Science is a painfully tight pair of shoes. It perceives the family of life to be little
more than a complex biochemical machine.
It has created powerful tools for ravaging the planet’s ecosystems,
creating a hard path for our descendants.
It gives us knowing, but not caring.
It’s not about wisdom. It’s about
pursuing the wants and needs of humans, with less concern for the
more-than-human world.
Robin Kimmerer is a biology professor. After being trained in the rigid beliefs of
science, she heard a Navajo woman talk about the realm of plants from the
perspective of indigenous knowledge. For
that woman, plants were not subjects, but teachers. In a flash, Kimmerer realized the shallowness
of her scientific training. It only provides
a pinhole view of reality. Science is
not enough.
Her grandfather was Potawatomi. When he was a boy, the government sent him
away to the Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was
trained to become an English-speaking wageworker. He forgot his language and culture and
drifted away from his people. He never
felt at home in either world.
Kimmerer has worked hard to reconnect with her Native
American roots, because traditional indigenous cultures are blessed with a far
more holistic relationship with the family of life. All people on Earth have tribal ancestors who
once lived close to the land, but so much has been lost with the passage of
centuries. Her book, Braiding Sweetgrass,
is a collection of stories that focus on living with respect and reverence for
the land.
She once asked a city lad where his sense of place felt strongest. He immediately responded, “My car.” Her book is especially important for the
impoverished millions, who have grown up indoors, in a ghoulish netherworld of
glowing screens. She has a strong and respectful
relationship with the land, and she describes it beautifully. It’s a perspective that is almost absent in
our culture, and without it, a long-term future for humans is impossible. We must remember.
While explaining the culture of sharing, respect, and
gratitude, she does not conceal her scientist badge. So, readers are less tempted to automatically
dismiss her stories as daffy rainbows of New Age woo-woo. Science is not worthless. In the centuries of restoration that lie
ahead, it can offer some useful ideas, if we keep it on a short leash. Nature will play a primary role in healing
the land as much as possible — it knows what to do. The far bigger challenge is dealing with the
monsters that inhabit the goop between our ears.
In the native world, when a patch of ripe strawberries is
discovered, the plants are warmly greeted.
The people ask permission to take some berries. If the response is yes, they take only what
they need, never more than half of the fruit.
The plants are thanked for their gift, and the pickers leave an offering
of tobacco.
Gifts and responsibilities are two sides of the same
coin. The berry pickers now have an
obligation to promote the wellbeing of the strawberry people, by depositing
their seeds in good locations (not a toilet).
This is a relationship of reciprocity between berries and people. The berry eaters need the plants, and the
plants need the berry eaters.
On the other hand, the relationship between mainstream people
and nonrenewable resources is not reciprocal.
The oil, coal, iron, and other minerals do not need the miners, nor is
their wellbeing improved by the mining.
The planet’s atmosphere does not appreciate our toxic offerings of
carbon emissions. The ecosystem does not
enjoy being treated like an open pit mine.
Cultures that enjoy a direct and intimate relationship with
their ecosystem have far more respect for it than those that forage at malls
and supermarkets. Consumer culture
receives enormous gifts from the land, but gives almost none in return. Kimmerer’s students clearly understand that the
relationship between consumers and nature is abusive. It’s difficult for them to imagine what a
healthy relationship would look like.
Kimmerer lives in the Onondaga Nation. At the school, the Haudenosaunee flag blows
in the breeze, not the stars and stripes.
There is no pledge of allegiance to a political system that claims to
provide “liberty and justice for all.”
Instead, each day begins with the Thanksgiving
Address, in which the students express gratitude for all of creation. It helps them remember that, “everything
needed to sustain life is already here.”
We are wealthy.
I had one issue with the book.
Natives from corn-growing cultures see corn as sacred. Corn was a recent arrival to the region of
the eastern U.S. Its expansion spurred
population growth and conflict. We know
that hunter-gatherers could succeed in achieving genuine sustainability when
they lived with the wisdom of voluntary self-restraint. But environmental history has not documented
a culture achieving sustainability via intensive agriculture.
Potawatomi legends describe a dangerous spirit called the
Windigo. It wanders across the land in
the lean months of winter. It is always
hungry, and never stops hunting. It’s a
selfish spirit that is obsessed with its own survival, by any means
necessary. The Windigo is notorious for
having an insatiable hunger. The moral
of the story is to share, to take care of one another. Don’t be a greedy butthead.
Much to the horror of the natives, the colonists imported a
diabolical spirit of incredible self-destructive overindulgence — Super
Windigo. In white society, mastering the
madness of insatiable consumption was seen as an admirable mark of success! Kimmerer winces. “We spend our beautiful, utterly singular
lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never
satisfy. It is the Windigo way that
tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is
belonging that we crave.”
After a lifetime of shopping and discarding, we don’t return
our bodies to nature. The dead are
placed in heavy caskets and buried deep in the ground, where nature will
struggle for centuries to retrieve the nutrients. I’ve always hoped that my corpse would be
eaten by mountain lions in a wild location, an offering to an ecosystem upon
which I have lived far too hard.
From other books, I have learned about cultures that did
something like this. Carl Jung noted
that the Maasai tribe did not bury their dead.
Corpses were left outdoors for the hyenas to eat. John Gunther wrote that the Bakutu people of
the Congo recycled corpses by laying them on a termite hill. In sky
burial, corpses are fed to the vultures.
This is done in Tibet, and in
Zoroastrian communities in India. Evan
Pritchard noted that the Western Algonquin people also practiced it.
Over the years, Kimmerer has heard the Thanksgiving Address recited
countless times. It is so inspiring to
listen to people express gratitude for all of creation. She longs for the day “when we can hear the
land give thanks for the people in return.”
So do I.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding
Sweetgrass, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, 2013.
Questions
for a Resilient Future is a 17-minute talk given by Kimmerer.
Returning
the Gift is a brief essay.
