Discussion dates are July 6 (Planting Sweetgrass, pages 3-59), July 13 (Tending Sweetgrass, pages 63-117), July 20 (Picking Sweet Grass, pages 121-204) and August 3 (Braiding Sweetgrass, pages 205 -300), and August 10 (Burning Sweetgrass and Epilogue: Returning the Gift, pages 303-384).

“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. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

WMEAC’s Lakeshore Outreach Organizer Tanya Cabala is facilitating this discussion and will provide questions for each session via email, on a weekly basis. Please provide your name and email address to her at tcabala@wmeac.org to get on the distribution list.

Participants are encouraged to purchase the book from the co-sponsoring independent bookstores,  Book Nook & Java Shop in Montague, or Books and Mortar in Grand Rapids.