Braiding Sweetgrass: Chapter 22 Summary & Analysis

Kimmerer describes a woman speaking Mohawk and gathering sweetgrass, and then herself, 400 years later, planting sweetgrass in the same valley along the Mohawk River. In between, however, that language has rarely been heard here. Immigrants pushed the Mohawk people out, and the government forced them into assimilation at places like Carlisle, with its mission to “Kill the Indian to Save the Man.” The Native children there were forbidden to speak their language and had their braids cut off. They were forced to dress like colonizers, taught to use money, and made to learn skills that the authorities deemed “useful.” This brutal strategy almost worked, but the Mohawk people—also called the “People of the Flint”—were resilient, and their culture survived.

Back in her own present, Robin is planting sweetgrass with one of her graduate students as well as a Mohawk basket maker named Theresa, who is helping them. They are planting sweetgrass here in its native range, welcoming it home to the Mohawk River valley. Kimmerer then returns to the history of the Mohawks: some of the culture and people survived Carlisle and 400 years of exile, sustained by the Thanksgiving Address with its philosophy of reciprocity with the land, even when everything else was taken from them. They left the Mohawk Valley and resettled in Akwesasne, which borders with Canada.

Black ash and sweetgrass are neighbors in this valley, Kimmerer says, and they are reunited in the baskets that the Mohawk people weave from them, mixing the two plants together. The people still give thanks to the land at Akwesasne, but the land itself has “little to be grateful for,” Kimmerer says, as industrial pollution has poisoned the river.

Robin’s friend Sakokwenionkwas, a Mohawk elder whose English name is Tom Porter, began a return to Mohawk Valley twenty years earlier, inspired by a prophecy he heard from his grandmother about the Mohawks going back to their ancestral home. Tom and a few others settled in a town called Kanatsiohareke, where they set about renovating decaying structures and building new ones. Their goal is to celebrate and restore Haudenosaunee culture, to create “Carlisle in the reverse”: “Heal the Indian, Save the Language” instead of “Kill the Indian to Save the Man.” At Carlisle, children were punished and abused for speaking their native languages, and so only a few fluent speakers remain, most of them elders.

Kimmerer here reaffirms the importance of language, saying that it acts as “a prism through which to see the world,” thus shaping the culture that speaks it. Along with restoring the language, Kimmerer had the idea of also restoring sweetgrass to the Mohawk valley as a way of recreating a flourishing home that sustains its people. Robin stops by Tom Porter’s home one morning to discuss this idea as he prepares her a hearty breakfast of pancakes and maple syrup. He explains his hopes and dreams for Kanatsiohareke, how he hopes that they can again grow the traditional foods that will sustain them, practice traditional ceremonies, and follow the teachings of the Thanksgiving Address.

Still speaking of the Thanksgiving Address, Robin asks Tom how he imagines that the land says thank you to humans. In response, Tom just refills her plate with pancakes and maple syrup. Later they play a traditional game in which peach seeds—one side painted black, and the other white—are rolled onto deerskin, and the players must guess how many in each throw will be which color.

As he steadily wins more and more rounds of the game, Tom tells a story of Skywoman’s twin grandsons, who struggled with each other over the fate of the world. Finally they played this game to decide the victor: if all the peach pits were black, the world would be destroyed, and if they were white, then life would remain. The twin “who made sweetness in the world” sent out his thoughts to all living things and asked for their aid, so that when the peach pits were cast, every living thing shouted together on behalf of life and turned the peach pits to white.

Tom’s daughter joins their game and shows Robin some beautiful quartz crystals called Herkimer diamonds that she has gathered over the years on the riverbank. They then put on their jackets and walk through the nearby fields, as Kimmerer laments the loss of sweetgrass here just like the loss of the Mohawk language. The history of plants is bound to the history of the people who have a relationship with them, and when Indigenous people and cultures were eradicated or assimilated, so too were many of the native plants. Those native plants were replaced by new crops and accompanying invasive species. To bring back sweetgrass here, Robin knows that she’ll also have to break the hold of the colonizing flora.

Tom supports Robin’s idea of bringing back sweetgrass that can eventually form a meadow for basket makers to harvest. He asks her where to get seeds, but Robin explains that sweetgrass is rarely able to be grown from seed; usually it multiplies through its underground rhizome, which sends up new buds to sprout elsewhere and thus move along a riverbank. This worked for the plant “when the land was whole,” but the rhizomes cannot cross paved areas, and development has been the main cause of sweetgrass decline.

At her university, however, Robin has already begun growing sweetgrass in nursery beds. To find these plants she had to first order them from a place in California—not a natural habitat for sweetgrass—but then she learned that they originally came from Akwesasne, and she took it as a sign that she should buy them all. Now the beds are thriving and the plants are ready to be replanted into their native soil. This project is about more than just restoring a natural environment, Kimmerer says; “it is the restoration of relationship between plants and people.”

Kimmerer now mourns all the years growing up when she knew so little about her own heritage, which was stolen from her grandfather at Carlisle—for example, she was never taught about the importance of sweetgrass. Back at Tom Porter’s house, he shows Robin a book containing the names of all those who attended Carlisle from 1879 to 1918. He points out his own uncle, and then Robin finds her grandfather, Asa Wall.

Asa and his brother Oliver were both sent to Carlisle, but Oliver ran away and returned home, while Asa did not. He became one of the “lost generation,” not able to return to his home culture after Carlisle but also not accepted by the colonist society that had done this to him. He joined the army and then settled in the “immigrant world,” working as a car mechanic and hiding anything related to his heritage in boxes in the attic. Asa did achieve what Carlisle taught him to want—a version of the American Dream—but Robin also grieves for her own childhood and what could have been if her grandfather hadn’t been so broken and changed by the school.

The town of Carlisle in Pennsylvania still lives on, and for its tricentennial it attempted to reckon with its history, inviting descendants of the stolen Indigenous children to return for “ceremonies of remembrance and reconciliation.” Robin attends along with other members of her family and hundreds of others, most of whom have never seen the infamous place. The town seems picturesque and all-American; looking at it, Robin finds it hard to forgive.

The descendants then gather around the school’s cemetery, where so many lost children are buried. There they burn sage and sweetgrass, drum, and pray. Robin thinks about the different ways to react to such grief and loss—with destruction or creation, like the two sides of the peach pits. Grief can be comforted by new growth, “by rebuilding the homeland that was taken.” This is why she is so devoted to planting the sweetgrass there in the Mohawk Valley.

Once more describing her work methodically planting the sweetgrass alongside Theresa, Kimmerer explains that it is like her own “ceremony of reconciliation.” She again imagines the women 400 years earlier working in a similar way to harvest the plants for baskets, and she feels a sense of kinship with them. Putting down roots like this is another way of shouting in affirmation of life, like the people and animals in the story of the peach pits and Skywoman’s grandsons. Suddenly Robin’s trowel strikes something hard in the soil. She cleans it off and sees that it is a large and beautiful Herkimer diamond. She shows it to Tom when she gets home, and he reminds her of the rule of reciprocity: “we gave sweetgrass and the land gave a diamond.”