Tom's Life Bits

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====== Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants ======

//Kimmerer, Robin Wall//

**Planting Sweetgrass**

Learning the Grammar of Animacy
mastered the kindergarten vocabulary and can confidently match the pictures of animals to their indigenous names . It reminds me of reading picture books to my children : “ Can you point to the squirrel ? Where is the bunny ? ” All the while I’m telling myself that I really don’t have time for this ,
Highlight (yellow) - Learning the Grammar of Animacy > Page 52 · Location 867
An admiring student once asked me if I spoke my native language . I was tempted to say , “ Oh yes , we speak Potawatomi at home ” — me , the dog , and the Post - it notes .
Highlight (yellow) - Learning the Grammar of Animacy > Page 53 · Location 877
To learn again , you really have to listen .
Highlight (yellow) - Learning the Grammar of Animacy > Page 53 · Location 879
things . Only 30 percent of English words are verbs , but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70 percent .
Highlight (pink) - Learning the Grammar of Animacy > Page 54 · Location 890
the mystical word Puhpowee is used not only for mushrooms , but also for certain other shafts that rise mysteriously in the night .
Highlight (yellow) - Learning the Grammar of Animacy > Page 55 · Location 921
In Potawatomi 101 , rocks are animate , as are mountains and water and fire and places .
Highlight (yellow) - Learning the Grammar of Animacy > Page 56 · Location 925
To speak of those possessed with life and spirit we must say yawe .
Highlight (yellow) - Learning the Grammar of Animacy > Page 56 · Location 929
Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it , or it must be gendered , inappropriately , as a he or a she .
Highlight (yellow) - Learning the Grammar of Animacy > Page 56 · Location 937
“ we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects , not a collection of objects . ”
Highlight (yellow) - Learning the Grammar of Animacy > Page 57 · Location 954
The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate , to be worthy of respect and moral concern , is to be a human .
Highlight (yellow) - Learning the Grammar of Animacy > Page 58 · Location 969
When Crow caws at me from the hedgerow , I can call back Mno gizhget andushukwe ! I can brush my hand over the soft grasses and murmur Bozho mishkos . It’s a small thing , but it makes me happy .
Tending Sweetgrass
Highlight (orange) - Maple Sugar Moon > Page 63 · Location 984
live . Instead of seeing piles of firewood and caches of corn , he found the people lying beneath maple trees with their mouths wide open , catching the thick , sweet syrup of the generous trees . They had become lazy and took for granted the gifts of the Creator .
Highlight (yellow) - Maple Sugar Moon > Page 65 · Location 1014
Maples have a far more sophisticated system for detecting spring than we do . There are photosensors by the hundreds in every single bud , packed with light - absorbing pigments called phytochromes .
Highlight (yellow) - A Mother’s Work > Page 86 · Location 1348
The best swimming lakes are not eutrophic , but cold , clear , and oligotrophic , or poor in nutrients .
Highlight (yellow) - A Mother’s Work > Page 87 · Location 1360
dissolved nutrients that flocculate in specks
Highlight (yellow) - Allegiance to Gratitude > Page 111 · Location 1746
The Thanksgiving Address reminds you that you already have everything you need . Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction ; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity , subverting the foundation of the whole economy . That’s good medicine for land and people alike .
Highlight (yellow) - Allegiance to Gratitude > Page 116 · Location 1833
Let us pledge reciprocity with the living world . The Thanksgiving Address describes our mutual allegiance as human delegates to the democracy of species . If what we want for our people is patriotism , then let us inspire true love of country by invoking the land herself .
Picking Sweetgrass
Highlight (yellow) - Epiphany in the Beans > Page 126 · Location 1946
A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection ,
Note - The Three Sisters > Page 129 · Location 1964
A sculpture is just a piece of rock with topography hammered out and chiseled in, but that piece of rock can open your heart in a way that makes you different for having seen it.
Highlight (yellow) - The Three Sisters > Page 129 · Location 1971
the genius of indigenous agriculture , the Three Sisters . Together these plants — corn , beans , and squash — feed the people , feed the land , and feed our imaginations , telling us how we might live .
Highlight (yellow) - The Three Sisters > Page 134 · Location 2052
The way of the Three Sisters reminds me of one of the basic teachings of our people . The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world .
Highlight (yellow) - Wisgaak Gokpenagen: A Black Ash Basket > Page 148 · Location 2278
“ use it up , wear it out , make it do , or do without ”
Highlight (yellow) - Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass > Page 158 · Location 2449
an experiment is a kind of conversation with plants : I have a question for them , but since we don’t speak the same language , I can’t ask them directly and they won’t answer verbally .
Highlight (yellow) - Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass > Page 158 · Location 2452
That’s kind of like Columbus claiming to have discovered America . It was here all along , it’s just that he didn’t know it .
Highlight (yellow) - Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass > Page 165 · Location 2567
sustainable harvesting can be the way we treat a plant with respect , by respectfully receiving its gift .
Braiding Sweetgrass
Highlight (yellow) - In the Footsteps of Nanabozho:Becoming Indigenous to Place > Page 210 · Location 3250
But true to the circle of time , science and technology are starting to catch up with Native science by adopting the Nanabozho approach — looking to nature for models of design , by the architects of biomimicry .
Highlight (yellow) - The Sound of Silverbells > Page 218 · Location 3360
The biologist Paul Ehrlich called ecology “ the subversive science ” for its power to cause us to reconsider the place of humans in the natural world .
Highlight (yellow) - The Sound of Silverbells > Page 222 · Location 3440
A teacher comes , they say , when you are ready . And if you ignore its presence , it will speak to you more loudly . But you have to be quiet to hear .
Highlight (yellow) - Burning Cascade Head > Page 250 · Location 3902
To have agency in the world , ceremonies should be reciprocal co - creations , organic in nature , in which the community creates ceremony and the ceremony creates communities .
Highlight (orange) - Putting Down Roots > Page 265 · Location 4135
How surreal it seems that Carlisle has earned a reputation in America for fervent preservation of its heritage , while in Indian Country the name is a chilling emblem of a heritage killer .
Highlight (yellow) - Putting Down Roots > Page 266 · Location 4153
I can take the buried stone from my heart and plant it here , restoring land , restoring culture , restoring myself .
Highlight (yellow) - Old-Growth Children > Page 279 · Location 4344
so came the cedar coffin . The first and last embrace of a human being was in the arms of Mother Cedar .
Highlight (yellow) - Old-Growth Children > Page 280 · Location 4352
They are not the tallest , but their enormous buttressed waistlines can be fifty feet in circumference , rivaling the girth of the redwoods .
Highlight (yellow) - Old-Growth Children > Page 284 · Location 4426
In five hundred years we exterminated old - growth cultures and old - growth ecosystems , replacing them with opportunistic culture .
Highlight (yellow) - Old-Growth Children > Page 287 · Location 4472
Human time is not the same as forest time . But
Burning Sweetgrass
Highlight (yellow) - Windigo Footprints > Page 307 · Location 4745
Below us was the snarling town ringed with rainbow - colored lagoons of petrochemical waste , too many to count . The footprints of the Windigo .
Highlight (yellow) - Windigo Footprints > Page 307 · Location 4751
complicit . We’ve allowed the “ market ” to define what we value so that the redefined common good seems to depend on profligate lifestyles that enrich the sellers while impoverishing the soul and the earth .
Highlight (yellow) - Windigo Footprints > Page 308 · Location 4761
It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger , when it is belonging that we crave .
Highlight (yellow) - Windigo Footprints > Page 308 · Location 4766
The consumption - driven mind - set masquerades as “ quality of life ” but eats us from within . It is as if we’ve been invited to a feast , but the table is laid with food that nourishes only emptiness , the black hole of the stomach that never fills . We have unleashed a monster .
Highlight (yellow) - The Sacred and the Superfund > Page 336 · Location 5207
sweetgrass is a teacher of healing , a symbol of kindness and compassion . She reminded me that it is not the land that has been broken , but our relationship to it .
Highlight (yellow) - The Sacred and the Superfund > Page 337 · Location 5235
Fear and loathing , our internal Haunted Hayride — the worst parts of our nature are all here on the lakeshore .
Highlight (yellow) - People of Corn, People of Light > Page 345 · Location 5356
wood . It is not more data that we need for our transformation to people of corn , but more wisdom .
Highlight (yellow) - People of Corn, People of Light > Page 346 · Location 5376
What if Western scientists saw plants as their teachers rather than their subjects ? What if they told stories with that lens ?
Highlight (yellow) - People of Corn, People of Light > Page 347 · Location 5387
Language is our gift and our responsibility . I’ve come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land . Words to remember old stories , words to tell new ones , stories that bring science and spirit back together to nurture our becoming people made of corn .
Epilogue: Returning the Gift
Highlight (yellow) - Page 383 · Location 5969
In Potawatomi , we speak of the land as emingoyak : that which has been given to us . In English , we speak of the land as “ natural resources ” or “ ecosystem services , ” as if the lives of other beings were our property . As if the earth were not a bowl of berries , but an open pit mine , and the spoon a gouging shovel .

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