Braiding Sweetgrass: Chapter 21 Summary & Analysis

This chapter follows the perspective of the salmon off the Pacific Northwest coast, gathering outside the river mouth and readying themselves to enter their ancestral home. The people who live by the cove and river gather to prepare for the salmon’s arrival, dressing in special clothes and preparing a feast. Still the salmon don’t come, however, so the people light a fire in a meadow on the headland (a jutting outcrop of land that is visible from the sea). The fire blazes up across the whole meadow, stopping only at the edge of the wet forest. The fire is meant as a sign for the salmon, telling them that they are welcome to return and that they will be thanked and honored by the people. The salmon all move as one and head towards the river mouth.

The next morning the headland is a field of ash, and the people are celebrating a river full of salmon. They wait four days before harvesting the first fish, who is caught by the “most honored fisher and prepared with ritual care.” Then they dance, feast on the salmon and other sacred foods, and give thanks. They return the salmon’s bones to the river, placing them to face upstream so that the salmon’s spirit can travel alongside their brethren. After all this ceremony the real harvest of salmon begins, though the elders still remind the fishermen to take only what they need and no more.

Now using more scientific terms, Kimmerer names the different species of salmon that the tribe would have harvested, and she describes how they provided food for people and other animals—even their decaying bodies provided nutrients for the forests along the river. In the spring, the burned meadow bursts with new life, fertilized by the ash and drawing in new wildlife. The meadow is a sacred place to the people, where healers gather medicinal plants and spiritual seekers come to fast and meditate. Kimmerer ends the story with the tragic truth: these people have now entirely died out, and only pieces of their stories remain. Their history is still written in the soil of the headland, however.

In Oregon in the 1830s, smallpox and measles decimated Indigenous populations, often long before any settlers arrived in person. These settlers enjoyed all the plenitude left behind by the dead, but they soon grew greedy for more and decided to turn the salt marsh into flat grazing land for cattle. Kimmerer describes why estuaries are so important, acting as very biodiverse wetlands where the salmon grow up. The colonizers built dikes to keep the water out and dried up the estuary, flushing the young salmon out to sea where they made easy prey and suffered from the fast transition from fresh to salt water.

The salmon fishing industry also exploded at this time, but without the proper environment anymore, with pollution in the rivers, and with overfishing (as opposed to the Honorable Harvest of the Indigenous people) the population almost went extinct. Returning to the perspective of the salmon, Kimmerer imagines them waiting and watching for another fire on the headland, one that never comes. She wonders: “where did the relationship of loving respect and mutual caregiving between people and fish go?”

Robin herself now walks up the path to that same headland, observing the lush forest and massive trees. Reaching the meadow, she steps out from the trees to find herself perfectly alone except for two bald eagles overhead. She knows the history of the headland, but she imagines other hikers (or even herself before she learned about it) visiting the place casually as just another scenic lookoff. Because she does know the history, however, she can only stand there and weep, full of both joy and grief: “joy for the being of the shimmering world and grief for what we have lost.” Other hikers go past, and she watches some of them put down their phones for a while and look longingly out at sea, as if “trying to remember what it would be like to love the world.”

Kimmerer comments on how easily we accept the idea of loving a person, but we consider loving the land as having no real practical effects. Cascade Head (the sacred headland) is a physical sign of the love between people and land. The ceremonies the people held there also had practical effects of clearing the land for new growth and ensuring the salmon thrived. She contrasts this to how we think of land—just a pretty place to write about on a postcard—or of salmon—just another grocery to buy.

Ceremonies hold people accountable to their community by focusing everyone’s attention on the same subject, Kimmerer says. Many Indigenous ceremonies have been lost, and the most common ceremonies in modern life, like weddings, birthdays, and graduations, focus only on people and moments of personal transition. These are important, she acknowledges, and we are familiar with how to carry out these ceremonies, but she also challenges the reader to imagine throwing a party for the arrival of salmon into a river. Celebrations don’t just have to be about our own species.

Indigenous ceremonies still focus on the land, while colonist ceremonies focus on people—they had to be transportable to survive in a culture of immigrants, and so couldn’t be bound to particular places. Kimmerer cautions against cultural appropriation of Indigenous practices, but she does believe that colonists need to develop new ceremonies to connect themselves to this land that is now their home.

Back at Cascade Head, Kimmerer describes a new kind of Salmon Ceremony that is now taking place: field biologists measuring the return of the salmon. For the last several decades a project has been underway to restore the estuary, removing the manmade dikes and dams in the hopes that “the land remember[s] how to be an estuary.” This is the result of scientific planning, not spiritual knowledge, but it is having a similar effect in restoring the land’s abundance.

The people studying Cascade Head cannot speak directly to the plants and animals, but they can use science to learn what they need. “Doing science with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity with the more-than-human world,” Kimmerer declares. She says that all of the field biologists and ecologists that she knows came into their field because of their love for nature, and that science can be a way of getting closer to nature. The experiments these people run are like their own beacon to bring the salmon home. The land has now returned to an estuary and its natural shape.

Kimmerer describes the scientists gathering at the river mouth, camping out and preparing their equipment—but still the salmon don’t come. She imagines that one night a microscope light is left on in a tent, and the salmon see this tiny beacon and answer its call to return home.