Braiding Sweetgrass

Kimmerer considers the idea that she was “raised by strawberries,” as wild strawberries were such an important aspect of her experience of childhood. As soon as she got home from school, she says, she would hurry off into the fields behind her family’s house, visiting the strawberry patches and trying not to eat the tiny berries until they were properly ripe. Even fifty years later she is still surprised to come across a patch of wild strawberries, and she experiences a feeling of gratitude as if for a wonderful but unexpected gift from the land.

Returning to the story of Skywoman, Kimmerer tells of how Skywoman’s daughter died giving birth to her twins, and when they buried her, a strawberry grew from her heart. Kimmerer says that wild strawberries helped shape her own worldview growing up: that of “a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet.” As a child, she experienced the world as a “gift economy,” unaware of how her parents struggled with the wage economy beyond the strawberry fields.

For Christmas the members of Kimmerer’s family would always make each other gifts—because they couldn’t afford to buy them, she now realizes, but also because at the time she thought that all gifts were supposed to be specially made for the recipient. For Father’s Day, her mother would bake her father a strawberry shortcake with wild strawberries picked by Robin and her siblings: another gift that couldn’t be bought.

Kimmerer muses on the nature of gifts: they are freely given, but they also establish a relationship and sense of responsibility between the giver and receiver. As a child, Robin would instinctively pull up weeds around the strawberry patches, and in response, new plants would bloom. In contrast to this, some farmers nearby grew strawberries to sell, and they would sometimes hire Robin and her siblings to help pick them. One woman reminded them that she owned the berries, and so they weren’t allowed to eat any of them. Robin knew that there was a difference between these berries and the wild strawberries: the wild ones “belonged to themselves.”

Kimmerer notes that our perception of an object depends on whether it is received “as a gift or as a commodity.” When she purchases a pair of socks, for example, she feels no special connection with the cashier or the store—she just exchanges the socks for her money. If those same socks had been knitted for her by her grandmother and given as a gift, however, she would have a very different relation to them—the gift would further a connection of gratitude and future gifts given to her grandmother in return. Wild strawberries are gifts, Kimmerer states, and store-bought strawberries are commodities. She says that she would even be offended to see wild strawberries at a grocery store, and she would want to liberate them—as they are meant to be given, not sold.

Kimmerer says that sweetgrass, too, should only be a gift, not a commodity. A friend of hers uses sweetgrass for ceremonial purposes, but he will never buy it, even from other Indigenous people—he will instead explain that it must be given freely if it is to be sacred. Some people refuse to offer him their sweetgrass for free, but others are willing to give it as a gift. Sweetgrass is a gift from the earth, Kimmerer says, and it continues on as a gift between people. The more a gift is shared, she claims, “the greater its value becomes.”

This idea led to the concept of the “Indian giver,” which in today’s commodity-driven world has negative connotations—someone who gives something and then later wants it back. In reality, Kimmerer says, the idea arose from the meeting of the Native gift economy and the colonial economy of private property. To the Native people, a gift came with attachments of responsibility and reciprocity: “that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again.” A gift isn’t a single “free” transaction, but rather part of an ongoing relationship between gift and giver.

Kimmerer once worked doing ecological research in the Andes. She particularly enjoyed the market in the local village, which was a vibrant and bustling place. Recently she dreamed of this market, she says, but when she tried to pay for things in the dream, the vendors all waved her money away and insisted that she take things for free. She chose a few things carefully and full of gratitude, and realized that she was more sparing in her consumption than if everything had simply been on sale rather than free. She also immediately began thinking about gifts that she might give to the vendors in return. Kimmerer now realizes that the dream was an illustration of a market economy transforming into a gift economy.

Kimmerer reminds the reader that she is a plant scientist who tries to speak in objective language, but she is also a poet who is drawn to metaphors. She doesn’t really believe that the wild strawberries are personally crafting a gift for her, but she also recognizes how little science knows about plants and their consciousnesses and the different ways that evolution works to further generations of a species. Her main point is this: that our perspective is what makes the world either a gift or a commodity. Treating the world as a gift means respecting it and feeling a responsibility to give back to it in return.

Centuries ago, Kimmerer says, it was easier to see the world as a gift, like the geese who caught Skywoman as she was falling or who arrived every year to offer themselves as food for people. Eating a goose that one has known and killed is very different from buying meat at the grocery store wrapped in plastic, the corpse of a bird raised in a cage. “That is not a gift of life; it is a theft.” Kimmerer acknowledges that we cannot all live as hunter-gatherers in today’s world, but we can at least change our perspective and act as if “the living world were a gift.” One way to do this is just “don’t buy it”—if it should be a gift, like wild strawberries or sweetgrass or water, then don’t buy it.

Kimmerer says that for most of human history, “common resources were the rule.” Some societies invented commodity economies, however; and such economies have taken over the world in recent centuries, causing both good and harm to humans, but destruction to the earth itself. Yet treating the world as a commodity is just “a story we have told ourselves,” Kimmerer says, “and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one.” We have the choice to exist in a gift economy with the land itself, living in both surprised gratitude and with a sense of responsibility to give back our own gifts. Even with the same number of resources available, seeing them as commodities makes us feel poor, while seeing them as gifts makes us feel wealthy.

Returning to her childhood, Kimmerer remembers how she used to eat the white unripe strawberries when she was too impatient to wait for them to turn red. As she grew older, however, she learned to wait for them to ripen properly. The commodity economy of Turtle Island is built around eating “the white strawberries and everything else,” but it has also left people longing for more. She hopes that we can once again live in a world of gifts, where we are patient enough to wait for things to ripen.