Braiding Sweetgrass

Kimmerer describes her younger self going off to college to study botany, full of excitement and wonder at the natural world. When her adviser asks her why she wants to pursue botany, Robin tells him about her lifelong love of plants, and that she wants “to learn about why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together.” The adviser immediately tells her that “that is not science,” and that she must stop thinking about things like beauty when it comes to botany.

Kimmerer then describes her love of asters and goldenrod, and how wonderful it seems that they grow together, making a meadow seem like a royal court of purple and gold. She wonders why the world is so often beautiful like this when “it could so easily be otherwise.” This is what she wanted to learn about in school, but professors like her adviser insisted that science was something else entirely.

Kimmerer now realizes that in going to the university, she “shifted between worldviews,” almost like going to the old Carlisle Indian School and being told that her entire way of life was wrong and should be discarded. The botany that young Robin learns in school is entirely detached from any kind of emotion or connection between humans and plants. After a while, she starts to believe that she had been wrong all along. She barely passes her first plant science class, but she keeps trying and soon learns not to question the kind of science that she is taught, despite her natural tendency to see things holistically. Her adviser writes that “She’s done remarkably well for an Indian girl.”

Robin goes on to get a master’s degree, a Ph.D., and a teaching job. She starts teaching “the mechanics of botany” just the way she learned them, still assuming that this is the best approach. One night, however, she stumbles across a photograph of a large American elm called the “Louis Vieux Elm.” Louis Vieux is one of Robin’s Potawatomi ancestors, and seeing his name there connected to the tree makes her have an epiphany: she has “stepped off the path of Indigenous knowledge” in her pursuit of science.

Soon after this Robin attends a gathering of Indigenous elders who are talking about plants. Hearing their stories and seeing their personal closeness with the plants themselves, she is deeply moved and feels like she has come home to a familiar kind of knowledge. These elders, she realizes, pursue questions that science does not. Like her adviser on the first day of school, science’s scope in this case is narrow and ignores other kinds of human understanding.

Inspired by this, Robin returns to ideas of beauty that she had ignored for years because of her science education. Kimmerer then uses this point to come back to asters and goldenrod, saying that there actually is a scientific reason that they look so beautiful together: purple and yellow are complementary colors, a “reciprocal pair” that evoke each other to the human eye—but also the eyes of bees, who pollinate the flowers. The bold contrast attracts their vision, so that asters and goldenrod growing together attract more pollinators than if they were to grow alone.

The question of asters and goldenrod is a matter of both science and beauty, then, and to see them fully requires both. Kimmerer muses that science and traditional knowledge might be like complementary colors themselves, a reciprocal pair that, when combined, create a fuller picture of the world. Kimmerer now resolves to understand her work no longer as purely scientific, but also something spiritual and emotional. Asters and goldenrod are “lived reciprocity,” and science and Indigenous knowledge could be, too.