Get insight from author and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer

Creating a Sacred Relationship With the Earth

A Q&A with Robin Wall Kimmerer

Holden Forests & Gardens is honored to begin the new year welcoming celebrated Native American scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer in partnership with the City Club of

Cleveland and Kent State University. This lecture will be a free virtual event held on Thursday, January 13 at noon. You can reserve your space at cityclub.org or holdenfg.org. Take a moment now to get to know Kimmerer, if you don’t know her already.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor; Director, Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and the author of Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss, which will be available for purchase in Holden and Forests giftshops.

What do you hope lecture attendees will come away with?

A renewed sense of the ways that humans can be medicine for the earth, living as if we were ecological citizens, who return the gifts of the earth not just being consumers.

How do you intertwine scientific knowledge and indigenous wisdom? Do you look for relationships between the two? Do you always start with one and the other follows, or what is your thinking process?

I think of indigenous knowledge and western science both as powerful intellectual traditions, which grow from different worldviews, but can both illuminate the nature of the living world and how we might better care for it. They are distinctive, sovereign systems of knowledge which can complement one another. Our capacity to achieve sustainability and a more positive relations with the natural world is strengthened when we use both. But traditional knowledge has been historically erased or marginalized, and our work is to protect and revitalize its role.

Why is restoration of ecological communities so important and how can each person make a difference?

The extent of damage that we have done to the living world is so great, that merely protecting the remnants is inadequate, we have to heal the wounds we have inflicted through restoration of land and the cultural values which shape our responsibility for land.

What do you grow in your farm gardens and why?

I grow a wide array of fruits and veggies, including traditional heritage varieties of corn, beans and squash, in order to celebrate and preserve these ancestral plants. I also consider the surrounding woods and fields like a garden, where I nurture wild foods and medicines, pollinator meadows and songbirds.

If you could impart one thing to all people about our planet, what would you offer?

As we give gratitude for the gifts of the land, can we live in such a way that the land can be grateful for us. Reciprocity is the root of relationship, all flourishing is mutual.

I noticed that singing came up in a couple of chapters of your book Braiding Sweetgrass when young people saw or felt the sacredness in the land and the plants, when love of the world bubbled up and came out in song. Those chapters and the other ones where you worked with students and helped them find a sort of communion with Earth were so beautifully told. As a teacher, and steward of the land, what does it mean to you to see students of any age find this type of connection while in the field?

To me, it means that the students have found something deep and meaningful , they’ve been changed by coming into relationship with the land. This connection derives from experience that touches mind, body, emotion and spirit- and therefore is long lasting. Once students feel this, they are activated I think to care actively for the land, you can’t be passive when you’ve been engaged in this way. It’s a reminder that what’s good for the land is good for people, too.

Each page of Braiding Sweetgrass is not only a lesson in ecology but in good, descriptive writing. A poet wants to know why goldenrods and asters are so beautiful, and you have told us why in such a way that makes me long for September just so I can really look at the combination with new eyes. Tell me more about your journey as a creative writer for a popular audience.

I’ve come to understand my writing as an act of reciprocity with the plants and land, a way of returning a gift in return for all they have given me. I realized that writing strictly for a scientific audience in peer-reviewed journals was not serving the good of the land, for that I needed to touch hearts as well as minds. It was a challenge at first to reclaim my naturally lyrical way of writing, from the formal scientific writing I had been doing. But, it was wonderfully liberating and I learned to trust the power of story. I am so grateful that people are listening.

Braiding Sweetgrass has made an impact on people worldwide. Book groups, classrooms, libraries, and museums everywhere have created programs around the book and sales are astounding. During all of your speaking engagements, touring, and talks, what is a common thread that you have noticed among readers and fans of the book?

In engaging with readers and listeners across this very diverse audience, I have sensed a deep longing for connection with the living world. There is a desire to know the plants well again, to feel part of the ecological community and to reclaim our role as givers to the land, not just takers. I can feel people longing for kinship with the land, that the extractive economies have tried to erase. People are remembering what it might be to have an honorable relationship with land.

The book was a lovely lesson not just in restoration and being a good steward of the land but in reciprocity with earth and water and plants and animals. Yet I imagine that many people may still feel paralyzed and scared when faced with the overwhelming prospect of overcoming or reversing the damage humans have inflicted upon the Earth. What advice do you give readers and students when they say to you, “But how do I start a healthy relationship with the land?

It starts with paying attention, come to know the ones who sustain you, so that you can sustain them. Inevitably, deep attention brings you to a place of understanding the world as gift- not as commodity and this realization incites a desire to give a gift in return. Giving back to the land, entering into reciprocity is a way of creating relationship with the earth. Humility is also a big part of knowing the land in this way, understanding that the land can be our teacher if we’re able to listen.

This lecture is part of a series of community events and activities supporting Big Read Northeast Ohio, an initiative that Kent State is leading through their recent award of the National Endowment of the Arts Big Read grant. Holden Forests & Gardens is excited to be a partner in this grant and provide the community with the opportunity to hear from Robin Wall Kimmerer. This initiative broadens an understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the exploration of award-winning books that showcase diverse themes, voices, and perspectives. Visit www.library.kent.edu/neabigread for more details and a full listing of programs, including more information on a discussion with Joy Harjo, author of An American Sunrise and the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States.

For more information about the classes that we are offering this winter to better connect you to the wonder, beauty and value of plants and trees, see page 30 in this magazine and go to holdenfg.org for the latest updates.