Raise a Garden. Raise Good Kids. Raise a Ruckus

Three lessons from a weekend with "Braiding Sweetgrass" author, Robin Wall Kimmerer

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Braiding Sweetgrass author Robin Wall Kimmerer. Photo credit: Dale Kakkak

It’s the last gasp of summer, and there are so many transitions ahead in my household: New school years, new jobs, big birthday celebrations. It’s been a race to get to this point in the year, and all this change is bearing down on us as the fall approaches.

So it was helpful, a few weekends ago, to take a break from it all and settle into a two-day workshop with the writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, a scientist, writer, mother and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. 

Her book of essays, Braiding Sweetgrass is a treasure that weaves together basic botany, Indigenous wisdom, and personal reflections on motherhood, political action and the climate crisis. Her book never fails to bring me solace and help me reclaim solid ground, when I’m spun out over some worry – large or small, about myself or my family, my city or the planet. 

Lesson one: Raise a garden

I do not have a garden. I have plants that I have not yet killed. But Kimmerer started the weekend by making us walk outside and get to know the land around us. She asked us to look closely enough at each growing thing and to begin to learn the names of the trees, the weeds, the grasses. I didn’t do the whole assignment – spend 15 minutes contemplating a single plant – but I did walk a bit more slowly through the woods. And I did this today on my walk to the subway, slowing down while moving forward.

Of course, when I slow down enough to actually look at the plants around me, I remember to feel grateful for them. Gratitude is the knock-on effect of paying attention to the world.  

“The practice of gratitude,” Kimmerer said, “leads to a practice of self-restraint. A feeling of ‘enoughness’ is an antidote to a desire for consuming more,” she told us. 

“Saying, ‘I have enough’ is a radical act in a consumptive society.”

To be sure, I know that too many people don’t have enough. Sometimes, paying attention to the world doesn’t lead to gratitude: it leads to panic. I can’t stop thinking, for example, about the news reports about what will happen when 70,000 child care centers close when pandemic-driven federal support for these centers dries up.

By one estimate, 3.2 million children will lose daycare spots. That means parents quitting their jobs to stay home to take care of kids, doubling up on jobs to pay for more expensive child care or moving away from families and communities in order to find adequate care.

“More like quicksand than a sudden drop off,” one child care center owner said. “It’s going to suck people under.”

So what’s the point of contemplating plants, when the crises abound? 

Paying attention to the plants and the trees doesn’t mean burying our heads from the troubles we face. 

“I choose joy over despair,” Kimmerer said. “Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily, and I must return the favor. We must pick up the things that we love too much to lose.”

Lesson Two: Raise Good Kids

Kimmerer’s work is rooted in her Potawatomi heritage and she is slowly teaching herself the Native language that her people lost. (Her grandfather was among the hundreds of thousands of Native children who were separated from their families and sent to Indian boarding schools, where children were forbidden to speak their native languages and physical and sexual abuse was rampant.)

Along with reclaiming language, Kimmerer also believes deeply in reclaiming the Honorable Harvest, a practice of asking permission so that we do less harm, and show more respect.

“Whether we are digging wild leeks, or going to the mall, how do we consume in such a way that does justice to the lives we take?” she asks in Braiding Sweetgrass.

Here is guidance of the Honorable Harvest, which we can use right now while raising our kids (our own, and others): 

Never take the first one

Ask permission

Listen for the answer

Share what you’ve taken

Take only what you need

Use everything you take

Minimize harm

Be grateful

“If you’re visiting your sweet grandma and she offers you homemade cookies on her favorite china plate, you know what to do,”  Kimmerer writes. “You accept them with many ‘thank you’s’ and cherish the relationship reinforced by cinnamon and sugar.”

“But we have been rifling through the cabinets of Mother Earth without asking permission,” she told us.

The guidance of the Honorable Harvest is a critical redirect.

“It is not your birthright to take whatever you want,” Kimmerer said.

Also: Reclaim their attention!

I was sad, but not surprised, the day I learned that my child recognized the Prime and Netflix logos on our remote. Kids know the names of 100 corporate logos by the time they are three, according to research conducted over a decade ago. On the other hand, a 2019 survey of British children found that 83% of children between the ages of five and 16 can’t identify a bumblebee. 

“Plant identification has been hijacked by corporate logos,” Kimmerer said.

 We live in a world of diminished attention. Our challenge as parents, she told us, is to help our kids get to know “another being well enough that you know its name.” 

“In order to be a good ancestor,” she said, “We don’t need to leave our kids a pile of money. We need to leave them a living planet.”

Lesson three: Raise a Ruckus

During my weekend with Kimmerer, there was a moment in which she reflected on whether she was just “preaching to the choir:” talking about gratitude and environmental consciousness, restoration and resilience, to a crowd of largely gray-haired women with vegan-leather shoes, refillable water bottles, and Earthjustice tote bags.

But then she reframed it:  

“This is the work of the choir,” she declared: to raise our collective voice.  

She implored us to look out for the change that was happening for the better: 

The Montana ruling that the state violated the constitutional rights of young people by promoting fossil fuels. 

Widespread recognition among U.S. voters – finally! – that climate change is human-caused, that it is a serious problem for the present, and a serious problem for our children and future generations. 

The restoration of land to the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans in western Massachusetts – land that has been out of their hands for over 200 years.  

When Kimmerer was starting out in college and eager to major in botany, her professors were skeptical of her: a young Native American woman who was as interested as much in the beauty in plants as she was in the study of plants.

But she had learned from the elders in her community what it meant to be a truly educated person: “An educated person knows their own gifts, and how to give them to the world,” she said. 

Gifts and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin, she told us. 

So to raise a ruckus, she said, we should ask: What are our gifts?  

Asking, ‘What is my gift?’ is the same thing as asking, ‘What is my responsibility?’

Throughout the weekend, Kimmerer returned to the same question: What does the Earth ask of us? 

The answer, she said, was to live in such a way that the Earth will be grateful to us.

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MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.

Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won several awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and is based in New York City with her partner and young daughter.

Allison Lichter is the Associate Dean at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She worked for many years at New York Public Radio and at the Wall Street Journal as a producer and editor. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.