Braiding Sweetgrass: Metaphors 6 key examples

Kimmerer titles her book Braiding Sweetgrass. Although she does describe the actual act of braiding the sacred plant, this is not the main subject of the book. Rather, she uses the title metaphorically to describe the method she is using to make her argument. She writes in the preface that, like a braid, her book 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." She brings together her traditional indigenous knowledge, her scientific expertise, and her lived experience into one strong "braid" that she offers as a gift to all the communities of which she has been a part. This "braid," her argument, shows her readers a new way of looking at the world. She hopes that this new perspective will help ecologists, Indigenous people, and other caring citizens with a stake in the earth's future to unite forces and begin reversing the wide-reaching devastation of climate change.

This metaphor is not only illuminating for casual readers of Kimmerer's book, but it also serves a very important role in bolstering the book's credibility in the eyes of academic scientists. Kimmerer is a scientist herself. Her colleagues expect her to use certain professional conventions in her writing, such as privileging data-driven studies and removing her personal experience from the equation. Kimmerer respects certain aspects of scientific writing, but one of her book's goals is to challenge the idea that personal experience and traditional knowledge are unimportant. In fact, she argues that science can be stronger when it takes these things into account. By foregrounding her unconventional method of mixing scientific writing with memoir and traditional storytelling, Kimmerer lets her readers know that she is not being a sloppy scientist but is rather making a deliberate choice to incorporate multiple kinds of knowledge.

Kimmerer's comparison of the syrup to "summer sunshine flowing in golden streams" is evocative and poetic. It helps the reader see the beautiful amber color of the syrup and feel the familial warmth of a winter morning when Kimmerer and her daughters share pancakes. However, the image is more than a metaphor. It is very nearly literal. Kimmerer has just used her ecological expertise to explain how and why the trees make the sap that gets boiled down to syrup. A maple tree's roots store starch. The tiny shoots that grow out the tree's branches in early spring need sugar to fuel their development into leaves, so they send hormonal signals to the roots to begin converting the starch into sugar. The roots draw in water from the ground to create a sugar solution (sap) that the tree draws up the trunk to feed the shoots. The few weeks when the sap is flowing are the prime time to tap maple trees.

Once the leaves are fully formed in the summer, they use photosynthesis to produce a surplus of sugar. This sugar flows back down the trunk into the roots, where the tree stores it as starch for next year. When Kimmerer writes that the syrup is summer sunshine, she is making a scientific as well as poetic statement. The syrup is distilled from the sugar solution the tree makes out of the light energy from the summer sunshine. This marriage between poetic language and scientific knowledge is not only one of Kimmerer's strengths as a writer, but it is also emblematic of her argument that science and a love of nature do not have to be at odds with one another.

Kimmerer makes it clear that while it is possible and even delightful to sit in a garden and listen to and imagine the sounds plants make as they grow, these sounds are not their language. Instead, they speak by producing food. Through the food, she claims, they teach us their wisdom.

Kimmerer does not mean that the food comes alive and makes words. Rather, she means that humans can learn about reciprocity, communalism, gratitude, responsibility, and the value of a person by harvesting the food plants produce and following the planting practices that produce the best crops. Corn, beans, and squash together can be a kind of super crop, providing complete nutrition. Indigenous women in North America have been planting these crops together for thousands of years to feed their communities. It is well-established wisdom that not only do the crops complement each other nutritionally, but also that they grow the healthiest and most sustainable food supply when they are planted together. They help each other to get the resources they each need to grow, and they protect one another from insects. Indigenous communities have been open to these lessons from the Three Sisters. Whereas the monocultures that now dominate the food industry are highly vulnerable to all kinds of environmental factors, gardens where the Three Sisters grow together tend to be hearty and reliable as sources of food.

By paying attention to the ways the Three Sisters produce the most and the best food, Kimmerer argues, humans can learn that cooperation allows us all to let our own strengths shine the brightest they can. Plants can be our teachers, and they can also be our collaborators if we let them speak to us.

In this chapter, Kimmerer finds herself in the Pacific Northwest. The land is unfamiliar to her, and she thinks about the original arrival of Nanabozho, the first man, on earth. Nanabozho received the Original Instructions to become indigenous to the land. By building an intimate, supportive relationship with the place and the ecosystem that was already established there, he could make the earth his home. Kimmerer wonders if she, too, might follow these instructions.

If we think of time as linear, a river flowing to the sea, Nanabozho completed the Original Instructions. He became indigenous, and his descendants are all indigenous to the same place. This idea doesn't seem quite right to Kimmerer. It fixes everyone in place and makes it impossible for immigrants to turn a new place into their home. However, if we think of time instead as "the sea itself," there is no start, end, or direction to time. Everything past, present, and future is always happening simultaneously. This means that there is no completing the Original Instructions. Rather, becoming indigenous is a process that we can all engage in continuously, at every turn. By thinking of time as a sea instead of a river, Kimmerer gives herself and other immigrants the chance to follow the Original Instructions wherever we go.

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.

The Windigo is the embodiment of hunger and overconsumption. It stands in for the unhealthy human capacity to feel forever unsatisfied. It also stands in for capitalism, which Kimmerer argues is predicated on the idea that we can never have enough. In this chapter, she comes face to face with a Windigo and must figure out how to defeat it before it eats her alive. She realizes that the concept of "plenty" is both a metaphorical arrow to defeat the monster and a metaphorical medicine to treat the sickness the monster represents.

Kimmerer cannot just offer the Windigo plenty of food in one go and expect to vanquish it. The monster's sickness is not hunger itself but rather the fact that it has no innate concept of plenty. The Windigo lives under a framework of winter "scarcity." It cannot imagine that there will ever be enough resources, so it eats everything in its path in order to stave off future hunger. Defeating the monster and treating its sickness requires showing it that there is such a thing as plenty. Once the Windigo can trust that summer always comes back, bringing enough food to eat, it will no longer feel that it must consume everything in its path.

This metaphor—of "plenty" as both weapon and medicine to defeat the Windigo—is important to Kimmerer's argument that Indigenous wisdom has something important to add to more dominant ways of knowing. The concept of plenty is built into Indigenous wisdom. Scarcity, meanwhile, is the cornerstone of capitalism, dominant American culture, and even ecology, which generally holds that plants live in constant competition for resources. By "braiding" Indigenous wisdom into dominant ways of knowing, we could introduce the notion of plenty and thereby "weaken the monster of overconsumption."