Reviews with content warning for Fire/Fire injury - Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

This book made me deeply reflect on my own life and the ways that I interact with nature. I hope it changed me for the better. I also was pleasantly surprised to see how narrative-based this book was. It made the read faster and more interesting. And Kimmerer’s language is so beautiful, while maintaining a simplicity that kept everything easy to understand. Especially to hear it in her own voice, I felt like I was floating along these words.

Content Warnings

dhiyanah's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

There's a profound heaviness we feel about our collective wounds and responsibilities in how the planet is changing, suffering, and asking for help during these times. I'm grateful this book doesn't shy away from that, giving language to the overwhelm we're navigating, tracing it back to our ruptured connection with land and the patterns upheld to keep us in constant states of struggle, survival, and forgetfulness.

By sharing her lived experiences in reclaiming, remembering, and honoring practices kept alive by her own and other indigenous lineages (US-based), the author invites us to reflect on our own capacities and efforts of being in right relationship with the living world. In this book, I found reflections of how my own struggles of unbelonging and loneliness are linked to a sense of feeling orphaned from land, from wider community. I found deep queries and burning desires within me - not having much framework for being local to anywhere - to embody a more reciprocal and grounded approach to the natural world, to this planet who still feeds and tends to us through all this chaos.

For this and so much more, I feel this is a crucial read to help situate and cultivate hope, courage, and determination within as we journey through these giant waves of grief and renewal with our Mother Earth.

Content Warnings

waybeyondblue's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

Content Warnings

talonsontypewriters's review against another edition

Go to review page

hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

5.0

Content Warnings

nodogsonthemoon's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

Content Warnings

katte's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

5.0

Non-fiction. What an incredible, spiritual journey this book was. I read it via audiobook, which was narrated by the author herself. Robin Wall Kimmerer shares so much of her scientific knowledge and her cultural teachings that I found it impossible to not want to do something in return (especially given the subject of her book!) My takeaway will be figuring out the reciprocity I can partake in towards her for these generous teachings, and the rest of the world, moving forward. Her writing is absolutely beautiful but so thought provoking and deep I could finish a session of a chapter or two and have to mull it over for weeks. It is a little overwhelming to think that she published this book in 2013 - almost ten years ago now - and was talking about approaching (or perhaps surpassing) the climate change tipping point even then. This book has changed me in a way I can’t yet describe, but I know it is for the better. Absolutely recommend the audiobook for accurate pronunciations of the Indigenous languages she writes about.

Content Warnings

More...