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Asking Permission for the Harvest: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass
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Asking Permission for the Harvest: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass
A book about changing the future by rethinking our place in the world.
By Ruthanna Emrys
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Published on August 26, 2025
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Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there.
This week, I cover Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, which draws on Potawatomi practice and environmental biology to frame humans as core participants in ecosystems.
What It’s About
I do like to pick the hard-to-summarize ones, don’t I? This week’s challenge is that lay science books tend to follow a set of linear scripts: textbook-ish division by topics, or memoir-ish connection of knowledge to a personal arc. Kimmerer is instead sitting around a fire with one of her student expeditions, telling stories that branch off into scientific and traditional knowledge, pulling back to common themes, pausing to build a shelter by hand, coming back to point out how the story and the shelter and the experimental findings braid together.
Starting with a story: Skywoman falls through a hole in the sky, and is rescued and held up by geese. Turtle offers her a place to rest on his back. From the animals’ gifts and her gratitude, she makes earth atop Turtle Island. She plants seeds brought from the sky, making a green, growing world. The first to grow is sweetgrass, a sacred plant used for baskets, medicine, and ritual.
It is a story of mutual interdependence, sacrifice, abundance, and shared gifts. Kimmerer then turns to a more recent story: she surveys her General Ecology students about the nature of the relationship between humans and nature. All are familiar with the negative effects of humans on the rest of the world; as for “positive interactions between people and land,” “the median response was ‘none.’”
Skywoman’s story, for many Great Lakes cultures, is part of the Original Instructions, a “compass, not a map” for living in respectful reciprocity with the rest of the world. Kimmerer illustrates: when foraging, you never take the first potential harvest that you find, and never take more than half. You ask for permission, listen for answers. Her scientific research supports these traditions, finding for example that sweetgrass stands tended and harvested by these guidelines grow with greater abundance and health than those left to their own devices—as well as than those fully-harvested by “efficient” European standards.
What would it look like, Kimmerer asks, for nations of immigrants to learn from Indigenous practice rather than trying to overwrite it? For people who’ve known only how humans harm the Earth to make their interactions beneficial?
What, Kimmerer asks, does it mean for immigrants to “become indigenous”? It’s a controversial framing: a lot of people would deny that such a thing is possible, metaphorically or otherwise. But we are short on frameworks for immigrants to put down roots not just in culture but in land. Her definition is “living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.” Haudenosaunee philosophy encourages taking the next seven generations into account; I grew up with that recommendation acknowledged more on buttons than in practice.
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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Robin Wall Kimmerer
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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Robin Wall Kimmerer
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* * *
I am writing this as a descendant of Jewish immigrants come to America from Europe. My dedication for Deep Roots lists my family’s first arrivals and their origins; one of my characters speaks for me when he describes New York City as his chosen homeland. And now I’m a Jewish-American immigrant come to the Netherlands, trying to figure out what it means to hold onto those layers of inheritance while putting down respectful roots.
In the early 20th century, my immigrant ancestors were part of the movement for doikayt, a Yiddish word that translates as “here-ness.” It comes close to Kimmerer’s immigrant becoming: trying to contribute to world-repair wherever you are able to live and thrive, for however long you are able to do so. Part of this—not a part that the doikayt movement originally understood, but I think part that the modern version needs to embrace—is listening to those who’ve been in the place longest, who know its rhythms and its language. It’s the local lulav that I made in DC with a foraged Osage orange instead of an imported, pesticide-laden citron; it’s tending native plants and paying land taxes and tracing watersheds and learning histories.
I don’t know what it is yet in the Low Countries, which are Anthropocene down to the mud that keeps them not-too-far below sea level. I’m listening and learning.
As a writer, I look to books like Braiding Sweetgrass for alternatives to assumptions I didn’t know I had. When I write futures, am I serious about how much humans can change? Are my aliens as flexible and varied as my own species? Am I doing the early 21st century equivalent of writing patriarchal pipe-smokers on the moon?
As is probably obvious from my previous posts, I also seek resonance and interconnection across my readings. Sheldrake’s mycelial networks connect to Kimmerer’s interspecies interplays and communications, connect to Mann pointing out that North American forests were planted and shaped by human hands. Separating humans from “nature” is both impossible and bad for all of us, denying symbioses that have existed for thousands of years.
Part of my philosophy of reading is that sometimes needful wisdom is found in complementary books, from authors who go at a topic from very different perspectives. My illustrative pairing is J. Elise Keith’s Where the Action Is: Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization and adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. One is practical and corporate, with a neat taxonomy of different types of meetings and why you might use each, and how to run them so they’re not best replaced by emails. The other is spiritual and activist and holistic, less about leading than about leveraging the “flight” of your group’s starling-flock. Together, they’ve helped me organize teams with both a clear understanding of why we’re all in the room together, and a deep respect for the collective dynamics and big-picture missions involved. I have frustrations with each that the other neatly fills; I find value from reading Keith when everything feels too fuzzy, and brown when everything feels too incrementally structured.
I’m coming to believe that Kimmerer’s books are a deep complement for Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance: How We Build a Better Future. Klein aims to reshape progressive goals and discourse, particularly in the U.S. It’s a deeply wonky book, in the best way, and clearly tailored to an audience of people trying to use law and policy as tools for world-repair. It’s also, well, wonky—focused on the art of the possible, willing to build big tents and make compromises and involve corporations and the military and anyone else who might contribute to, say, making environmental protection compatible with actually building new housing.
Kimmerer’s Potowatomi vision of abundance—produced not by top-down policy, but by shared values and practices—seems like a necessary counterbalance. If, like so many of Kimmerer’s students, most people don’t believe that mutual abundance across species is possible, then policy will stumble again and again on a false dichotomy between humans and “bats and newts.” (That’s the latest version from the U.K. this morning.) If we can’t change our ideas about good agricultural practice from picking every last stalk to leaving some for the land, all the regenerative soil practices in the world won’t sustain our harvest as the world warms.
And, it seems to me, if we don’t find a way to imagine abundance that allows for “enough,” we won’t ever come to a point that feels comfortably sufficient. Which means that we’ll stay vulnerable to politicians and advertisers who play on that sense of eternal lack for their own ends.
The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories
Verbing Improves Language. Any speculative fiction writer in the tradition of Tolkien knows the tension between wanting your language to be really different and wanting your language to incorporate the fifty coolest things you know about real languages. Kimmerer, a heritage language learner, reports that Potawatomi not only divides the world into animate and inanimate, but (along with the related Ojibwe) makes verbs of animacy that in English is nouned, or adjectived. Wiikwegamaa means “to be a bay.” Saturday, hill, red, beach—all verbs.
“To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too.
It’s a way of conceptualizing the world as full of animacy, agency, and dynamic change. Where English gives these things the illusions of permanence and subjection, this seems more respectful and more accurate. And an incredibly interesting grammatical attitude to give to fictional cultures as well. (So far I have shared it, in a passing scene, with some orcas patrolling the Arctic for poachers.) More broadly, it should prod creators to think through our assumptions about how we divide and describe the world.
Bioregions Not Borders. Speaking of divisions: A common—and extremely sensible—complaint of Indigenous movements is that western political boundaries cut directly through areas that in Native tradition, and in the pure common sense of ecological connectedness, are inextricable.
Kimmerer describes a bioregional map that replaces state boundaries with areas “defined by the leading denizens of the region, the iconic beings who shape the landscape, influence our daily lives and feed us—both materially and spiritually.” She asks what it might mean to become a citizen of the Maple Nation, or the Salmon Nation, or the Pinyon Nation. She talks about the gifts that in policy terms are clinically called “ecosystem services”: air and water purification, shade, songbird habitat, soil building, delicious syrup. Humans, when we’re paying attention, thin trees so that the remainder can grow a full canopy, keep an eye on forest health, and appreciate the gifts they’ve received. Nations with artificially-drawn borders may approximate this relationship with land management and rights of nature frameworks. But it seems more salient when you define areas based on things that matter.
I’ve written about future societies divided by watershed, one way to nudge governance based on shared natural interests. But I’d love to see more stories about governance by tree and salmon distribution areas, or based on bird migrations.
Get Your Hands Dirty. Some of my favorite parts of this book follow Kimmerer and her ethnobotany students on field expeditions. She would say that the plants are the real teachers there. She takes college students who’ve mostly interacted with nature via the Discovery Channel, and has them build a wigwam classroom out of saplings and cattails and birch bark. They canoe through marshes, wade and gather. They harvest spruce roots amid mycelial networks, hands deep in humus.
We also show off our root-gathering hands: black to the elbow, black under every nail, black in every crevice like a ritual glove of henna, our nails like tea-stained china. “See?” says Claudia, pinkies raised for tea with the queen, “I got the special spruce root manicure.”
It’s not so much an idea to build a story around, as a reminder that there’s only so much detail that you can get sitting behind your computer—if you want to write rich worlds, you need to get in close with the one you have.
New Growth: What Else to Read
I’ve managed to keep this post limited to Braiding Sweetgrass, but also highly recommend Kimmerer’s follow-up The Serviceberry, and I assume I will recommend Gathering Moss once I read it. (I am spreading these out to savor.)
As mentioned above, Emergent Strategy is another book that uses spiritual and holistic tools to explore a topic that often suffers from a lack thereof.
Antonia Malchik’s On the Commons newsletter is an ongoing meditation on belonging to the land, and reversing the artificial enclosures of private property. Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots aims to build a sense of place in seemingly unlikely places.
One of the best ways to build a sense of local connection, in my opinion, is hyperlocal foraging and cooking. I’m fond of both the Mitsitam Café Cookbook and The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen for North American Native recipes and techniques. The foraging component of my bookshelf leans toward Stalking the Wild Asparagus and other hippie classics passed on by my parents—more recent (and possibly European) recommendations welcome in the comments![end-mark]
The post Asking Permission for the Harvest: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s <i>Braiding Sweetgrass</i> appeared first on Reactor.
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