Highlights

  • So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. (Location 94)
  • PLANTING SWEETGRASS (Location 99)
  • Skywoman Falling (Location 101)
  • When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? (Location 157)
  • One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven. (Location 166)
  • For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it. (Location 195)
  • The Council of Pecans (Location 211)
  • The word pecan—the fruit of the tree known as the pecan hickory (Carya illinoensis) —comes to English from indigenous languages. Pigan is a nut, any nut. (Location 237)
  • In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. (Location 313)
  • Living by the precepts of the Honorable Harvest—to take only what is given, to use it well, to be grateful for the gift, and to reciprocate the gift—is easy in a pecan grove. We reciprocate the gift by taking care of the grove, protecting it from harm, planting seeds so that new groves will shade the prairie and feed the squirrels. (Location 367)
  • The Gift of Strawberries (Location 381)
  • The strawberry arose from her heart. In Potawatomi, the strawberry is ode min, the heart berry. We recognize them as the leaders of the berries, the first to bear fruit. (Location 406)
  • In our family, the presents we gave one another were almost always homemade. I thought that was the definition of a gift: something you made for someone else. We made all our Christmas gifts: piggy banks (Location 416)
  • gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I’ll wear them when she visits even if I don’t like them. When it’s her birthday, I will surely make her a gift in return. As the scholar and writer Lewis Hyde notes, “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.” (Location 445)
  • For the plant to be sacred, it cannot be sold. Reluctant entrepreneurs will get a teaching from Wally, but they’ll never get his money. (Location 461)
  • That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage. The fields made a gift of berries to us and we made a gift of them to our father. The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes. This is hard to grasp for societies steeped in notions of private property, where others are, by definition, excluded from sharing. Practices such as posting land against trespass, for example, are expected and accepted in a property economy but are unacceptable in an economy where land is seen as a gift to all. (Location 466)
  • Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again. (Location 475)
  • In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a “bundle of rights,” whereas in a gift economy property has a “bundle of responsibilities” attached. (Location 478)
  • But when everything became a gift, I felt self-restraint. I didn’t want to take too much. And I began thinking of what small presents I might bring to the vendors tomorrow. (Location 496)
  • know we cannot all become hunter-gatherers—the living world could not bear our weight—but even in a market economy, can we behave “as if ” the living world were a gift? (Location 524)
  • Water is a gift for all, not meant to be bought and sold. Don’t buy (Location 527)
  • all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become. (Location 535)
  • The commodity economy has been here on Turtle Island for four hundred years, eating up the white strawberries and everything else. But people have grown weary of the sour taste in their mouths. A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts. I can scent it coming, like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze. (Location 540)
  • An Offering (Location 543)
  • public names and true names. True names are used only by intimates and in ceremony. My father had been on Tahawus’s summit many times and knew it well enough to call it by name, speaking with intimate knowledge of the place and the people who came before. (Location 564)
  • 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. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist. (Location 615)
  • Asters and Goldenrod (Location 618)
  • The questions scientists raised were not “Who are you? ” but “What is it?” No one asked plants, “What can you tell us?” The primary question was “How does it work?” The botany I was taught was reductionist, mechanistic, and strictly objective. Plants were reduced to objects; (Location 663)
  • But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer. Why two flowers are beautiful together would violate the division necessary for objectivity. (Location 675)
  • The botanist looks at him appraisingly, surprised by his capacity. “Well, well, young man, you certainly know the names of a lot of these plants.” The guide nods and replies with downcast eyes. “Yes, I have learned the names of all the bushes, but I have yet to learn their songs.” I was teaching the names and ignoring the songs. (Location 686)
  • Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit. I came (Location 742)
  • Science and art, matter and spirit, indigenous knowledge and Western science—can they be goldenrod and asters for each other? When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response. (Location 750)
  • Learning the Grammar of Animacy (Location 752)
  • To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language. (Location 753)
  • Puhpowee, she explained, translates as “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” As (Location 769)
  • But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed. (Location 772)
  • The powers of assimilation did their work as my chance of hearing that language, and yours too, was washed from the mouths of Indian children in government boarding schools where speaking your native tongue was forbidden. (Location 779)
  • people do not learn, the language will die. The missionaries and the U.S. government will have their victory at last.” (Location 793)
  • Stewart King, a knowledge keeper and great teacher, reminds us, the Creator meant for us to laugh, so humor is deliberately built into the syntax. Even a small slip of the tongue can convert “We need more firewood” to “Take off your clothes.” (Location 848)
  • A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But (Location 866)
  • “Look, it is making soup. It has gray hair.” We might snicker at such a mistake, but we also recoil from it. In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of self hood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family. (Location 874)
    1. In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. (Location 880)
  • Yawe—the animate to be. I am, you are, s/he is. To speak of those possessed with life and spirit we must say yawe. By what linguistic confluence do Yahweh of the Old Testament and yawe of the New World both fall from the mouths of the reverent? Isn’t this just what it means, to be, to have the breath of life within, to be the offspring of Creation? The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world. English doesn’t (Location 884)
  • as ecotheologian Thomas Berry has written, “we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” (Location 897)
  • Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.” If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice. (Location 906)
  • The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human. (Location 913)
  • TENDING SWEETGRASS (Location 935)
  • Maple Sugar Moon (Location 937)
  • His teachings remind us that one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation. It is our work, and our gratitude, that distills the sweetness. (Location 1044)
  • Witch Hazel (Location 1066)
  • It came to me once again that restoring a habitat, no matter how well intentioned, produces casualties. We set ourselves up as arbiters of what is good when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests, by what we want. (Location 1378)
  • Among our Potawatomi people, women are the Keepers of Water. We carry the sacred water to ceremonies and act on its behalf. “Women have a natural bond with water, because we are both life bearers,” my sister said. “We carry our babies in internal ponds and they come forth into the world on a wave of water. It is our responsibility to safeguard the water for all our relations.” Being a good mother includes the caretaking of water. (Location 1411)
  • The Consolation of Water Lilies (Location 1466)
  • Allegiance to Gratitude (Location 1562)
  • Many Native peoples across the world, despite myriad cultural differences, have this in common—we are rooted in cultures of gratitude. (Location 1587)
  • the Thanksgiving Address, a river of words as old as the people themselves, known more accurately in the Onondaga language as the Words That Come Before All Else. (Location 1594)
  • We are thankful to our Mother the Earth, for she gives us everything that we need for life. She supports our (Location 1609)
  • feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she still continues to care for us, just as she has from the beginning of time. To our Mother, we send thanksgiving, love, and respect. Now our minds are one. (Location 1610)
  • We give thanks to all of the waters of the world for quenching our thirst, for providing strength and nurturing life for all beings. We know its power in many (Location 1618)
  • forms—waterfalls and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans, snow and ice. We are grateful that the waters are still here and meeting their responsibility to the rest of Creation. Can we agree that water is important to our lives and bring our minds together as one to send greetings and thanks to the Water? Now our minds are one. (Location 1619)
  • We turn our thoughts to all of the Fish life in the water. They were instructed to cleanse and purify the water. They also give themselves to us as food. We are grateful that they continue to do their duties and we send to the Fish our greetings and our thanks. Now our minds are one. (Location 1625)
  • the Thanksgiving Address without feeling wealthy. And, while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. (Location 1666)
  • pledge of interdependence? (Location 1688)
  • “Can we agree to be grateful for all that is given?” (Location 1689)
  • Not surprisingly, Haudenosaunee decision-making proceeds from consensus, not by a vote of the majority. A decision is made only “when our minds are one.” (Location 1705)
  • Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them. (Location 1734)
  • The Thanksgiving Address reminds us that duties and gifts are two sides of the same coin. (Location 1737)
  • If what we want for our people is patriotism, then let us inspire true love of country by invoking the land herself. (Location 1755)
  • PICKING SWEETGRASS (Location 1763)
  • Epiphany in the Beans (Location 1765)
  • This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone. (Location 1790)
  • “Do you think that the earth loves you back?” (Location 1816)
  • “What do you suppose would happen if people believed this crazy notion that the earth loved them back?” (Location 1819)
  • Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond. (Location 1821)
  • People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, “Plant a garden.” (Location 1850)
  • The Three Sisters (Location 1855)
  • But the beauty of the partnership is that each plant does what it does in order to increase its own growth. But as it happens, when the individuals flourish, so does the whole. (Location 1951)
  • Wisgaak Gokpenagen: A Black Ash Basket (Location 2052)
  • Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass (Location 2286)