Braiding Sweetgrass

Tom’s daughter came to join the game. She held a red velvet bag
in her hands and poured its contents onto the deerskin. Diamonds.
The sharp facets threw rainbows of color. She beamed at us as we
oohed and aahed. Tom explained that these are Herkimer
diamonds, beautiful quartz crystals as clear as water and harder
than flint. Buried in the earth, they are washed along by the river
and turn up from time to time, a blessing from the land.
We put on our jackets and walked out over the fields. Tom
paused at the paddock to offer apples to the big Belgians. All was
quiet, the river slipping along the banks. With the right eyes you can
almost unsee Route 5, the railroad tracks, and I-90 across the
river. You can almost see fields of Iroquois white corn and riverside
meadows where women are picking sweetgrass. Bend and pull,
bend and pull. But the fields where we walk are neither sweetgrass
nor corn.
When Skywoman first scattered the plants, sweetgrass flourished
along this river, but today it is gone. Just as the Mohawk language
was replaced by English and Italian and Polish, the sweetgrass was
crowded out by immigrants. Losing a plant can threaten a culture in
much the same way as losing a language. Without sweetgrass, the
grandmothers don’t bring the granddaughters to the meadows in
July. Then what becomes of their stories? Without sweetgrass,
what happens to the baskets? To the ceremony that uses these
baskets?
The history of the plants is inextricably tied up with the history of
the people, with the forces of destruction and creation. At
graduation ceremonies at Carlisle, the young men were required to
take an oath: “I am no longer an Indian man. I will lay down the bow
and arrow forever and put my hand to the plow.” Plows and cows
brought tremendous changes to the vegetation. Just as Mohawk