While most of the titles on my bedside table since the pandemic haven’t been directly related to conservation, there’s one title I keep coming back to again and again: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A decorated botanist and member of the Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer reimagines the way people could (and did, prior to European colonization) define their relationships with the natural world, as well as to each other.
My copy of the book is slightly crinkled, my daughter’s collection of clover and the first red maple leaf of the season nestled between the pages. As I flip gently through, the chapters greet me like old friends: “Witch Hazel,” “A Mother’s Work,” “The Sound of Silverbells,” and “Wendigo Footprints.” Kimmerer’s mastery of her field is undeniable; however, it’s her storytelling that keeps me coming back to this book. Her candid voice and the way she weaves the pain of an unblinking look at the havoc we have wrought on our world, and each other, with hope for humanity’s capacity to change, to repair the harm that we’ve done, and to forge a new way forward by looking to the voices that colonization tried so hard to silence.
While the overall message of Braiding Sweetgrass is unmistakably optimistic, this week, leading up to the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a particular passage has been weighing heavily on my mind. This day has only come to national prominence in recent years with the discovery of mass graves outside residential schools that were designed to separate indigenous children from their cultures and communities and mold them into members of white colonial society. The last residential school in Canada did not close until 1997. While the heart-breaking abuses suffered by these children and their descendants were formally documented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 and official apologies have been issued, the effects of this systemic abuse persist.
After a summer of turmoil, record high temperatures, the rollback of decades of legislation to protect basic human rights back in the States, hate and transphobia spreading like wildfire, not to mention actual wildfires that blanketed my city in smoke so thick that it was dangerous to breathe the air outside, it’s clear that the wheels of a terrible machine are still turning. The pain and destruction persist. But in these times, it’s imperative that we do not look away.
I know that there are people out there giving it their all to dismantle systems of oppression and ensure that the world we leave to future generations can support them. But some days are just heavy. Those days, I hear Kimmerer’s words in my mind:
“Weep! Weep!” calls a toad from the water’s edge. And I do. If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”
Heavy as they may be, I hear these words with gratitude. For although I may weep, and I do, I know that I don’t weep alone, and I still have hope that love will see us through.
More info on Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation can be found here.
This post was written unceded Anishinabe Algonquin territory. The peoples of the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation have lived on this territory as stewards of this land and keepers of their culture, stories, and practices since time immemorial.
A Quill of Conservation 