Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants and member of the Vieux and Johnson families, visited the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Heritage Center Nov. 2 for a book signing event.
“I am so grateful to be back in Shawnee. It feels so good to walk in here and to be driving through the beautiful, oak woodlands,” she said to attendees of the event. “It really is wonderful. It’s just going to make me tear up to be here right now.”
Kimmerer spoke about relatives who preceded her and honored the “sacred storytellers who connect us to our ways.” She explained that she herself grew up outside of the community because her grandfather was sent to the Carlisle boarding school in Pennsylvania. Living in the northeast, she said it was stories that kept her connected to her Tribe.
Kimmerer is a botanist as well, and she said during the time she was growing up, she had many questions about her culture but not many elders to teach her. After wondering how her people knew the things they did, she realized that the world around them was their teacher.
“The plants taught them. The land taught them. The water taught them,” she said. “So, I became an attentive student to the plants at that time, and so I’m grateful for the stories that they told me as well.”
She told attendees that one of the greatest compliments for her is to hear someone say that Braiding Sweetgrass sounds like something a grandparent told them, because it includes Potawatomi stories and teachings.
When she published Braiding Sweetgrass in 2013, she said she thought her family would be the only readers. Since then, the book has sold more than two million copies and been translated into 21 languages.
“People around the world know our stories, and what an honor that is, and that our stories and our teachings can guide us in this perilous time that we live in,” she said. “You probably heard your elders say that the reason that our people held onto our teachings through so many trials, it’s a miracle. It’s a miracle that our stories are still here, and that’s because the whole world would need them.”
Before concluding, Kimmerer requested she be able to plant a seed and brought up the ways the world is waking up to Indigenous teachings, such as the Biden Administration issuing a memorandum that Traditional Ecological Knowledge must be elevated in all land management and science decision making.
“I never thought I’d live long enough to see, to hear that,” she said.
She spoke of her pride in the work CPN has done, from the Tribe’s college program, to its care for citizens, to the creation of the Aviary. Kimmerer remembers her father telling her about the days when the CPN offices were in a trailer, and how impressed she is with how far the Nation has come.
Storytelling, she said, is sacred, and stories can be oral, written, sung and even told through art. However, she said stories are also written in the land.
“The story I want to tell, when people from the other side of the world ask me ‘What are the Potawatomis up to?’ I would love to be able to tell the story of how we are caring for our plant relatives,” she said. “Just as we are a leader in language revitalization, couldn’t we be a leader in plant knowledge revitalization as well?”
Plants have helped the Potawatomi people from the very beginning, Kimmerer explained, and she said it is now time for the Potawatomi people to help plants.
“When I think about the ways that Potawatomi, we are spread out like beads on a string from Shawnee to Ontario. That’s the direction of climate change, too,” Kimmerer said. “Couldn’t we collaborate, and indeed, lead the way with other Potawatomi nations to create ways to care for our plants, create ways for our plants to move north if they need to, create sanctuaries for them, create refuges, so that our people will always have our medicines and always have our foods? That’s a story that I can imagine us writing together.”
Kimmerer also attended a book signing hosted by Green Feather Book Company, Norman Cultural Connection, and CPN at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma. Registration for that event filled up to capacity within hours of being posted online.
Kimmerer is a scientist, writer and botanist who lives in upstate New York. In addition to Braiding Sweetgrass, she has also written Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses and The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which hit bookstore shelves in November.
Learn more about Kimmerer and her books at robinwallkimmerer.com.