Braiding Sweetgrass: Allusions 3 key examples

In The Lone Ranger franchise, which began as a radio show in the 1930s and turned into a television show, Tonto is the Potawatomi sidekick to a crime-fighting Texas Ranger. The fact that the main character is still called "The Lone Ranger" despite Tonto's company and collaboration says worlds about the show's take on Tonto as a human being. He is the butt of many jokes. The central joke is that he does not know how to speak in proper sentences. He speaks a made-up version of pidgin English, which Kimmerer refers to with the line, "Me try talk good Injun way." Some of his lines draw on Spanish, some draw on English, and some draw on poorly-understood phrases from Indigenous languages. His name translates to "stupid" in Spanish, turning him into the ultimate stereotype of Indigenous people as unintelligent, bad communicators.

Kimmerer jokes that she and her sister sound like Tonto not when they try to speak English, but rather when they try to speak Potawatomi. The allusion does not undermine her intelligence or her sister's. Rather, it helps her make the humorous but important point that learning a new language is hard. If Tonto speaks a stilted mixture of different languages, it is because he too is drawing on everything he has ever learned about different languages to get his point across. He speaks his own version of "Spanawatomi." The Lone Ranger, on the other hand, only communicates in English. He would sound stilted, too, if he tried to speak another language.

In addition to rehabilitating Tonto's reputation, the allusion also helps Kimmerer make the point that preserving Indigenous languages may only be possible in limited ways at this point. Because so many Indigenous people were forced to speak English and not their native languages in residential schools, very few elders still speak Potawatomi and other Indigenous languages. It takes time and practice to learn the intricacies of a language, and there is limited time left before those who know these intricacies will no longer be around to pass on the gift. Still, even if she and her sister never get beyond stilted speech, she argues that their work with the language is important. By allowing herself to sound silly, she allows the language to teach her new ways of thinking about the world.

Kimmerer states that she almost studied poetry in college instead of ecology; both poetic and scientific approaches to thinking about nature appealed to her. The phrase "certain slant of light" refers to a famous Dickinson poem about nature, religion, and despair. In the poem, Dickinson describes "a certain Slant of light, / Winter afternoons — / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes —." Dickinson notices the way the light on a winter afternoon can shine on a dead landscape. The sight does the same thing to her that somber church music does, making her reflect on the "heavy" reality that we are all bound to die. This poem is emblematic of the meditative, gloomy tone that pervades much of Dickinson's work. She was excellent at taking simple images and imbuing them with spiritual meaning. Growing up in a Protestant community and living through the bloody American Civil War, she was also practically obsessed with death and what it did to the soul.

Whereas Dickinson wrote about the light on "winter afternoons," Kimmerer observes "that certain slant of light on a yellow afternoon." The afternoon is "yellow" because it is fall, and the leaves are changing. Kimmerer might easily take fall as a harbinger of the dead winter Dickinson wrote about, but instead she emphasizes its cheery, "warm and clear" yellow glow. The way the light falls on the beans makes Kimmerer not gloomy, but rather joyful over the idea that the earth nurtures us all.

Despite the contrast between the two writers' attitudes, Dickinson's way of accessing her spirituality by noticing nature is very much in line with the way Kimmerer lives her own life. Kimmerer is not necessarily criticizing Dickinson's poetry, but rather springboarding off of it to capture a sense of joy that is all the more wonderful in contrast to the older poet's despair. Whereas Dickinson interprets winter as a preview of death, Kimmerer instead thinks of fall as a time of abundance and winter as the season that will give rise to next year's abundant harvest. Her gratitude and confidence in the earth's generosity are rooted in her Indigenous worldview. In Christianity, the universe revolves around death and the afterlife. Life is temporary because it ends. According to Kimmerer's Indigenous beliefs, the universe revolves instead around life. Life never ends because even when we die and decompose in the earth, our deaths give rise to more life.

The music of the spheres is a concept first articulated by Pythagoras but important also in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers. Pythagoras noticed that there was a physical, mathematical element to music: the note a string will emit when it is plucked depends on the length of the string, and we can use math to predict the exact note a string of an exact length will emit (assuming there is a uniform tension on the string). He built this observation out into the theory that each planet and celestial body emits a unique tone based on the physics of its orbital revolution. The human ear cannot hear all of these tones, but he theorized that life on earth reflects the collective "music of the spheres," or planets, sun, and moon. Harmonious music is correlated with a harmonious earth, and discordant music is correlated with a discordant earth. Subsequent philosophers built their own theories based on Pythagoras's idea. One popular idea was that humans could get closer to God by studying the natural world and trying to understand the music of the spheres, even if they could never physically hear this music.

Kimmerer compares ecological insight to the music of the spheres. To her, thinking and learning about the natural world does more than satisfy her curiosity. It is a transcendent, spiritual experience. When she studies nature, she feels like she is part of something larger than herself. Her students, on the other hand, come to the camping trip with the shortsighted idea that they are learning about nature only to satisfy a graduation requirement. They are unable to see that there is anything larger than their own career paths. Kimmerer is frustrated because the lessons she is trying to teach can't get across to students with this limited view of nature as an obstacle to the best things in life. Her mission on this camping trip and subsequent trips she leads becomes showing her students not only how to look for the "music of the spheres" in nature, but moreover how to conceive of such an idea to begin with.