Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

To have agency in the world, ceremonies should be reciprocal cocreations, organic in nature, in which the community creates ceremony and the ceremony creates communities.

Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable. Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm.

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.

The squash creates the ethical habitat for coexistence and mutual flourishing. I envision a time when the intellectual monoculture of science will be replaced with a polyculture of complementary knowledges. And so all may be fed.

A person can live well on a diet of beans and corn; neither alone would suffice. But neither beans nor corn have the vitamins that squash provide in their carotene-rich flesh. Together, they are once again greater than alone.

By virtue of their nitrogen-fixing capacity, beans are high in protein and fill in the nutritional gaps left by corn.

All summer, the corn turns sunshine into carbohydrate, so that all winter, people can have food energy.

That nitrogen should be the factor that limits growth is an ecological paradox: fully 78 percent of the atmosphere is nitrogen gas. The problem is that most plants simply can’t use atmospheric nitrogen. They need mineral nitrogen, nitrate or ammonium. The nitrogen in the atmosphere might as well be food locked away in full sight of a starving perso

The glossy bean is speckled brown, curved and sleek, its inner belly marked with a white eye—the hilum. It slides like a polished stone between my thumb and forefinger, but this is no stone. And there is a pumpkin seed like an oval china dish, its edge crimped shut like a piecrust bulging with filling. I hold in my hand the genius of indigenous agr