The one-sentence summary

Indigenous wisdom from Native American mythology, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants can enhance our attentiveness to life at all scales.

Can’t be bothered to read it? Listen to the 5-minute summary in two parts.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • The writer is a scientist and professor, and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She uses her knowledge of Environmental Biology and botany to raise awareness of our relationship with the world and our role as custodians of it. She is also a poet and the world speaks to her in metaphor.
  • A metaphor of sweetgrass stewardship runs through the book, from planting and tending to picking, braiding and burning it. Sweetgrass is revered as the hair of Mother Earth, and it is traditionally braided to show loving care for her wellbeing. Braids plaited of three strands are given away as signs of kindness and gratitude.
  • The Native American creation story is of Skywoman falling from the sky to be held up by animals to prevent her hitting the water and drowning. Eventually rested on the back of a turtle, the animals place soil on its back, she produces seeds from the Tree of Life, and the first plant to grow on earth was sweetgrass. When she buried her daughter on earth, the plants that were special gifts sprang from her body – tobacco from her head, sweetgrass from her hair, strawberries from her heart, corn from her breasts, squash from her belly, and beans from her hands.
  • The Thanksgiving Address is an extremely long river of words that sets gratitude as the highest priority, referencing water, fish, plants, medicinal herbs, animals, birds, wind, sun and moon – every aspect of the natural world.
  • Surveying her students, the author found that they all believed that humans and nature are a bad mix. Rating their knowledge of positive interactions between people and land, the median response was none. Respect for the world has been lost, and yet the story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than it is on the page.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • A gift creates ongoing relationship. As the scholar Lewis Hyde notes, “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.”
  • Something is broken when food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft. We need to behave as if the living world is a gift. Water is a gift for all, not meant to be bought or sold, so don’t buy it. When food has been wrenched from the earth, depleting the soil and poisoning our relatives in the name of higher yields, don’t buy it.
  • Every few years, some species of trees produce a bumper crop of fruits or nuts. The collective term for these fruits and nuts is ‘mast’, so such a year is called a mast year. Mast fruiting is collective and the trees do not work as individuals. This is further confirmation of the theory that trees talk to each other – a view espoused in the book Finding The Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.
  • Native elders still puzzle over those who colonized North America, saying: “The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they are staying or not.”

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • The book is predominantly an autobiography, so it takes work to extract information and philosophy from the anecdote.