Dr. Grauer's Column - Teaching and Braiding Sweetgrass

Teaching and Braiding Sweetgrass

A few years ago, I was on the Navajo Indian land with some students and there, in a gift shop, was where I first noticed a book called “Braiding Sweetgrass”. I thought “huh?” and that was that.

I saw it again a couple of years ago at a writer’s conference in Northern California, my eyes lit on it and I formulated a slight impulse like, “Nah—chick book.” Yea, I really do have ridiculous and immature images that jump in and out of my mind like that. But I flipped through it a little anyway, read a few phrases, and thought, “Huh!”

Then last year, I was at UCSD and there in the bookshop this same book winked at me again, and so, half reluctantly, I purchased it.

It sat on my nightstand for a few months. I was just coming off reading Tommy Orange’s amazing and troubling native American novel “There, There”, and Richard Powers’ powerful novel, “The Overstory”, where the trees are somehow among the main characters. I guess it was sitting in the right place in my house, and it winked at me again and, without thinking, I started into the first chapter, called “Skywoman Falling,” slightly reluctantly.

The opening line of “Braiding Sweetgrass” is, 

“In winter, when the green earth lies resting beneath a blanket of snow, this is the time for storytelling.”

There was no denying the perfection of that opener. And by midchapter, when the author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, tells us that we are ALL capable of becoming indigenous again, I was in total agreement: “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 upon it.” I knew, without doubt, that this was exactly my work at our school, this was my work as a teacher: to become indigenous to our school.

The first few pages of any book are often hardest for me, as I burrow into its world, and I burrowed hard until last line of that opening chapter:

“The plants can tell us their story, we need to learn to listen.”

I thought, Huh!” and “Yes!,” and dove into the next chapter. But I think my main reason for continuing on was my thought, “Lucky chapter! She could never do that again!”

But she did it again. “Wow!” And again.

I want to say that not only is "Braiding Sweetgrass" uncanny, and that it brilliantly braids together the science expertise of a seasoned botany professor with the wisdom and spiritualty of a Native American elder, with the craft of a master writer, but that this is one of the greatest masterpieces I have ever experienced reading. Having every single person in the Grauer community read this book would bestow one of the loveliest blessings upon our school that I can think of.

The next chapter is a lyrical and essential dive into the horrific phase of American history where Native American children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools so that their entire culture, language, and spirit might be expunged. In my mind, this should be required reading for anyone who would be a teacher. I want our teachers to study this, again and again, to understand the perennial efforts schools make to turn everything into an anthropocentric hierarchy, and I want for them to be stunned and humbled at the ways Native American spiritualists/teachers are attempting to restore ancient circles of ceremony that have the power of reuniting us all like mycorrhizal networks, fungal strands that connect the trees trunks beneath our feet, a slow intelligence humans grew to ignore while we grew entranced with our wild egos, until the age of pandemic woke us up. I hope we are waking up.

Obviously, these are problems that have been concerning me for a long time as an educator, and I believe a circle has been broken in education for a long time. As the legendary musician Taj Mahal described it just today, “What was destroyed was the connection between our ancestors and what was supposed to be received by us.” [1]  Isn’t that the connection that education is supposed to make? I always try to avoid flighty, new age, impractical solutions and philosophies, I had wrongly suspected this of "Braiding Sweetgrass", and so the book had to win not just my heart but my mind.

For me, each chapter continued blending the botany lessons with the ancestral wisdom, with the writer’s craft, and ending in revelations: “Dang, she did it again!” Halfway through the book, I was still thinking, “No way can she keep this up,” but she did, and I would not allow myself to read more than a chapter at a sitting because savoring each one was defining my summer as it turned into early spring.

We were in the thick of a pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, the President of the US was sending out erratic and divisive riddles as guidance, most of the nation's school campuses had been closed down, and in increments, Kimmerer was showing me and all of us no less than how to survive.

Midway through the book is the chapter called, “The Sound of Silverbells,” and there I read the whack-on-the-side-of-the-head lines, “I didn’t understand how one could be a biologist without being able to see the land, to know natural history and the elegant flow of natural forces. The earth is so richly endowed that the least we can do in return is to pay attention.” I simply could not imagine better instructions to any teacher or student. And I had to change the name of the chapter then because I knew the truth: we have invented an educational system that instructs us what to think about with no regard to what the miraculous human brain can see and feel and care about: “I knew that I had failed to teach the kind of science that I had longed for as a young student seeking the secret of Asters and Goldenrod, a science deeper than data … against my prejudices, I’d worn a white lab coat into the wilderness.”

I renamed that chapter, “On Teaching.” She was taking us into big questions: Why do we need ceremony and science, together? What’s so beautiful about the world? Can a story matter? “If plants are our oldest teachers, why not let them teach?” Kimmerer wrote. I sent away for five copies and started giving them to the first people I saw. I will buy you one. I am still amazed.

The ancients told us: A teacher comes when you are ready. It took me a couple of years to get ready for Kimmerer. It was a hard and exhausting time then. At that point, the reality of the natural world had become record-breaking heatwaves and million-acre wildfires consuming California; it was a time of human sheltering in place, isolation and pandemic fear, and the phrase “I can’t breathe” came to mean some heartbreaking things. Most of our teachers were busy moving classes outdoors. We were replacing classroom desks with a much older, more efficient configuration—the circle—and we were using our indoor ceilings less and tree canopies more. We were integrating gardening into more classes. I finished this chapter on teaching, went into the school, and started building our treehouse classroom.

Reading Kimmerer, I grew more aware of my own challenges as an educator who had not done enough in celebration of discovery or of the natural world, or in teaching the ancient wisdom and the indigenous environmental philosophies that are sustainable. As a teacher, it is easy to keep our students busy codifying and categorizing but not seeing, experiencing and wondering. Kimmerer’s work is the incredibly well-documented evidence to every educator in the world, evidence that just as easily could have come from Einstein, that “It wasn’t the naming the source of wonder that mattered, it was the wonder itself.”

[1] Banjo Studio Podcast Episode 17, March 4, 2021

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