The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Origins of “Braiding Sweetgrass”

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Robin Wall Kimmerer is an unlikely literary star. A botanist by training—a specialist in moss—she spent much of her career at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. But, when she was well established in her academic work, having “done the things you need to do to get tenure,” she launched into a different kind of writing; her new style sought to bridge the divide between Western science and Indigenous teachings she had learned, as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, about the connections between people, the land, plants, and animals. The result was “Braiding Sweetgrass,” a series of essays about the natural world and our relationship to it. The book was published by Milkweed Editions, a small literary press, and it grew only by word of mouth. Several years later, it landed on the Times best-seller list, and has remained there for more than three years; fans have described reading the essays as a spiritual experience. Kimmerer herself was recently recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship. Parul Sehgal, who writes about literature for The New Yorker, went to visit Kimmerer on the land she writes about so movingly, to talk about the book’s origin and its impact on its tenth anniversary. “I wanted to see what would happen if you imbue science with values,” Kimmerer told her. She is an environmentalist, but not an activist per se; her ambition for her work is actually larger. “So much of the environmental movement to me is grounded in fear,” she explains. “And we have a lot to be afraid about—let’s not ignore that—but what I really wanted to do was to help people really love the land again. Because I think that’s why we are where we are: that we haven’t loved the land enough.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Farrell Sagle in today for David Remnick. And you see all the blackberries. Oh, they were not in bloom yesterday, but look at this cloud of white. It's all blackberries. There'll be jam and pie this summer. I recently took a trip to Western New York, to its fields and its forests,

to visit Robin Wall Kimmerer, an unlikely. literary star, a botanist by training, a specialist in moss, an expert naturalist. Keppard. Is that what that is? They keep it up all day long. Kimmerer has had a long career in universities, but she felt constrained by the world of Western science. She's Native American and the indigenous teachings she learned. The sense of connection, she felt with the land, plants, and animals around her had been dismissed by the scientific community. And while established in her career, Kimmer's Kimmerer set out to publish a collection of essays to bridge the divide.

The result is Braiding Sweetgrass. It's published first by a small press. It's become a phenomenon since. It's been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than three years and sold well over a million copies. Last year, Kimmerer received the MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called Genius Grant. So, yeah, let's walk up to the pond. It's a decade since Braiding Sweetgrass was first published.

And I went to talk with Robin Wall Kimmerer at her home, outside Syracuse, New York. You know, when people write memoirs that are read and beloved, readers will talk to them about, like, oh, how's your mother and how's your sister? We act that way about your pond and your trees, right? Which is what you wanted. It is. I love that.

Because in that case, you know, it's an attachment to place. And you understand what it would be like to have that attachment. Yeah. And to work for it. it. So we're standing at the banks of this pond near her property. It's ringed with willows and dogwoods.

And it's loud. It's so full of birdsong and insects. It's noisier than my block in Brooklyn. You see this bright, shiny yellow grass in here? That's sweet grass. You're beautiful. I pulled that for a little while

and as it starts to dry it will give you the most wonderful fragrance. When she bought the property, the pond was full of algae, choked with algae, and she worked very, very hard to dredge it out, to clean it, to make it a place where her daughters could swim, but also to return it to this loud, humming, squawking community around us. So many birds there. There's that pair of little green herons, the parents taking off.

You see the red-wing blackbirds over there, these dragonflies humming about. but it really is for me a magical little place. There's so much life here. We just heard the yellow warbler there. Brown thrash are calling over there. I love it you to hear them, but they also must be registering you. They must be like, she's back. Robin is here.

She's making her. She's brought some other humans with her. It's true. It's true. I know they know me. My pandemic project, when we couldn't have friends over for dinner, I started having dinner parties at the pond. for the winter birds.

So I would go up and spread a table with all of these treats. And my goal was by the end of the winter to have the chickadees land on my hand and eat seeds from my hand. I thought it was going to take months. It took about two weeks. But, yeah, I know they all know me. You know, it's easier for me to describe

what braiding sweetgrass does to a reader rather than describe the book itself. You know, it's a book that changes people. It moves them. You have a spiritual experience reading this book. If you haven't read it, imagine a series of linked essays that don't fit cleanly into any conceivable category. These are scientific essays.

Why do asters and goldenrod bloom together in such intense display? Or why does maplesap flow so abundantly in the spring? But they're also a meditation on our relationship with the natural world, and they draw heavily on Native American teachings handed down from generation to generation. So Kimmer's home is surrounded by rolling hay fields and farmland, but her house is ringed by giant maples. We went inside and sat at her dining room table to talk. The earliest sort of seeds of this book for you,

before it was even a book, did it start as questions, did it start as sentences? Where did you find it, or how did it find you? For me, it really started with this notion that it feels to me that our relationship with land is broken. And so much of the environmental movement to me is grounded in fear. And we have a lot to be afraid about. And let's not, you know, ignore that. But what I really wanted to do was to try to find a way in which

to help people really love the land again. Because I think that's why we are where we are, that we haven't loved the land enough. And part of that for me is tied up with the notion that we look around us at all of this abundance and we call it natural resources. We think about it as ecosystem services or sometimes commodities, right? Whereas from my perspective and very much grounded in a Potawatomi way of knowing, all of this is a gift. and what I was seeing is that most people don't understand the world as gift.

And when you do, the response of gratitude and reciprocity flows from that. So I really set for myself this goal of seeing if we could help tell stories that would help people see the world as gift. I want to imagine where you were when this mission, this great, this great ambition sort of presented itself. Where were you living? Where were you? You know, what was happening in your life when you first started working on this book? I was living here in the abundance of upstate New York. And at that time, my youngest daughter was still at home about to leave for college.

And so it was a transition time for me. It was also a time when I felt well established in my career as a scientist. I had fulfilled the sorts of things that tenure requires of you. I had done all those things which were expected of me. And I wanted also to do that thing, which I wanted for my life. not what institutions wanted of me. And so that helped give me the impetus to write in what I think of as my true voice. One of the mysteries about this book for me is it has to do with the voice.

And the sense, as I was reading it, sometimes I was like, who's speaking right now and who is being spoken to? there's a rotating point of view. Sometimes it feels to me that you're writing to your daughters, but then the point of view shifts and you actually have a chapter told from the point of view of your daughter. At some points it feels almost like

you're trying to make a language for nature to speak to nature. Did you have a reader in mind as you were working on it and hearing your voice, your free voice for the first time? Did you imagine it finding readers in the world? Who was in your mind at that time?

I was quite explicitly writing for two audiences at the beginning. Little did I know there would be quite a different audience, but I was writing for my scientific colleagues in order to try to make the case for indigenous science and traditional ways of knowing and reimagining what science looks like when it's imbued with values. So that was one audience. I also was writing always with my listening to native people. that I wanted the stories that I told, the reflections that I shared, I wanted my native community to say, yes, yes, this is true, this is our way. Because I wanted to be very sensitive to the fact that this is my story, but it's not my knowledge.

This is the knowledge of collective generations of people listening to the land. So those were the two audiences that I had in mind. But you're right that there's maybe an implicit audience. And for me, it is the land. You know, as a botanist, as a person who's just been madly in love with dirt and trees and birds forever, I wanted to be sure that I was representing them, that I was, it's not possible to fully tell their story, but I wanted them to be present and to create a sense of empathy and compassion and respect for the living world. I mean, you describe yourself as being in love with dirt, but as I was reading this book,

I started to keep a running list of words you were teaching me, and you're in love with dirt, but you're in love with language, and you taught me words that I'd never heard of, wicker, the soft, naying sound of a horse, ducks dabble the way they skim off the top. I have this beautiful list of language you've given me. And I'm curious about the origins of your sensitivity to language. When did that happen? What a good question. I certainly grew up in a family where they were fine storytellers. My dad was a wonderful storyteller and kind of the master of some of those old-time, colorful expressions that I just loved. And so I'm sure that was an influence.

But as a young person, I loved poetry. I still have the book set of poetry from when I was 8, 9, 10 years old. So it feels like an innate love of language, which is also part of being a scientist. You know, that precision. in language, that that little part of leave, it has a really particular name. And so being steeped in the particularities of the living world that comes from science also appeals to my poetic self because of that discipline of finding just the right word.

The discipline and also the pleasure, right, when you describe as salamanders feeling soft like an overripe banana. That's pleasure for its own sake. You know, it's getting it right. So Kimmer goes from being this academic scientist, and she was writing papers with titles like, and, you know, I looked one up, environmental determinants of spatial pattern in the vegetation of abandoned lead zinc mines,

to writing this book that's far more poetic, unclassifiable, searching. You know, and if you pick up this book and you go to the back of it and you see her bio, there's another really startling fact. She lists herself before she lists herself as anything else, as a scientist or anything, she lists herself first as a mother. And that is unusual for any writer, let alone a scientist.

I'm so glad you've highlighted this because so often in the academy, we are asked to identify ourselves according to our institutions and our titles and our disciplines. And first and foremost, I know that I am a mother, because it's relationship, it's nurture, it's this sense of love being loved by the world and having love for the world that really propels me. And most of, in most scientific disciplines, we're not even allowed to talk about that. We can't even say the words. And so for me, it's an active resistance to first claim that I am a mother. first and for me the boundaries between me being a mother and being nurtured by

Schakmiquet by Mother Earth they feel like the same thing it feels very whole to me and and and so inevitably I had to write about being a mother and you know another Another element of that is I'm constantly aware of the fact that what feels like second nature to me of this intimacy with the land and plants is not second nature to most of my readers. Nature is like a park or a wilderness area. And so I wanted to use mothering also as a vehicle for expressing the kind of relationship. that one can have with the living land, being mothered by the land and mothering in return. That's Robin Wall Kimmer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass.

Our conversation continues in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Parles Sagal. I'm a staff writer at the magazine. I've been speaking today with Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a book about botany and much more

that's been on the New York Times bestseller. for more than three years. Braiding Sweetgrass shares Kimmer's indigenous knowledge about the natural world, and one of the themes of her writing is her own family history. She's an enrolled member of the citizen Potawatomi Nation, and her family's

story contains the history of American Indian policy in the U.S. Her ancestors were forcibly removed three times in a single generation, pushed out of their homelands around Lake Michigan, and left essentially to starve in Oklahoma. It's one reason why

It feels so powerful for Kimmer to come back, reclaim these teachings, and braiding sweetgrass. They were so nearly lost. They say that we are inevitably living our ancestor's stories. And joyfully, I am. I think about, in particular, my grandfather, who at only nine years old, who was taken from his family on our reserve in Oklahoma, and sent to the Carlisle Indian School, whose motto you may know was to kill the Indian to save the man.

It was the most violent sort of colonial assimilative enterprise. And I always knew those stories growing up. I also knew of my grandfather's resilience and resistance to that painful, painful chapter. But when I was a little kid, I longed for culture. And I would ask my dad, you know, what's the word for this? Or what's the ceremony for that? And he always had to say, I don't know. That was taken from us at Carlyle.

I'm so grateful to him that he didn't just say, I don't know. He said, this was taken from us. So that wound was always present for me. But as a young kid, I remember saying, if there could be schools that are designed to take that away, doesn't that mean there could be schools that are designed to give it back, to bring it back? And so that story has really laid a path for me. So every word of our language that I learn feels like a little piece of healing. And so, yes, the wounds of colonialism, attempted erasure, attempted genocide are at the heart of the book. This is a book about resilience and remembering and recovery as well.

It's, you know, I think really early on in the formation of breeding sweetgrass, I wrote with what seemed hubris at the moment to say, I want this book to be medicine. And it turns out I think it has been. Can you tell me a little bit about when you first realized that the book was starting to take off? Did you hear from readers? How did you come to know? It began for me with letters, with real letters. And I remember the first one. I had a wonderful airmail letter from someone in France. And I thought, what?

Someone in France is reading, braiding sweetgrass and their response of how it helped them love land more. I thought, well, that's just wonderful. I have a reader. And it meant so much to me. It meant so I still have that letter. And boxes of others, of beautiful, handwritten correspondence and emails

and yeah it was at first overwhelming to me I had never any expectation that this book would find a wide audience and so I feel deeply responsible to readers because they share often really intimate stories of awakening of healing of their own

what I would call longing for relationship with place. And so that it fills my heart, but it also sometimes makes my heart heavy, because it's a lot to carry. But I also am buoyed up by the fact that really often those letters come with a celebration of, and guess what I did? I started a community garden. I began a forest preschool. The letter from someone who said,

I work on Wall Street, and I can no longer do so. And I am now moving to the northeast and moving north and starting an organic farm. Hundreds of letters of people who are changing their lives because they were remembering something. they're remembering how they want to live. You know, there's a wonderful moment in your first book gathering moss

where you say that, you know, when you look at moss, moss shouldn't have made it. Moss is small. Moss can't grab onto almost anything, can it, really? Moss has to live in like the little cracks in the fissures, but, you know, it teaches us poignant things right now. You write, and you say that it's about, leaving more than you take, working together and staying small.

And I think you wrote that about 10 years before braiding sweetgrass. I did. Right? And, you know, I think about braiding sweetgrass with its own questions. As you say, you know, you were writing it when your own girls were leaving home, right? It's a book about the culmination of certain kinds of mothering. And I'm wondering here now what sorts of questions are preoccupying you? Are you looking at the moss again? What are you looking at?

First, I want to say that both gathering moss and breeding sweetgrass are works of love for moses, for the world, and in the case of my children leaving is also like an exercise. What am I going to do with all of this love, right? When I don't have to make peanut butter sandwiches, what am I going to? do with all that love. Yeah, you make me cry too. And I'm still in that place. But in a place which now, how to say, you know, the world that I'm so in love with is on the precipice. And so that's what consumes me. How can stories, how can indigenous, knowledge be the medicine that can bring us back from the brink I don't know

that it can be but I'm certainly going to try because that's the gift that's been given to me yeah to me when I think about what will pull us back from the brink is a change in worldview away from this human exceptionalism and into kinship with the living world. If we really felt and understood and embodied kinship with the living world, we wouldn't cause our family to go extinct, right? We wouldn't. And so what I'm trying to do now with another writing project is to try to somehow really connect with readers to the personhood of nature, to the beingness of other species and to really try to write in such a way that creates a wave of ecological compassion.

So that's where my head and heart are. Just the response to your book and the way it has been embraced and recommended. I mean, this is a book that is a success because people were placing it in other people's hands, right? Does that make you feel optimistic? It does. It does. The very fact that people are reading a book about plants, that they're reading a book about plants from an indigenous perspective,

and that people are answering this call of reciprocity. You know, breeding sweetgrass is an invitation, isn't it? It's an invitation into reciprocity to say, what is your gift and how could you get? it to the world and what i'm hearing as i travel and in correspondence i'm hearing this huge yes how i'm experiencing this is a word that you used at the outset and that is of of a kind of remembering i think when when there are audiences of people in tears i think what is this about this is about remembering what it would be like to be nurtured by the earth

and it's like people are deeply lonely for that. And so that gives me a lot of hope that there isn't this emotional response. But, you know, it makes me think about a wonderful prompt that some fellow writers and I used in a conference ones. We said, what do you love too much to lose? We said to the audience. And we said to them, and what are you going to do about? about it. Their list of what do I love too much to lose was endless, endless. And the list of what am I going to do about it was wholly inadequates to the moment. That's Robin Wall Kimmerer, author

of Braiding Sweetgrass, which was released 10 years ago this year. We spoke near her home in upstate New York. I'm Borrow Sagle. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I really enjoyed being with you on the show this week. David Remnick will be back next week. Thank you for listening. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbes of Tune Yards. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Breita Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, Avery Keatley, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabuele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Decker.

And special assistance in the editing of this week's program from Karen Frillman. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.