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

That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer.

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

even in a market economy, can we behave “as if ” the living world were a gift?

There is now compelling evidence that our elders were right—the trees are talking to one another. They communicate via pheromones, hormonelike compounds that are wafted on the breeze, laden with meaning.

It is a terrible punishment to be banished from the web of reciprocity, with no one to share with you and no one for you to care for.

There is no shame in working the mines to feed your family—an exchange of hard labor in return for food and shelter—but you want your labor to count for something more.

They weave a web of reciprocity,

I floated through the market with a sense of euphoria. Gratitude was the only currency accepted here. It was all a gift. It was like picking strawberries in my field: the merchants were just intermediaries passing on gifts from the earth.

holds an embryonic copy of a maple branch, and each bud wants desperately to someday be a full-fledged branch, leaves rustling in the wind and soaking up sun. But if the buds come out too soon they’ll be killed by freezing. Too late and they’ll miss the spring. So the buds keep the calendar. But those baby buds need energy for their growth into bra