48 pages • 1 hour read
Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
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Symbols & Motifs
Fire
Throughout Braiding Sweetgrass, fire appears as a powerful symbol of the balance of light and darkness in the universe. In Anishinaabe legend, the original man Nanabozho saw “great fires consume the land” when he explored the West (183). He was terrified by the power of these wildfires until the Firekeeper came to him. He explained to Nanabozho that “all powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy” (183), and that the wildfires were the same fire that warmed his lodge. For Kimmerer, fire acts as a symbol of the balance between light and darkness, a reminder to “invest our gifts on the side of creation” (183).
Elsewhere in the book, Kimmerer describes the effect of fires on landscapes such as the meadows of the Pacific Northwest. Traditionally, Indigenous communities would burn these meadows to welcome migrating salmon from the ocean into freshwater rivers. As Kimmerer explains, “they mean for it to say, ‘Come back to the river where your lives began. We have made a welcome feast in your honor’” (210). As a result of these fires, the meadows burst into bloom in the spring: “the burnt and blackened soil heats up quickly and urges the shoots upward, fueled by the fertilizing ash” (212). The destructive forces of the fire lead to abundant plant growth, demonstrating the balance of light and dark in nature and humans.
Sweetgrass
Sweetgrass—also known by its Indigenous name, wiingaashk—appears as a recurring motif related to the theme of The Interconnectedness of Life on Earth. Along with sage, tobacco, and cedar, sweetgrass is one of the four plants sacred to many Indigenous nations. Kimmerer describes sweetgrass as “both medicine and relative” (24), pointing to the Indigenous understanding of the kinship between humans and other beings on Earth. Indigenous wisdom teaches that if humans “use a plant respectfully, it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away. If you don’t give it respect, it will leave us” (135). The research of Kimmerer’s graduate student Laurie shows that this is true for sweetgrass: “picking sweetgrass seemed to actually stimulate its growth” (142). Their research demonstrates that “humans participate in a symbiosis in which sweetgrass provides to the people and people, by harvesting, create the conditions for sweetgrass to flourish” (142). For Kimmerer, this symbiotic relationship is evidence of the interconnectedness of life on Earth.
The Potawatomi people gift braids of sweetgrass as a sign of “kindness, compassion, and gratitude” (28). In an introductory chapter, Kimmerer interprets her book as a braid of sweetgrass: “a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world” (28). Kimmerer’s use of the braid of sweetgrass as a symbol of her own work points is evidence of her understanding of sweetgrass as an important gift.
Windigo
In the final section of Braiding Sweetgrass, the mythical human-monster hybrid called the Windigo emerges as a powerful symbol of greed and overindulgence. Anishinaabe legend tells that the Windigo was a human until he succumbed to cannibalism, which “doomed the gnawer of bones to wander as a Windigo for the rest of time” (252). In Kimmerer’s telling of the legend, the Windigo is described as having “arms like tree trunks and feet as big as snowshoes” (252). The Windigo appears in “the blizzards of the hungry time” and “shrieks with its craving, consumed by consumption, its mind a torture of unmet want” (252). As a cannibal human-monster hybrid, the Windigo is defined by its insatiable hunger and predation of humans.
Kimmerer uses the myth of the Windigo as a symbol of the human greed and indulgence she criticizes elsewhere in the book. Her use of the symbol is based on her belief that “the collective fears and deepest values of a people are seen in the monsters they create” (252). The Ojibwe roots of the word Windigo mean “‘fat excess’ or ‘thinking only of oneself’” (253), and Kimmerer interprets the Windigo as “the name for that within us that cares more for its own survival” (252). She points to “the current epidemic of self-destructive practices—addiction to alcohol, drugs, shopping, technology, gambling and more” as evidence of the Windigo’s presence in modern life (253). The practices of interdependence and gratitude Kimmerer encourages throughout the book are her antidotes to the Windigo way of living.
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