaches, grapes, sweet corn, squash—the fields are also embroidered with drifts of golden yellow and pools ...