Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall-Kimmerer
The Real-Quick Rundown
Title: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Genre / Vibe: Nonfiction / Botanical spiritual sermon meets Indigenous ecological memoir
Page Count / Time Commitment: 390+ pages / Savor over weeks with tea, tears, and highlighters
Published: 2013 (but eternal tbh)
Read It How: Audio book and paperback, Listening to the gospel and underlining like a woman possessed
Rating: 10 out of 5 ancestral seed bundles
Personal Take: I can’t believe it took me so long to read! This is my new Bible. It felt like Robin was putting words to my beliefs. My body, my breath, and my work all feel different after reading it.
What’s It About (No Spoilers, Promise)
Robin Wall Kimmerer—a mother, scientist, teacher, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation—invites us to reimagine our relationship with the natural world through stories, science, and ceremony.
Part memoir, part ecological manifesto, part Indigenous offering, Braiding Sweetgrass is rooted in reciprocity: what the land gives us, and what we must give back.
This isn’t a book you consume—it’s a book you enter into relationship with.
First Stitch
From the first page, I knew this wasn’t just about plants. This was about belonging. About remembering a language I never knew I was fluent in.
Kimmerer doesn’t just write—she tends. Every chapter feels like a hand on your shoulder, a prayer in your palm, a seed under your tongue.
What I Loved
The weaving of Indigenous knowledge + Western science without dilution
Stories that are oral tradition—tender, powerful, necessary
The emphasis on reciprocity over extraction
Clear-eyed grief for colonialism’s scars without letting it swallow the beauty of what endures
The way it re-centered humility, gratitude, and kinship as essential technologies of survival
“The land knows you, even when you are lost.”
Yas Sis!
What Missed the Mark
Honestly? Nothing. This book wasn’t written to hit every demographic's expectations. It was written as an offering, a braid. You show up to it, not the other way around.
Themes, Threads, & Thought Spirals
This book is about relationship—with land, with memory, with language, with future generations. It’s about how healing doesn’t happen through domination or data, but through ceremony, story, and responsibility.
“All flourishing is mutual.”
Other threads that hit me like lightning:
Potawatomi language as resistance and revival
Sweetgrass as both plant and prayer
Grief for lost homelands—and hope in rematriation
Science that listens instead of controls
Gratitude as a radical act in capitalism’s chokehold
This is the book that made me want to compost deeper, listen harder, and say thank you before I take anything.
Who’s Gonna Love This?
Anyone working to decolonize their environmentalism
People who cry over trees and call their houseplants “babies”
Scientists with soft hearts
Artists, herbalists, gardeners, knitters, and kin
Readers craving reconnection—with the earth, their ancestors, and themselves
One Line That Slapped
“What would it be like to be raised by a country, to wake up each morning and step outside into a ready-made world?”
Unraveled me.
Final Take
Braiding Sweetgrass didn’t just reconnect me to how I see the world—it changed how I move through it. How I craft, how I create, how I offer myself back to the earth I’m made from.
This is a sacred text. A love letter. A roadmap.
If you’ve ever felt your body grieve a felled tree, or thanked your yarn before casting on, or whispered “I’m listening” to the wind—this book is your home.
5 out of 5 prayer bundles.
Read it slowly. Then read it again.
Have you read this one? What did it give back to you? Drop a 🌾 if it lives in your spirit now too.
