The ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ Author Wants Us to Give Thanks Every Day

Every summer, the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer takes a group of students on a two-week field trip deep into the woods and bogs of the Adirondacks.

For their final exam, students prepare a feast from foraged plants, dining on a wild menu of boiled cattail kebabs, roasted rhizomes, stir-fried day lily buds, lichen noodles in a gelatinous broth of boiled rock tripe. For dessert there are serviceberry and cattail pollen pancakes, smothered in pine-scented spruce needle syrup.

Before digging in, the group recites the Thanksgiving address — an invocation within Indigenous Haudenosaunee communities that gives thanks to the earth and its abundance.

“We start the class with a Thanksgiving address to share our sense of gratitude for the plants, and we end the same way,” said Kimmerer, a professor of environmental biology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, who is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. “So we learn about the gifts of plants and how to receive them.”

Kimmerer often says that plants have been her teachers throughout her life. As a little girl, she stashed shoe boxes of pressed leaves and seeds under her bed. Later, as a young botanist, she studied the mysteries of moss reproduction. Throughout her decades of research and environmental advocacy, as she’s pushed to bring Indigenous knowledge into ecological conservation work, she’s learned about the delicate web of relationships between plants and their surroundings.

Now, as a renowned plant ecologist and best-selling author, Kimmerer is teaching millions of people how to learn from plants.