Braiding Sweetgrass

This year, the annual gathering brought together speakers like Ken Burns, Kara Swisher, and Stacey Abrams to reflect on themes of democracy as America turned 250 years old.

In this final installment of our series, Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, contemplates how to reshape society's relationship with the natural world.

She's joined in conversation by Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson.

This talk was recorded in front of a live audience on July 29, 2026, and has been edited for broadcast.

And it is blueberry season.

here in Maine, you didn't know, now you know.

And Robin, berries star in two of your books, very strongly in Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry.

So I thought I would just kick off this session by sharing my extremely hot take, which is that strawberries are wildly overrated.

yes we got a lot there yeah so that's the pirate queen by ariel lohan Yeah.

And then I do want to say thanks to Eeyore122 for the recommendation for braiding sweetgrass.

Monica is good to send me the Ravelry comments.

I own a copy of it, and I haven't gotten into it.

But it's awesome.

And then the next book we're going to do, we're currently reading Braiding Sweetgrass, which I don't know if you've read that one by Robin Kimmermer.

It's one of my favorite books, who is an indigenous writer.

And it's part memoir.

It's a bit different.

It's Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

And it's nonfiction.

But it's all about... like ancestral knowledge and indigenous like wisdom relating to nature and like the land and the way that people lived um so the author is uh indigenous american and she I feel like is like a botanist as well.

So the journey from soul medicine and adding practices that help participants to engage in nature, nature meditations, exploring themes that have been taught and knowledge systems that preceded the colonial culture in which we live, to approach nature as a living, animated, world of wisdom with what could be called medicines without wanting to co-opt that but having been exposed to indigenous teachers and elders myself realizing what a terrible loss has happened in considering the natural

world to be a noun and not a verb and that comes directly from Robin Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass where she speaks of how indigenous languages have so many nuances and are very animistic.

They animate the organic world.

There is not a single entity in the organic world that isn't given the place of verb, a process, a right of being, as opposed to a thing or an it.

There is no philosophical space left for something that can treat and address and interact a medical competency, let's say, with that intangible in people's healthcare lives.

journeys with their physicians treating their illness.

There's a beautiful quote I can offer from Thomas Hacking, a phrase he used, and he wrote a book called Rewriting the Soul, tracking how the psychiatric sciences emerged in the 18th century and after about a hundred years when the notion of embodied soul met a dead end in medical practices.

So the notion of an embodied soul that's treated by physicians and an aspect of the medical arts of healing completely dead-ended after the Descartian shift when Descartes came up with his philosophy of the mind as a superior aspect of the whole person and the body being a subsidiary that is directed by the mind.

And I appreciate my place in all things more.

Like I love, I know you and I have often talked about the book Braiding Sweetgrass or The Serviceberry.

One of the things I love about all of her work is sort of her indigenizing to place concept.

And that part of our responsibility as humans, who I would say, I don't know how she would phrase it, but I would say we are profoundly disjointed in our relationship to our lived reality.

Uh, she is a writer and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

Her books include Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, as well as, more recently, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World.

She is a SUNY, State University of New York, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, where she also founded and is the Director Emeritus of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

In this conversation, we discuss her journey of learning through plants, from the three sisters of corn, beans, and squash, to mosses in boreal forests.

We need to scale it down to relationships with our homeplaces.

Because when you know your homeplace, when you know the soil, when you are invested in that soil because it's got to feed your great-grandchildren as well as you, you have a very different relationship with, with land that can lead us to a, an enduringly sustainable future.

On these issues, um, you're, you're a very well-known author on the two books I mentioned.

You've written other books as well.