Covenant of Reciprocity: A Review of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

This article originally appeared in Science for the People Magazine, Volume 26, no. 2, “Ways of Knowing” (Winter 2023/2024).

When Robin Wall Kimmerer received her scientific training in botany, she was immediately confronted by the supposed supremacy of western scientific thought and told that the questions she wanted to answer, informed by her Potawatomi heritage, were “not science.” To walk the science path, she was told, she had to abandon the path of Indigenous knowledge. Eventually, she came to understand how these two ways of knowing are in fact complementary. Merging these two sides of herself gave her a superpower to know the world in multiple ways at once, a perspective which she graciously shares in Braiding Sweetgrass.

Throughout this review, I follow Kimmerer’s use of language referencing specific Indigenous nations and generalizations about Indigenous systems of thought. It is important to emphasize that there is no single, monolithic Indigenous worldview or moral system. Any references to “Indigenous knowledge” or “Indigenous ethics” in the text are intended to reflect the perspective outlined by Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, which I interpret as highlighting broad similarities in how diverse frameworks, primarily those originating in Indigenous nations of the North American continent that Kimmerer refers to, consider nonhuman relations.

Kimmerer patiently and poetically translates between Indigenous knowledge and Western science. A clear example of this is in the chapter on The Three Sisters. In practices of Indigenous agriculture, the three sisters are corn, beans, and squash, planted together in the same spot at the same time. Kimmerer introduces us to these plants like they are old friends. She tells us an accompanying story that emphasizes reciprocity, cooperation, and the importance of sharing one’s unique gifts. Three women came to a village in the depths of a long winter when people were dropping from hunger. One was tall with flowing yellow hair, another was dressed in green, and the third robed in orange. The three came inside to shelter by the fire and the residents generously shared what food they had. In return for this generosity, the three revealed their true identities—corn, beans, and squash—and gave the villagers a bundle of seeds so that they might never go hungry again. But we also learn the more detached, scientific story about why these plants are good companions. Beans fix nitrogen in the soil with the help of the bacteria Rhizobium, the corn stalk provides a trellis for the beans to climb, the leaves of the squash shade the surrounding soil, helping to retain water, and the different root systems of the three plants—one long, one short, one wide—allow room for all three. Regardless of which language we use to describe the three sisters, the result is the same: layers of reciprocal relationships whose whole is greater than the sum of their parts. Here we have a blueprint for the world, says Kimmerer, a map of balance and harmony, each sharing their unique gifts for the benefit of the collective.

Although Braiding Sweetgrass has been celebrated by the biomimicry community, the message here is not merely that we can find inspiration for how to design better airplane wings or water resistant materials by looking at what solutions have evolved in nature.¹ Kimmerer invites us to consider how we orient towards and relate to the plants around us. What do we learn when we approach plants as teachers—as our oldest kin—rather than merely objects of study?

The answer, over and over again, is reciprocity, especially the reciprocal relationships that arise in communities that celebrate individuality for the benefit of the collective, a theme which features prominently in Kimmerer’s positive vision of the future. She envisions a future of science in which the “intellectual monoculture” is replaced by a “polyculture of complementary knowledges” (p. 139), and a future economy driven by gift exchange rather than market exchange. Kimmerer helps the reader to imagine what a gift economy would feel like by recounting a dream. In the dream, she is shopping at her local market, but every time she goes to pay for something, the vendors refuse to accept her money, instead telling her to accept their gifts.

I looked in my basket: two zucchinis, an onion, tomatoes, bread, and a bunch of cilantro. It was still half empty, but it felt full. I had everything I needed. I glanced over at the cheese stall, thinking to get some, but knowing it would be given, not sold, I decided I could do without. It’s funny: Had all the things in the market merely been a very low price, I probably would have scooped up as much as I could. 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. (p. 29)

When we see the food we eat and the water we drink as gifts from nature, it puts us in a particular kind of relation in which we are motivated to reciprocate and give back. The gift relation makes visible that we are a part of and dependent on nature, rather than nature being the source of resources to be extracted. If classical economics is about the management of scarce resources, perhaps Indigenous economics is about sharing abundant gifts.

Kimmerer introduces the reader to Indigenous ethics as she recounts her experience learning the Potawatomi language as an adult. Whereas European languages are noun-based and often assign gender to nouns, Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs and divides both nouns and verbs into animate and inanimate. What would be a single word in English, like the verb to hear, is two separate words in Potawatomi, one for when hearing an animate being, and another for when hearing an inanimate object. But the Potawatomi understanding of what it means to be animate is expansive, including rocks, mountains, water, fire, places, songs, drums, and stories. The Potawatomi language reflects a world filled with life, reserving inanimate words primarily for objects that are made by people. This grammar of animacy, which reminds the speaker of their kinship with the animate world, can be injected into English as well, by referring to the land and all who inhabit it as someones rather than somethings.

Some might protest that this would be anthropomorphism, the error of projecting human-like attributes onto non-humans, a tendency that should be resisted for the sake of objectivity. Here we encounter an incompatibility between Indigenous and Western thought that cannot be bridged. “The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be human” (p. 57). Traditional Western moral thought can be characterized as anthropocentric in that moral agency is defined by proximity to humans. This can be seen in the notion of fundamental human rights or in the ethical standards which govern animal research in Europe, where the burden of justification is larger, and standard of treatment higher, for research involving non-human primates than for other species.² This anthropocentrism is fundamentally incompatible with Indigenous ethics, which might be better described as ecocentric or biocentric.³ For example, an ecocentric worldview is reflected in Ecuador’s current constitution, adopted in 2008, which recognizes the inalienable rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish.⁴ These “Rights of Nature” were written to embody the notion of sumak kawsay (buen vivir in Spanish), rooted in the Indigenous belief system of the Quechua. Kimmerer shows that an anthropocentric worldview is not a prerequisite for doing science and gives us examples of the kind of research questions and research impacts that are possible specifically because of the non-anthropocentric worldview that she and her graduate students share. Anthropomorphism is only a scientific error within an anthropocentric worldview.

The dominance of anthropocentric worldviews has been in the limelight lately with recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI). As artificial systems (like chatbots) become more human-like in their behavior and abilities, it is presented by the media and researchers as if these systems are approaching the pinnacle of intelligence. This is incongruent with an Indigenous worldview, in which humans are seen as “somewhat lesser beings in the democracy of species” (p. 346), the younger sibling that would be wise to learn from their elder relatives. In response to these developments in AI, Indigenous artists and scholars like Suzanne Kite and Jason Edward Lewis are exploring human-machine relationships to build alternative visions of Indigenous futures. In Making Kin with the Machines, Lewis and colleagues argue that Indigenous epistemologies are especially well suited to theorize about ethical human-AI interactions since they already include protocols to respectfully acknowledge the non-human.⁵ The Abundant Intelligences research program continues this line of research to envision AI systems based on Indigenous knowledge systems that serve Indigenous communities. This is an example of exactly the kind of research Kimmerer espouses in the book.

An anthropocentric capitalist environmental ethics portrays the impacts of human consumption on the natural world as a harm to be minimized, suggesting that the best thing for the environment would be for humans to leave it alone. A biocentric ethics, in contrast, encourages involvement and care in reciprocal relationships between humans and nature. This is reflected in Indigenous wisdom cited in the book: “If we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away. If you don’t give it respect it will leave us” (p. 157). In Kimmerer’s experience, her colleagues could not fathom scientific hypotheses about the beneficial impacts of human land use—harvesting a plant could only do harm to a population, they assumed. The book presents two counterexamples from her own research. We learn about the black ash, which was struggling in nearly every tested location except for those near communities of basket makers who harvest them regularly. “Where the tradition of black ash basketry was alive and well, so were the trees” (p. 149). And we learn about the eponymous sweetgrass, which flourishes when harvested and declines when not. Even though half of all stems had been harvested each year, at the end of the year the plots that had been harvested were more populated with healthy grass than the unharvested controls. The Indigenous wisdom held fast under scientific scrutiny.⁶

The final chapters of Braiding Sweetgrass are an indictment of modern materialism, a lament for inaction on climate change, and a call to action. Here, Kimmerer is her most explicitly anti-capitalist, criticizing the artificial scarcity of unregulated markets. She calls instead for an economy of the commons, “wherein resources fundamental to our well-being, like water and land and forests, are commonly held rather than commodified” (p. 376), echoing the Indigenous worldview that the land is a common good to be shared, not to be owned as private property. But changing our economic system will not be enough, she says, unless we also change our relationship to each other and the land. We must appreciate that we are recipients of gifts from the natural world and take on the accompanying responsibility to reciprocate. “Gratitude plants the seed for abundance” (p. 376).

Kimmerer’s passion for science is infectious. She sees science as a way of revealing the beauty of the natural world: “The very facts of the world are a poem” (p. 345). But she’s also highly critical. She is careful to direct her criticism at what she calls the scientific worldview, “in which a culture uses the process of interpreting science in a cultural context that uses science and technology to reinforce reductionist, materialist economic and political agendas” (p. 346), rather than the practice of science, which she presents as compatible with alternative worldviews. She dreams of a future in which it is commonplace for scientific investigation to reflect Indigenous worldviews and for the beauty of the natural world to be shared with all, rather than hoarded by a select few, to develop our collective knowledge and responsibility. “For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring?” (p. 345).

Braiding Sweetgrass is a mind-expanding, heart-filling book, and I am profoundly changed for having read it. But when I reflect on why this book affected me so much, I’ve had the uncomfortable realization that it is partly due to my own internalized white supremacy. I found Kimmerer’s message especially compelling because she spoke my language, that of mainstream science. The book was mind-expanding for me partially because it made clear the complementarity of these two ways of knowing, something that was painfully obvious to someone like Kimmerer, and undoubtedly countless others who don’t see their values and interests reflected in mainstream science. My trust in the Indigenous wisdom she described was bolstered by its confirmation by science. Am I still assigning primacy to scientific thought? Is that the bar, the standard by which I judge other ways of knowing?

Braiding Sweetgrass sheds light on an epistemic injustice wherein institutionalized, Western, scientific knowledge is privileged relative to Indigenous knowledge. This injustice helps to uphold the white supremacist and colonial logics that capitalism relies on to justify the extraction of land, labor, and resources for profit. I was educated and socialized into white supremacist thought to uphold these systems. These same forces underlie the colonial oppression that Kimmerer and her family experienced. Her people were repeatedly violently removed from their lands because these lands were wanted by settlers for their resources. Her grandfather was forced to attend a government boarding school whose stated mission was “Kill the Indian to Save the Man.” This historical oppression is continuous with Kimmerer’s experience in the higher education system where she was told to suppress her Indigenous identity and was celebrated for having “done remarkably well for an Indian girl” (p. 43).

The book is decidedly not academic, despite the fact that it references a variety of complex topics that are within the scope of several academic disciplines. Some readers may be disappointed by the lack of critical theory, but such an analysis was not Kimmerer’s goal. In an interview with The Guardian, she said she wants to write “as an act of reciprocity with the living land . . . People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how it’s a gift.”⁷ She wrote a beautiful, soulful, personal, and accessible book that has reached a huge audience. It has sold more than two million copies worldwide, been translated into twenty languages, and appeared on the New York Times bestseller list the last three years.⁸ Readers from all backgrounds can connect to Kimmerer’s personal stories about balancing her multiple identities as a scientist, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a mother, and a daughter, and experience the kind of transformative revelation that I experienced when reading the book.

Kimmerer shows us science by Indigenous people, for Indigenous people, something we all need more examples of. She inspires awe, reflection, and gratitude. Her story has implications for how we do science, how we respond to the climate and ecological crises, and how we engage with the natural world on a daily basis. In its simplest form, Kimmerer’s message is just to pay attention to plants, but upon closer inspection, this simple instruction has the potential to completely upend one’s worldview. Let us listen to the Three Sisters who taught us that if we use our gifts to take care of each other and work together, all will be fed.