Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of PlantsRobin
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
https://www.booksfree.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/9781571313560.pdf
Skywoman by Bruce King (Oneida)
In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of
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course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of
Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing,
human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.”
We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the
most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for
guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us
by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and
have had time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground,
joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food and medicine
from light and water, and then they give it away.
To walk the science path I had stepped off the path of indigenous
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knowledge. But the world has a way of guiding your steps. Seemingly out
of the blue came an invitation to a small gathering of Native elders, to talk
about traditional knowledge of plants. One I will never forget—a Navajo
woman without a day of university botany training in her life—spoke for
hours and I hung on every word. One by one, name by name, she told of the
plants in her valley. Where each one lived, when it bloomed, who it liked to
live near and all its relationships, who ate it, who lined their nests with its
fibers, what kind of medicine it offered. She also shared the stories held by
those plants, their origin myths, how they got their names, and what they
have to tell us. She spoke of beauty
My first taste of the missing language was the word Puhpowee on my
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tongue. I stumbled upon it in a book by the Anishinaabe ethnobotanist
Keewaydinoquay, in a treatise on the traditional uses of fungi by our
people. Puhpowee, she explained, translates as “the force which causes
mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” As a biologist, I was
stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western
science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. You’d think that
biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific
language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing.
What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.
In the three syllables of this new word I could see an entire process of
close observation in the damp morning woods, the formulation of a theory
for which English has no equivalent. The makers of this word understood a
world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything. I’ve
cherished it for many years, as a talisman, and longed for the people who
gave a name to the life force of mushrooms. The language that holds
Puhpowee is one that I wanted to speak. So when I learned that the word for
rising, for emergence, belonged to the language of my ancestors, it became
a signpost for me.
I remember the words of Bill Tall Bull, a Cheyenne elder. As a young
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person, I spoke to him with a heavy heart, lamenting that I had no native
language with which to speak to the plants and the places that I love. “They
love to hear the old language,” he said, “it’s true.” “But,” he said, with
fingers on his lips, “You don’t have to speak it here.” “If you speak it here,”
he said, patting his chest, “They will hear you.”
We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.
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