Braiding Sweetgrass: Chapter 28 Summary & Analysis

Kimmerer begins by affirming the importance of stories: “stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land.” Because we are both storytellers and “storymakers,” paying attention to old stories and myths can help us write the narrative of a better future. She then relates the Mayan creation story.

In the story, the first divine beings, or gods, create plants and animals to fill the emptiness. Afterward they want to create a creature who can speak, and so they try to make humans. They make the first humans out of mud, but they are ugly and shapeless and soon melt away in the rain. Next they make humans out of wood. These people are beautiful, strong, and clever, and they soon populate the earth with their children. These people have no gratitude or love within them, however, and they disrespect the rest of creation. The gods send disasters to strike them, and they also give the rest of creation their own voices to speak out against their mistreatment. They all join together to destroy the wood people. Next the gods make people out of pure sunlight, who are beautiful and powerful, but they too lack gratitude and think themselves equal to the gods, so the gods destroy them as well.

Finally, the gods make people out of ground corn meal. These people are compassionate and loving, and they can dance in gratitude for the rest of creation. They are “wise enough to be grateful.” Out of all the gods’ experiments, only the corn people respect the world that sustains them—“and so they were the people who were sustained upon the earth.”

Kimmerer muses on this story, wondering why the people of corn were the ones who ultimately inherited the earth. Corn, she says, is the product of “light transformed by relationship” via photosynthesis, and also of a relationship with people, creating the people themselves and then sustaining them as their first staple crop. This story is usually read as a history, but Kimmerer reminds the reader that in many Indigenous cultures time is not linear but rather circular. This makes the story both history, ongoing process, and prophecy of the future. She relates the idea that the Popol Vuh, the sacred Mayan text that contains this creation story, was used as a seeing instrument, or ilbal, through which its culture viewed their relationship to the world.

Immigrant culture should appreciate this wisdom, but not appropriate it, Kimmerer says. Instead, settler society should write its own story of relationship to the world, creating its own ilbal using science and art. She then comments how the scientific process of photosynthesis could also be described like a poem, with plants combining light, air, and water to make sugar and oxygen, our food and breath. Our breath then gives back carbon dioxide, which the plants use as their own breath. We are symbiotic organisms, and this living symbiosis is its own story of reciprocity and gratitude.

“The very facts of the world are a poem,” Kimmerer declares. These fact/stories used to be carried by elders and now they are usually the domain of scientists. But the technical language of science excludes most people, which also keeps them cut off from any ideas of the “democracy of all species.” “Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from somewhere else,” Kimmerer writes.

Science probably is the ilbal of the Western world, Kimmerer admits, but the current scientific worldview seems more like that of the wood people: clarifying material facts but blurring spiritual wisdom and relationships. She contrasts scientific practice, which brings the questioner into close contact with the natural world and invites a sense of wonder and curiosity, with the scientific worldview, which uses technology to advance exploitative materialistic economies. The scientific worldview also privileges human intelligence and value over all others, lacking humility—just like the people of wood.

In the Indigenous worldview, however, humans are seen as the “younger brothers of Creation” who must learn from those who were here before us: the plants and animals, who have their own kinds of intelligence and knowledge. Kimmerer imagines a kind of science in which people saw plants as teachers rather than as objects to be experimented on.

Kimmerer closes by describing the Indigenous idea that each part of creation has its own unique gift, like a bird with its song. She wonders what our gift might be, and thinks back on the people of mud, wood, and light. They all lacked gratitude, which is indeed our unique gift as human beings, but increasingly Kimmerer says that she has come to think of language as our gift and responsibility as well. She imagines writing and storytelling as “an act of reciprocity with the living land,” as we attempt to become like the people of corn and create new stories about our relationship to the world.