Robin Wall Kimmerer: What is nature teaching us that we’re too distracted to see?

Yeah, and I wanna come back to this topic of our attention and what's happening to our attention, particularly with regard to nature.

Um, but one of the things that I'm curious about is about the relationship to the land itself, and you have this beautiful passage in Braiding Sweetgrass that I, I just wanna read because it is, um, I think it captures this, uh, very powerfully.

It's about children, language, and lands, and you say, "Almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren't looking because you were trying to stay alive.

In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land.

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 non-human kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library.

The source of our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground.

It belonged to itself.

It was a gift, not a commodity, so could never be bought and sold.

These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places." It was such a powerful passage, and it really hit me that we have a deeper history and heritage of relationship to land than I think we are experiencing in our day-to-day lives today.

And, and can you say more about how this knowledge, this understanding of what the land means in its fullest, fullest sense, like how was that passed on to you? And I'm curious also how you've gone about passing it on to your children and grandchildren.

Yeah.

Thank you for reading that passage because to me it captures this fundamental difference between the indigenous worldview and, and a settler worldview that thought of land as, as, as property, capital, natural resources, um, but was somehow devoid of the sacred, of, of the connection to the healing, the teaching of, of, of the land.

And those meanings and values were certainly imparted to me by my family, um, by, by inspiring authors, by Potawatomi community and-- But I want to say that they were also shared with me by the land herself.

If you have a deep engagement with, with the land, you know, drinking from, from a, a creek and picking berries and making firewood and, and, you know, being on your knees in, in the meadow looking at whoever else is living there, the land teaches you that.

Um, our, our culture, our stories, our families help give us the language for that, but I think it is engagement with the land that, that lets you know.

I, I think to your point too, to feel that from the land, we have to be paying attention in a sense and we-- and that's-- it's not just about time.

I think it's about attention and it feels like today our attention is so fractured and we may be around nature, but we're not paying attention to nature.

We may be paying attention to our screens, um, and we may not be around nature at all if we're, you know, in a, in a cubicle or in a building all day long.

And I- I'm just curious how you think about this issue of attention, the fracturing of attention, and how is it impacting how we connect with nature, and how do we get it back?

You know, as a, as a preamble to answering this question about attention, which is at the heart of the matter-

Mm.

I think that it's also about back to our perception of what land is and what land means.

We can pay attention, but without the assumption, if you will, without the lens that the land is alive, that the land has agency, that the land is not some thing, but someone-

Mm.