Join us for KHC’s fifth book club read!   We will hike and discuss our thoughts, reactions, and shared experiences of the book.  Bring a chair or something to sit on, for we will make one extended stop for our discussion.

Location: Kenna Cartwright Park – Doc Findlay Trailhead

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. InBraiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Discussion Questions: 

Discussion_And_Question_Guide_Braiding_Sweetgrass

The ‘Gift of Strawberries’ (pp. 22-32) introduces the reader to the concept of “the essence of a
gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.” (p. 28) How can “the relationship of gratitude and
reciprocity that has been developed increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal”?
(p. 30)

‘Learning the Grammar of Animacy’ (pp. 48-59) introduces the concept of communing with
nature by getting to know more about plants and recognizing that they are not inanimate objects.
What can you do to start learning about the plants in your immediate environment? If you
addressed the plants as something other than ‘it’, would that change your attitude? How?

Kimmerer states that “we seem to be living in an era of Windigo economics of fabricated demand
and compulsive overconsumption” (p. 308) In addition, “Our leaders willfully ignore the wisdom
and the models of every other species on the planet—except of course those that have gone
extinct. Windigo thinking.” (p. 309) Can you provide examples of unnecessary overconsumption?
What would we need to change in our society to stop these practices?