pitch 02 · past the stream · left alone
A meadow, and almost nothing done to it. One path goes in, cut so that somebody using wheels can get to the middle, and at the middle there is a ring of stones with a fire in it and benches round the fire. That is the whole build. The rest is grass doing what grass does.
what is growing here
Every other pitch in this field is a building. This one is a field inside a field. Nothing here is landscaped, nothing is arranged for looking at from a particular spot, and there is no best time to come.
The argument for that is not that nature is nice. It is that a place you keep turning up to will tell you things, and will go on telling you for as long as you keep turning up — and that this is a relationship with obligations running both ways rather than a view with a bench in front of it. Our own glossary calls the learning half of this place-based: the natural, cultural and built environment as the text, and knowledge that belongs somewhere rather than everywhere. The other half is on Nature and on Offline — fresh air, daylight, large muscle movement, and the freedom to stim while you are out in it.
Our glossary attributes a framework called reciprocal ethical unity to Barry Lopez. Star Stuff went and read the essay for The Place Knows You’re There and he never wrote the phrase. What he wrote was “living in some sort of ethical unity with a place”, and the hedge was doing work: he was being careful not to sound more certain than he was about somebody else’s relationship to the ground. Fusing that with a question he asks two paragraphs later turned a hesitation into a term of art. We did it, and this room is quoting from the pages where we did it, so it says so here rather than further down.
That zine also takes apart the sentence most people meet reciprocity through — as long as we protect nature, nature will protect us, which is Jessica Hernandez’s father’s teaching, reported by her. If you have spent your life being offered belonging on terms, you hear a contract in those first three words, and the flinch is correct and aimed at the wrong sentence. Nothing is being withheld. Walk far enough out of a relation and it does not start refusing you; it just cannot reach you.
And the attention this asks for is attention some of us get assessed for. The first thing Lopez names is paying intimate attention — one deep channel going a long way into one thing rather than a thin layer over everything. Read from where we are standing that is a description of monotropism. Same attention, different name, depending on who is doing it and whether anybody thought to ask what it was for.
Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair. Golden green and glossy above, the stems are banded with purple and white where they meet the ground. Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand its scientific name: Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn't know you'd forgotten.
Also on our own Nature.
the way in
A meadow is not automatically anybody’s. Left completely alone it is a place for people who can wade through waist-high grass over uneven ground, which is a smaller group than it sounds and not the group this organisation is for. So there is a path, and the path has a specification, because “accessible” without one is a word in a brochure.
Past where the path stops, the grass is grass. We have not drawn a map of the rest of it, the way the field above has not drawn one of the woodland. That is on purpose too.
the clearing
Benches, a ring of stones, and open sky. Nothing plays until you press play, and every label says how long it runs first. These are Robin Wall Kimmerer in her own voice — her publisher, her hosts, her keynotes — shortest first, so that three minutes and an hour and a half are both a real option.
Milkweed Editions · 2:50
Her own publisher, her to camera, ten years on from the book. The shortest thing at the fire and the one to start with.
Bioneers · 3:31
The rule this whole room is built on, in three and a half minutes: never take the first, never take more than half, never take more than you need, and ask.
TEDx Talks · 17:58
The same argument with room to breathe, given at TEDxSitka in 2012 — before the book came out.
The Commons KU · 20:49
A walk rather than a lecture. Closest in shape to what this page is trying to be.
Bioneers · 21:23
Sweetgrass itself, and the study that found the harvested patches doing better than the unharvested ones. The braid of stories and the braid of data, held up side by side by the person who made both.
Natural History Institute · 27:04
On what the relationship does to the person in it, which is the half of reciprocity that is easiest to leave out.
The On Being Project · 51:33
The long conversation, with Krista Tippett. Grammar of animacy, gift economies, and the word that turns an it into a being.
Museum of Science · 55:20
The most recent thing at this fire, and the one that spends longest on what reciprocity asks of somebody who is not a botanist.
Harvard University · 1:22:11
With Richard Powers and Terry Tempest Williams. Three writers on plants, in a room that let them go long.
New York Botanical Garden · 1:26:21
The longest sit at this fire. Put it on when the plan is to not have a plan.
I could hand you a braid of sweetgrass, as thick and shining as the plait that hung down my grandmother's back. But it is not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself. So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story — old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.
Also on our own Place-Based Education.
a door rather than a screen
Somebody has recorded most of Braiding Sweetgrass and put it on YouTube, chapter by chapter. It plays, it would embed, and it would have taken ten minutes to build it into this page as a row of screens beside the fire. Here is why it is a list of links instead.
The book is in copyright. Robin Wall Kimmerer is alive, publishing, and reads the authorised audiobook herself; the recording below is not hers and not her publisher’s. And the rule this entire room is built on is the honorable harvest — never take the first, never take more than you need, ask permission, give something back. A page making that argument out loud cannot serve somebody else’s whole book off its own surface while doing it. So the chapters are a door: press one and you leave, knowing what you are pressing.
They are worth knowing about, which is why they are here at all rather than quietly dropped. The gaps in the numbering are real gaps — those chapters were never uploaded — and they are left showing rather than closed up, because a tidy run of numbers would look like a whole book.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Robin Wall Kimmerer · Milkweed Editions, 2013
Borrow it → · find a library copy
Quoted throughout, and already quoted on our own Nature.
twenty-one strands
A sweetgrass braid is made of twenty-one strands divided into three bundles of seven, and each bundle means something. This is not our teaching and we are not going to explain it; what follows is an Elder saying it, transcribed off the video it is said in, with the timestamp kept so you can go and hear it.
“we divide these 21 into seven seven and seven … we divide them into seven strands each and that's what we braid into the one braid”
the first seven they always represent those seven generations behind us — our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents. Who we are, what we are, is because of them, because they're the ones that give us life. At least for that we need to be thankful.
these next seven they represent those seven sacred laws we all talk about … and the old people they tell us those teachings are simple. Love — it's not complicated, nothing complicated about it. Those teachings are powerful. Respect — powerful teaching. They say those teachings are really beautiful. Humility — when I can understand that I'm no better than anybody else, but then nobody else is any better than me.
the last seven, those seven generations ahead of us — our children, our grandchildren, whose children that are yet to be born. Why are they important? What we do to Mother Earth today is one day going to affect them. Right now she gives us everything we need to have life, but if we don't look after it, what's going to be left?
“so we make that one braid, we bring them and make it into one braid, and in that way each of these strands they also represent yesterday today and tomorrow, man woman and child, mind body and spirit. You could take one strand, break it — that's simple. When you bring them all together, that's what creates that strength of that braid.”
“our whole journey, our whole life, is intertwined within this braid as well, and it begins right here with the roots that we don't see. Imagine a tree without any roots — a little bit of wind will come, that tree will fall down.”
Transcribed from Sweet Grass Teaching at 0:53, published by Shawenim Abinoojii Inc. The video does not name the Elder speaking — not in the description, not on the channel, not at the end — so neither do we, rather than guess at one. The words are the video’s own captions, punctuated and not otherwise changed; the timestamp is there so you can check them.
Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit. I came to understand quite sharply when I began my training as a scientist that science privileges only one, possibly two, of those ways of knowing: mind and body. As a young person wanting to know everything about plants, I did not question this. But it is a whole human being who finds the beautiful path. That September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity; its wisdom is that the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other. Science and art, matter and spirit, indigenous knowledge and Western science — can they be goldenrod and asters for each other? When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response.
Not on any page of ours, and not confirmed against the book from here.
the field guide
Wiingaashk, wiingashk, swi’te’, Hierochloe odorata — the same plant, and the names are not interchangeable, because they come from different nations with different laws about it. Everything below is somebody else’s teaching on somebody else’s channel. We link it, we name who published it, and we say in one line of our own what it is about. We do not retell it, and there is nothing on this page that instructs anybody how to harvest, braid or burn sweetgrass, because that is not ours to hand out.
Shawenim Abinoojii Inc. · 5:12
What to look for at the base of the stem, why sweetgrass is a kindness medicine, and the 21 strands. The teaching further down this page is this video, at 0:53.
Kahwá:tsire Indigenous-Led Child & Family Programs · 5:27
The Anishinaabemowin name, said out loud by somebody it belongs to.
UINR - Unama'ki Institute of Natural Resources · 8:06
Mi'kmaw law — netukulimk is taking enough and not more, which is the honorable harvest arriving from a different nation and a different coast.
Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig · 11:51
Filmed in Gitigaan Mishkiki, a traditional medicine garden, which is the difference between a plant described and a plant stood next to.
Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC) · 14:53
Métis Nation. The one here that names its Elder on the video itself.
Mikmaq FineArts · 16:28
Swi'te' is the Mi'kmaw name. Picking, cleaning and braiding, filmed slowly enough to follow.
Savanna Institute · 49:01
Filed here rather than at the fire because Ryan filed it here: it is her answering other people's questions rather than telling it her own way.
and this is not sweetgrass
Ten seconds of a clump of bunchgrass gone to seed with the sun behind it, shot by Ryan in his own front yard on a January afternoon. It is not sweetgrass and we are not going to tell you what it is, because nobody here determined it and a plant named on a page reads as a determination.
It is here because it is the argument. Place-based does not mean going to the sacred meadow; it means the ground you are standing on, which for most people is a verge, a yard, a car park with something coming up through it. This clip is already on our own Nature entry, underneath the line about immediate contact with the outdoors, which is where it earned its place.
Ryan Boren · 0:10 · already on our own Nature
A clump of bunchgrass gone to seed, backlit, with a mullein rosette at its foot and river rock round it. Not sweetgrass, and the page says so.
It was through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land, that the original immigrant became indigenous. For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means 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.
Also on our own Offline: Fresh Air, Daylight, and Large Muscle Movement.
before you go
It does not teach sweetgrass. It does not summarise an Elder. It does not tell you that being outdoors will fix anything, and it does not treat a meadow as a treatment. A loud room is an access barrier and so is a mile of uneven ground; this place is quiet because quiet is what it is for, and it has a path because a place with no path is closed.
The dial works here like everywhere. At Gentle the grass stands still and every word stays exactly where it is. Nothing is behind an intensity level.
Full credits for everything that plays here — every channel, every runtime, every passage and what was checked about it — are in the liner notes. The field this is pitched on is the campgrounds, and the street is still there when you want it.
HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?
Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, plays or leaves this page until you say so. At Gentle the grass is still.