Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other. Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one—with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and with a legal system that recognizes the standing of other species.

The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction—not just for Native peoples, but for everyone.

“doesn’t this mean that speaking English, thinking in English, somehow gives us permission to disrespect nature? By denying everyone else the right to be persons? Wouldn’t things be different if nothing was an it? ”

But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer.

as a traveler between scientific and traditional ways of knowing,

I’ve cherished it for many years, as a talisman, and longed for the people who gave a name to the life force of mushrooms. The language that holds Puhpowee is one that I wanted to speak. So when I learned that the word for rising, for emergence, belonged to the language of my ancestors, it became a signpost for me.

It may leave the spirit hungry while the belly is full.

even in a market economy, can we behave “as if ” the living world were a gift?

It was the beginning of my reclaiming that other way of knowing that I had helplessly let science supplant.