Class 18 - The Three Sisters

Checking in

In this session, we’re going to discuss Braiding Sweetgrass, and the chapter on tthe Three Sisters.

Before we start, we’re going to check in for five minutes. Just say hello to your fellow students, talk about how the course is going, and if there are any questions that you are facing.

This Week’s Reading

In the first reading, we’ll be looking at one chapter of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book: Three Sisters.

We’ll start with a writing exercise:

• What did you respond to in the Kimmerer piece?
• What did you struggle with or not agree with?

Thinking about food: Discussion

Where does our food come from?

• What did you have for dinner last night (or breakfast this morning)?
• Where did your food come from?
• Are any of you from a farming background?
• How much of your food do you grow yourself (or is grown in your community)?
• What do you do to prepare food?

Three Sisters

In this justly famous passage, Kimmerer talks about what is known as intercropping, or companion planting, the planting of multiple crops in the same area. This was a common farming strategy in indigenous american communities. So in this passage, Kimmerer talks about the “three sisters” — the three staple crops of American indigenous societies — corn (maize), beans, and squash.

We’ll watch this video on intercropping and the three sisters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSwGxJe4bVs

There are a lot of interesting questions that this section raises. The first, of course, is whether intercropping works. And if so, how and in what ways does it work? There’s been a lot of scientific research on this. One recent paper, about an experiment in which scientists worked with indigenous communities, can be found here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-022-10336-z

BREAK

Going into more depth

Here are some questions to discuss:

• Is intercropping used in traditional agriculture in your home region?
• Does your own culture have any equivalent myths about reciprocity between different plants?
• Returning to the quesion of different ways of knowing, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes “I envision a time when the intellectual monoculture of science will be replaced with a polyculture of complementary knowledges?” What would such a polyculture look like? And is it desirable?

Homework

For our homework, we’re moving on to read our next text. It’s an extended essay called “The Delusions of Certainty” by the American writer Siri Hustvedt. It has been both published as a book in its own right, and as the long central section of her book of essays, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, which is on Perlego (https://ereader.perlego.com/1/book/781688/19). It tackles some fundamental questions about our self-understanding: as bodies, as brains, as human beings. And it asks about the relationship between our scientific metaphors and other broader issues, such as gender.

This is an incredibly rich and powerful extended essay, exploring questions about knowledge, gender, minds, bodies and how we understand ourselves and our relationship with the world. For Thursday’s session, we’ll read the following section: Coming in and Going Out

Come to the next session ready to talk about this!