Braiding Sweetgrass

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 enough to call it by name, speaking with intimate knowledge of
the place and the people who came before. When we call a place
by name it is transformed from wilderness to homeland. I imagined
that this beloved place knew my true name as well, even when I
myself did not.
Sometimes my father would name the gods of Forked Lake or
South Pond or Brandy Brook Flow, wherever our tents were settled
for the night. I came to know that each place was inspirited, was
home to others before we arrived and long after we left. As he
called out the names and offered a gift, the first coffee, he quietly
taught us the respect we owed these other beings and how to show
our thanks for summer mornings.
I knew that in the long-ago times our people raised their thanks in
morning songs, in prayer, and the offering of sacred tobacco. But
at that time in our family history we didn’t have sacred tobacco and
we didn’t know the songs—they’d been taken away from my
grandfather at the doors of the boarding school. But history moves
in a circle and here we were, the next generation, back to the loon-
filled lakes of our ancestors, back to canoes.
My mother had her own more pragmatic ritual of respect: the
translation of reverence and intention into action. Before we
paddled away from any camping place she made us kids scour the
place to be sure that it was spotless. No burnt matchstick, no scrap
of paper escaped her notice. “Leave this place better than you
found it,” she admonished. And so we did. We also had to leave
wood for the next person’s fire, with tinder and kindling carefully
sheltered from rain by a sheet of birch bark. I liked to imagine their
pleasure, those other paddlers, arriving after dark to find a ready