Braiding Sweetgrass

my hillside has yielded small patches of vibrant green in April and
nurtures the hope that the leeks can return to their homelands and
that when I’m an old lady I’ll have a celebratory spring supper close
at hand. They give to me, I give to them. Reciprocity is an
investment in abundance for both the eater and the eaten.
We need the Honorable Harvest today. But like the leeks and the
marten, it is an endangered species that arose in another
landscape, another time, from a legacy of traditional knowledge.
That ethic of reciprocity was cleared away along with the forests,
the beauty of justice traded away for more stuff. We’ve created a
cultural and economic landscape that is hospitable to the growth of
neither leeks nor honor. If the earth is nothing more than inanimate
matter, if lives are nothing more than commodities, then the way of
the Honorable Harvest, too, is dead. But when you stand in the
stirring spring woods, you know otherwise.
It is an animate earth that we hear calling to us to feed the
martens and kiss the rice. Wild leeks and wild ideas are in jeopardy.
We have to transplant them both and nurture their return to the
lands of their birth. We have to carry them across the wall,
restoring the Honorable Harvest, bringing back the medicine.