Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants Audiobook (Free)

As a botanist and teacher of vegetable ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the various tools of technology. Being a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family members, and history that the Potawatomi, and a majority of various other cultures indigenous to this land, consider vegetation and animals to become our oldest educators. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lens of knowing jointly to reveal what this means to see humans as ‘the younger brothers of creation.’ As she explores these themes, she circles toward a central debate: The awakening of the wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the world. Once we begin to pay attention for the dialects of other beings, we are able to begin to understand the countless life-giving gifts the globe provides us and figure out how to offer our thanks a lot, our treatment, and our own gifts in exchange.