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A Note On Conventions:
I am inspired greatly by Robin Wall Kimmerer offering writing and knowledge both through an explicitly Indigenous lens, but also through a first-person perspective, too. Countless times I have been told to leave my experiential knowledge, my emotions, and my yearning for kinship with the earth out of my research, and certainly out of my academic writing. It is through reading Braiding Sweetgrass that I am empowered to challenge both these standards.
Additionally, I find it vital to begin my work with a novice understanding of the land that I write this on. To answer the question of why I’d acknowledge land at the beginning of an essay about Indigenous wisdom seems to answer itself, but in truth, the privilege I embody from the occupation of this land interacts with every part of my life. I am on the land understood as ancestral homelands of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation, Nooksack Tribe, and other Coast Salish peoples, who have loved and stewarded this area since time immemorial, as I have been taught to say. Yet, I know not their distinct histories, have never met a member, and only know a handful of words in Lushootseed. Therefore, this essay about Indigenous wisdom lacks the personal experiential knowledge by, for, and with Indigenous people that I haven’t undergone. Additionally, I am a second-generation immigrant, but not a settler. On these intersections I give thanks to, and embrace in awe, Braiding Sweetgrass.
I fully intend to enthusiastically insult the supremacy of Latin in scientific naming, and the exotification of Indigenous language. Therefore, I will be putting “Latin” in quotes, English plant names in italics, and vocabulary from Indigenous languages with no other formatting. Words are in Potawatomi unless otherwise indicated. I am grateful and thrilled to access resources by Indigenous language revival programs for my learning of words and concepts.
Braiding Sweetgrass presents itself like a wetland (or maybe I’m biased from my love for them). Calls to action and hopes (joined by fears) for the future rise up like new shoots that unfurl into cattails and skunk cabbages as the present takes form. They grow from the preserved history, the old knowledge, of the generations past; It is in this way that peat is our history just as story is. Time is both distinct – this plant is dead, this plant grows – and intermixed, for from the nutrients of the past grows the present. Similarly, as Kimmerer offers, time is more like a lake than a river (Kimmerer, pg. 333) – This I understand as both stratification and mixing creating a combined definition of a single body.
Throughout the layered body of Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer mixes together the combined understanding of botanical nomenclature, by incorporating common names, Latin names, and Potawatomi names. What originally presented itself to me as a triple-translation and oncoming headache of cross-reference offered multi-faceted knowledge that challenges the scientific principles in which I’ll soon receive a degree. Kimmerer creates a pedestal for Indigenous knowledge through botanical nomenclature from which Braiding Sweetgrass is inextricable and thereto grows the necessity of Indigenous knowledge in science and nature writing.
Kimmerer muses about Nanabozho and Carolus Linnaeus meeting in the section “Braiding Sweetgrass” (Kimmerer, pg. 203). Linnaeus, whose binomial nomenclature system has been standardized by colonized science, tells relatively little of the history or character of an organism besides its physical constituents – if you’re lucky. Cicigîme'-wîc1 – “Acer rubrum” – offers coloration indication in the Latin, but much less is the case for “Eriocoelom lawtonii”, which is named after a person and not the intricacy of the plant past its broad family. Meanwhile, the Potawatomi style of naming plants – which shares a commonality in function with many Indigenous languages across the so-called United States – offers both agency and clarity to the individuals named. Kimmerer identifies ode min2 as “the heart berry”, which references not only the origin of the berry from Skywoman’s daughter, but as the leader of the berries that heralds in the growing season (Kimmerer, pg. 23). She continues her discussion on naming through her recollection of a Navajo botanist teaching her how all the plants got their names (Kimmerer, pg. 42). Plants receiving names not through an arbitrary person-association or limited physical characteristic encourages the name of a plant to include its complex life story, complete with its ecology, applications to human life, and interactions with the annual and regional patterns. Example
Such a high emphasis in science education on learning Latin names creates a limited knowledge of the plants, or gatekeeps the knowledge of their fuller identities to those who have the time or mentorship to discover more. “Once some folks assign a scientific label to a being,” Kimmerer warns, “They stop exploring who it is (Kimmerer 202)”. Even in absentia of a name in Potawatomi, Kimmerer names and familiarizes herself – and the reader – with plants based on a system of understanding distinct from classical scientific thought. She recognizes trees with “strong arms covered in moss” and with a “branch like a wing” instead of “Picea sitchensis” and “Thuja plicata” (Kimmerer 202). Even without a name in Potawatomi that’s offered to the reader, thinking of plants in terms of their relationships to the world offers a wealth of knowledge over Latin or English naming. Relationship-based plant naming is the key to beginning to understand plants as autonomous individuals and to break from the hierarchical distinctions implied in colonized naming systems.
There is direct application to sciences from Indigenous plant knowledge, as Kimmerer clearly spells out in what I consider to be the climax of the book: “Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass”. Kimmerer formats this section akin to a scientific paper: Introduction, Literature Review, Hypothesis, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, Acknowledgements, and References Cited. However, for a scientific study, the References Cited section is minimalistic and utterly complete: Wingaashk3, buffalo, Lena, and the Ancestors (Kimmerer 162). The Ancestral knowledge of Wingaashk, repeated through Lena and the relationship between Wingaashk and the buffalo, speaks enough to the reasoning of Wingaashk growback. The experiment has been repeated through time and is understood collectively – all the grounds for a theory, or accepted scientific understanding. From Indigenous understandings come the same revelations from scientific research, from the co-dependent relationship of buffalo and Wingaashk to the hormonal response in Wingaashk to cutback often exerted by buffalo teeth or gatherer hands. To disregard Indigenous systems of knowledge that produce the same results is an unfortunate effect of colonization that ultimately slows science, and leads the results to a chorus of “We knew! We have known forever!”.
How could other nature writers apply Indigenous thought to their strengths in identification and naming of other beings? Terry Tempest-Williams, author of grief memoir Refuge, finds solace in her life transitions through her passion for birding. Williams reflects only on the Latin names of birds in her reflections, though many of their meanings are useful for identification, like “Numenius americanus” to describe ko’hwi4 in Shoshone. But, Williams’s relationships to the birds are personal only. She uses her knowledge of birds as a mechanism of unpacking and understanding her identity and grief, and the identities she shares with other humans. What Braiding Sweetgrass has to teach her analysis is to learn from the more-than-human animals instead of using them as a tool for self-discovery as a commodity. Each species of bird, presented individually and with Latin and English naming, is co-opted from its own agency into a facet of Williams’s existence, upon which Williams reigns superior for the lessons of the birds building her reflections, instead of her informed identity existing beside them in mutual development. Henry David Thoreau follows a similar suit, though he artfully connects flora to figures of literature and history in his renowned Walden. Plants serve not as neighbors or community with individual histories and distinct existences, but as mechanisms, too, for his self-sufficiency. His establishment of his cabin at Walden and subsistence from the land are not lessons learned but steps that he climbs to his self-actualization. From Kimmerer, Thoreau could learn to think more like Nanabozho, in agreement and cooperation with the land.
Barry Lopez, however, tactfully interlaces his taxonomic descriptions in his piece The Raven with sensation- and emotion-based description. His analysis of the politics of ravens and crows isn’t just pandering anthropomorphism, but a relationship-based understanding of the identities of birds, and recognition of their more-than-human complexity, made deceptively palatable to a scientific crowd by the early introduction of Latin binomial nomenclature. He uses only colonized language to talk about the ravens and crows, and yet experience and highlights their animacy. From this I learn that the grammar of animacy, though well learned through Indigenous naming, does not end in the typeface and pronunciation. Watch as I call back to the greats of nature literature, telling them to change and learn in the hypothetical void of timeless (and one-way) conversation with their memories and remaining works, all the while I am not without great flaw in my relationships to plants and naming. It took me nearly an hour of rifling through my old notebooks and scratch Post-its to discover the Latin name of a moss that I had come to love: “Sphagnum magellanicum”. The last time I met this moss was right under Mount Si, near sdukʷalbixʷ in Lushootseed5. Joined by my labmates Miles and Carly, we ventured with our hip waders into a peat bog filled with native carnivorous plants and little cranberries that tasted sweeter the sweatier we got. With sandwiches and Rainier rumbling in our bellies we combed through the melting snow for handfuls of red moss that pillowed out into entire sofa cushions beneath our feet, filled at every crevice with tannin-dark water. At last, slightly tipsy and delirious from the long day, I plunged my bare hand into the snow and pulled up a bundle of red that dripped clear onto my pants. This “Sphagnum” had no common name to knowledge, and without a common name, a name in Lushootseed, Okanogan, or Salishan would be nigh impossible to find. I memorized its Latin name, its anatomical properties, and the coordinates of our finding. A year later, all three of these were lost to me, but the memory remains of how bedazzled the moss was with cranberries, as if the rosy hue of the moss just wasn’t good enough to call out to us from between cracks in the snow. I often wondered to myself what the name of that moss was, but remember it for its relationships with cranberries, snow, and bog water. Yet, until I read Braiding Sweetgrass, I thought nothing of my knowledge without a Latin name. As both a budding scientist and nature writer, the lessons that Braiding Sweetgrass holds for me are twofold: One is of positionality and humility as I investigate and learn ecology from the environment, and the other is of relationship-based analysis of plants and animals.
I am Sundanese, descendant of the seven Bataras. Java itself rests on the back of the turtle Bedawang, and grows the plants of Nyi Pohaci, a woman raised by the gods who was laid to rest on the earth, whose body grew the plants of Sundanese sustenance, and whose brothers grew the animals that consume them. I found many parallels to the story of Skywoman and the arrival of plants to Turtle Island. In this way I feel a kinship with Braiding Sweetgrass and its teachings; Though I may never know how Nyi Pohaci’s plants grew together with my ancestors, I can know thanks to Kimmerer how Nanabozho’s life informs the Potawatomi and others, and from there form my own informed epistemology. Just as Braiding Sweetgrass creates space for Indigenous knowledge in science and nature literature, it has created the hope for me to reclaim my own indigeneity, beginning with the animacy of plants and supplemented with the power of Indigenous language as a bridge to building relationships with them. If language is a bridge and not an end-all-be-all to forming community with nature and its more-than-human citizens, then Braiding Sweetgrass dares to cross the waters of academia and scientific naming, to challenge the observer to “Know this space for yourself, as yourself”.
References
1. Red maple
2. Strawberry
3. Sweetgrass
4. Curlew
5. Snoqualmie
Kimmerer, Robin W. Braiding sweetgrass : indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2020. Print.
Williams, Terry T. Refuge : an unnatural history of family and place. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.
Lopez, Barry H. Desert notes : reflections in the eye of a raven ; River notes : the dance of herons. New York: Avon Books, 1990. Print.
“Sdaʔdaʔ Gwəɬ Dibəɬ Dxwləšucid ʔaciɬtalbixwPuget Sound Geographical Names.” Lushootseed, 16 Jan. 2017, https://tulaliplushootseed.com/places/.
Shoshoni Dictionary - Shoshoni Language Project - The University of Utah. https://shoshoniproject.utah.edu/language-materials/shoshoni-dictionary/dictionary.php?sho_search=&english_search=curlew&search=Search. Accessed 30 May 2021.
Cicigîme'-wîc
Wingaashk
Ko’hwi
“Sphagnum magellanicum”
My Ancestors