Section 3: Picking Sweetgrass

Summary

This middle section of Braiding Sweetgrass opens with “Epiphany in the Beans,” a chapter set in Kimmerer’s home garden. She describes the relationship between herself and the land as one of love, a label she defends by noting the many similarities to love between human beings. Weeding, watering, pruning, and the like are, Kimmerer suggests, ways of expressing love—and the simplest thing one can do to “restore relationship between land and people” is to plant a garden. 

“The Three Sisters” explains both the biology and the symbolism of the Three Sisters agricultural technique, in which corn, beans, and squash are planted alongside one another. The corn provides a natural trellis for the beans, which enrich the soil by recruiting nitrogen-fixing bacteria. The squash plant, with its broad leaves and bristly stems, keeps the soil from losing its moisture and hinders pests and rival plants. For Kimmerer, this relationship is a model of the kind of mutual thriving that can also exist in human families and communities—and between humans and nature. 

In “Wisgaak Gokpenagen: A Black Ash Basket,” Kimmerer recounts her visit to a family of traditional Potawatomi basket makers. She notes how these craftspeople painstakingly choose the best trees for their work and avoid wasting any material from the trees they fell. Ecological studies of black ash habitats, Kimmerer notes, have found that the basket makers actually benefit the trees by thinning the forest just enough to allow new growth. 

“Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass” is written in the section-by-section form of a scientific article. Here, Kimmerer describes traditional sweetgrass harvesting practices and remarks on the decline of sweetgrass in some of its historic habitats. She tells of an experiment she and a student of hers conducted to see whether a particular method of harvesting was causing undue harm. They found that sustainable harvesting encouraged the grass to grow more fully, whereas not harvesting it at all made the grass languish. This, Kimmerer points out, clashes with the commonplace view that leaving wild plants alone is the most ecologically sound way to behave. 

The chapter “Maple Nation: A Citizenship Guide” begins at the local gas station in Kimmerer’s small town in upstate New York. An overheard discussion about town council business prompts Kimmerer to think about what civic-mindedness looks like on an ecological scale. She visits the sugar house, where syrup is being made, and reflects on her place in “Maple Nation,” as she dubs the region of the Northeast where maple trees abound. 

“The Honorable Harvest” raises and examines a question that appears throughout Braiding Sweetgrass: how can human beings take from the land in an honorable, sustainable fashion? Gathering wild leeks, Kimmerer muses that since people cannot photosynthesize, they necessarily rely on other lives to sustain their own. She describes attempts to live out the ideals of the Honorable Harvest in herb gathering, deer hunting, and even fur trapping. Visiting her local mall for stationery, she observes that some places are openly hostile to these ideals. 

Analysis

Picking sweetgrass is a form of taking, and this section dives into the issue of how one can take from the land mindfully and sustainably. In “Wisgaak Gokpenagen: A Black Ash Basket” and “Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass,” Kimmerer describes situations in which harvesting wild plants directly benefits those same plant species and the ecosystem at large. She points out, however, that it is often not so simple. In “The Honorable Harvest,” Kimmerer examines some scenarios where mindful “harvesting” may seem impossible or at the least very difficult. She admits, for instance, that she was initially unprepared to see fur trapping as anything other than exploitative. Allusions to the Honorable Harvest ideal appear across all parts of the book, but the chapters in this section explore the concept in the most direct and concentrated way. This concept will recur in “Burning Cascade Head,” where a seemingly destructive action—ritually setting fire to a swath of grassy coastal land—turns out to provide a rich habitat for a variety of species.  

Ultimately, Braiding Sweetgrass is not written as a philosophical treatise on bioethics. Moreover, Kimmerer explicitly disavows the idea that she might have all the answers when it comes to how humans should relate to the natural world. Instead, she presents guidelines and examples, sometimes in the form of traditional tales whose lessons are unpacked only briefly. The book’s frequent refrain is that one should proceed from a mindset of gratitude and reciprocity, treating natural resources as gifts.