Checking in

In this session, we’re going to discuss our final sections from Braiding Sweetgrass.

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 two chapters of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book: Putting Down Roots and People of Corn, People of Light.

Putting Down Roots

In this section, Kimmerer gives us a description of scientific work: counting sweetgrass plants for replanting. It’s boring, back-breaking… and rewarding. The context is a project run by the university, replanting sweetgrass plants, exploring ecological “restoration.” They are “putting ecosystems back together” (p. 263).

(We often forget this physical context of how science is carried out. We are removed from the processes of research: the sheer amount of care and observation, for example, that goes into the gathering knowledge about the world — so this is an interesting reminder of this).

But throughout this story of replanting, Kimmerer weaves stories of other things: basket-weaving, history, resettlement, colonialism, the death of cultures, pancakes, the grim history of children forcibly relocated to Indian Schools (which has been in the news more recently), language loss, the relationship of plants and people, and much more.

The stories that Kimmerer weaves all circle around one particular question. The question is this: how have certain kinds of knowledge (which their defenders might claim to be “scientific”) served to uproot us: to uproot us from our linguistic roots, our communities, to uproot plants, even whole ecosystems?

• Thinking of your home country, has there been a parallel process of “uprooting” — through education, the suppression of language, privileging particular forms of knowledge?
• What has the result of this uprooting been? How has it affected communities and individuals? Who has won and who has lost?
• How is the rhetoric of science used to justify this uprooting (e.g. “We need progress! This is what development means! You need to leave behind superstition and embrace science?”
• Does scientific understanding inherently uproot us from the world? Or can it help root us more firmly?

People of Corn, People of Light

In this section, Kimmerer brings together different ways of knowing — scientific and indigenous. She begins with a Maya creation myth from the Popol Vuh, about how they created human beings.

Let’s look at this short video: Popul Vuh.

Writing exercise: What does this myth tell us?

So, to recap on the myth, the gods wanted to create a creature who could speak. So they started to make humans. They tried four approaches:

• Making human beings out of mud
• Making human beings out of wood
• Making human beings out of light
• Making human beings out of corn

Only the last batch turned out well, being able to sing and dance and pray, and having compassion and gratitude.

This story, Kimmerer says, is a ilbal, a lens through which we can see our place in the world.

Then Kimmerer moves on to talk about photosynthesis, and argues that facts are themselves a poem: the world is astonishing and rich. But the way that we communicate these facts tends to exclude: scientific language can “give us knowing” but it can’t give us caring for the world.

So do we need, alongside science, stories that can encourage us not just to know but to care? Given that language is the particular gift we have — do we need new stories, new ways of talking about the world?

Questions

Here are some questions to talk about:

• Is it true that science can only give us knowing, but can’t give us caring?
• Do we need multiple ilbals, or lenses, through which to see the world?
• Do we need to find poetic ways of seeing the world in addition to science, or do we need to find the poetry in science?

Homework

For your homework, start on the next text from the brilliant Siri Hustvedt. The text is on Canvas.