Braiding Sweetgrass

I was a climate refugee for just one night, but it was enough. The
waves of heat we are feeling now as a result of climate change
aren’t yet as crushing as the ones that rocked us that night, but
they too are out of season. I never thought that night of what I
might save from a burning house, but that is the question we all
face in a time of climate change. What do you love too much to
lose? Who and what will you carry to safety?
I wouldn’t lie to my daughter now. I am afraid. As afraid today as
I was then, for my children and for the good green world. We
cannot comfort ourselves by saying it’s going to be okay. We need
what’s in those bundles. We can’t escape by going to the
neighbors’, and we can’t afford to talk quietly.
My family could go home again the next day. But what about the
Alaskan towns being swallowed alive by the rising Bering Sea? The
Bangladeshi farmer whose fields are flooded? Oil burning in the
Gulf? Everywhere you look, you see it coming. Coral reefs lost to
warming oceans. Forest fires in Amazonia. The frozen Russian
taiga an inferno vaporizing carbon stored there for ten thousand
years. These are the fires of the scorched path. Let this not be the
seventh fire. I pray we have not already passed the fork in the
road.
What does it mean to be the people of the seventh fire, to walk
back along the ancestral road and pick up what was left behind?
How do we recognize what we should reclaim and what is
dangerous refuse? What is truly medicine for the living earth and
what is a drug of deception? None of us can recognize every piece,
let alone carry it all. We need each other, to take a song, a word, a
story, a tool, a ceremony and put it in our bundles. Not for
ourselves, but for the ones yet to be born, for all our relations.
Collectively, we assemble from the wisdom of the past a vision for