Braiding Sweetgrass

It is summer, called niibin or “the time of plenty” in Potawatomi, and Robin is picking raspberries. When she sees a blue jay and a turtle also eating the berries, she decides that she has picked enough and will leave the rest, because “the earth has plenty and offers us abundance.” Highlighting the red and green colors of the raspberries, Kimmerer shifts the scene to describe similarly colored blankets at a Potawatomi ceremony called minidewak, which is also taking place in this time of abundance.

At the minidewak powwow everyone who has gathered brings some kind of gift, and they spread them all out on the red and green blankets. Some of the gifts are intricate and handmade and some are humble, but everyone provides something. Then everyone takes turns choosing one gift each from the pile. Afterwards there is drumming, and they all dance together “to honor the gifts and the givers.”

No matter the gift that someone brings, Kimmerer says, “the sentiment is the same.” The gift-giving ceremony is an expression of the most ancient Potawatomi teachings about the importance of generosity and gratitude. These qualities are essential to a culture “where the well-being of one is linked to the well-being of all.” Hoarding one’s gifts leads to becoming “constipated with wealth, bloated with possessions, too heavy to join the dance.” Sometimes this happens at the minidewak powwow, where someone will miss the point of the ceremony and take more gifts than they give, afterwards guarding their possessions instead of joining the dance.

“In a culture of gratitude,” Kimmerer writes, “everyone knows that gifts will follow the circle of reciprocity and flow back to you again. […] We dance in a circle, not a line.” After the dance, Robin watches a little boy cast aside his chosen gift of a toy truck. The boy’s father makes him pick it up and keep it, however. “You never dishonor the gift. A gift asks something of you,” Kimmerer says. She doesn’t know the exact origin of the minidewak, but she wonders if it was started by people witnessing the generosity of plants, as part of the word “minidewak” means both “gift” and “berry.”

At many ceremonies, berries are passed around in one large bowl with one spoon, so that everyone can “taste the sweetness, remember the gifts, and say thank you.” The bowl does have a bottom though, so it’s important that everyone save some berries for their neighbors. In the same way, “the gifts of the earth are to be shared, but gifts are not limitless. The generosity of the earth is not an invitation to take it all.”

Kimmerer muses on how we might refill a bowl once it is empty. Gratitude alone is not enough, she now believes. We should learn from berries that “all flourishing is mutual”: “we need the berries, and the berries need us. Their gifts multiply by our care for them, and dwindle from our neglect. We are bound in a covenant of reciprocity, a pact of mutual responsibility to sustain those who sustain us. And so the empty bowl is filled.”

Unfortunately, people have abandoned the wisdom of berries, treating the earth’s gifts like our own property to be exploited, acting “as if the earth were not a bowl of berries, but an open pit mine, and the spoon a gouging shovel.” If we treated a generous person in the same way we treated the earth—by flaunting their kindness and stealing all of their possessions—it would be a moral outrage. The earth gifts us with energy sources like sunlight, wind, and water, but in our greed we have broken the planet’s surface to dig for fossil fuels. “Had we taken only that which is given to us, had we reciprocated the gift, we would not have to fear our own atmosphere today,” Kimmerer says. “We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying.”

Kimmerer closes the book by imagining a future in which human beings recognize, just in time, Mother Earth’s gifts and give her our own gifts in return. “More than anything,” she says, “I want to hear a great song of thanks rise on the wind. I think that song might save us.” Then, like at the minidewak, she imagines the drums beginning and everyone dancing, celebrating the earth’s gifts together.

“The moral covenant of reciprocity calls us to honor our responsibilities for all we have been given, for all that we have taken,” Kimmerer says. It is now time for us to “hold a giveaway for Mother Earth,” to “spread our blankets out for her and pile them high with gifts of our own making,” like art, writing, machinery, and acts of kindness. “Whatever our gifts, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world,” Kimmerer concludes. “In return for the privilege of breath.”