BRAIDING SWEETGRASS BY ROBERT WALL KIMERER FULL BOOK PDF.

 Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly

picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair.

Golden green and glossy above, the stems are banded with purple

and white where they meet the ground. Hold the bundle up to your

nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river

water and black earth and you understand its scientific name:

Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our

language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother

Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t

know you’d forgotten.

A sheaf of sweetgrass, bound at the end and divided into thirds,

is ready to braid. In braiding sweetgrass—so that it is smooth,

glossy, and worthy of the gift—a certain amount of tension is

needed. As any little girl with tight braids will tell you, you have to

pull a bit. Of course you can do it yourself—by tying one end to a

chair, or by holding it in your teeth and braiding backward away

from yourself—but the sweetest way is to have someone else hold

the end so that you pull gently against each other, all the while

leaning in, head to head, chatting and laughing, watching each

other’s hands, one holding steady while the other shifts the slim

bundles over one another, each in its turn. Linked by sweetgrass,

there is reciprocity between you, linked by sweetgrass, the holder

as vital as the braider. The braid becomes finer and thinner as you

near the end, until you’re braiding individual blades of grass, and

then you tie it off.

Will you hold the end of the bundle while I braid? Hands joined by

grass, can we bend our heads together and make a braid to honor

the earth? And then I’ll hold it for you, while you braid, too.

I could hand you a braid of sweetgrass, as thick and shining as

the plait that hung down my grandmother’s back. But it is not mine

to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself. So I offer,

in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the

world. This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of

knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe

scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters

most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories

and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with

earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a

different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD