Braiding Sweetgrass

those little pink orchids only grow under pines. “Not science,” he said, and he ought to know, sitting in his laboratory, a lear ...

That first plant science class was a disaster. I barely scraped by with a C and could not muster much enthusiasm for memorizing ...

A master’s degree, a PhD, and a faculty position followed. I am grateful for the knowledge that was shared with me and deeply pr ...

magnificent American elm, which had just been named the champion for its species, the largest of its kind. It had a name: The Lo ...

humbling. It was the beginning of my reclaiming that other way of knowing that I had helplessly let science supplant. I felt lik ...

perceive them as beautiful, but it does explain why that combination gets my undivided attention. I asked my artist buddies abou ...

Why are they beautiful together? It is a phenomenon simultaneously material and spiritual, for which we need all wavelengths, fo ...

then I learned to fly. Or at least try. It was the bees that showed me how to move between different flowers—to drink the nectar ...

Learning the Grammar of Animacy To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language. I come here to listen, to nestle in ...

language not our own. I think now that it was a longing to comprehend this language I hear in the woods that led me to science, ...

makers of this word understood a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything. I’ve cherished it for many yea ...

whole world. Our language, millennia in the making, sits in those nine chairs. The words that praised creation, told the old sto ...

grandmothers behind him covered her mouth in a giggle and his stern face suddenly broke into a smile as big and sweet as a crack ...

from the West Coast who says Bozho. Moktthewenkwe nda—as if she needed to identify herself: who else speaks Potawatomi? To call ...

to? The simple phrases I’m learning are perfect for my dog. Sit! Eat! Come here! Be quiet! But since she scarcely responds to th ...

have different tenses and cases to be mastered. European languages often assign gender to nouns, but Potawatomi does not divide ...

I remember paging through the Ojibwe dictionary she sent, trying to decipher the tiles, but the spellings didn’t always match an ...

and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise— become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs f ...

Dopwen yewe. Table it is. But of apple, we must say, “Who is that being?” And reply Mshimin yawe. Apple that being is. Yawe—the ...

objects.” One afternoon, I sat with my field ecology students by a wiikwegamaa and shared this idea of animate language. One you ...