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Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Sweetgrass is best planted not by seed, but by putting roots directly into the ground. Thus the plant is passed from hand to earth to hand across years and generations. its favored habitat is sunny, well-watered meadows. It thrives along disturbed edges.
There is such a tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. When we braid sweetgrass we are braiding the hair of mother earth, showing her our loving attention, our care for her well-being, in gratitude for all she has given us
Predator-Satiation Hypothesis: When the trees produce more than the squirrels can eat, some nuts escape predation. Likewise, when the squirrel larders are packed with nuts, the pregnant mamas have more babies and the squirrel population skyrockets. Which means hawks have more babies, and fox dens are full too. But next fall the trees have shut off production. The squirrel larders are empty so they go out, and are looking harder and harder, exposing themselves to the increased predator population. Through starvation the squirrel population plummets. The trees make some nuts.
Strawberry: Skywoman’s beautiful daughter grew on the good green earth, loving and loved by all beings. She died giving birth to two twins, flint and sapling. Heartbroken, Skywoman buried her beloved daughter in the earth. Her final gifts, our most revered plants grew from her body. The strawberry arose from her heart. In Potawatomi the strawberry is the ode min, the heart berry - the leader of the berries as the first to bear fruit.
A gift creates an ongoing relationship
rel:Distributed Gift - A gift in 100 obscure pieces (as opposed to a commodity exchange)
On gift economics, Lew Hyde found “objects… will remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts.” The gift relationship with nature is a formal give and take to acknowledges our participation in and dependence on natural increase.
Tahawus is the Algonquin name for Mount Marcy (named to commemorate a governor who never stepped foot on the wild slopes.) Tahawus (the cloud splitter).
Among the Potawatomi people there are public names and true names. True names are used only by intimates and in ceremony.
On her early botany studies : The question was “how does it work?” The botany I was taught was reductionist, mechanistic and strictly objective. Plants were reduced to objects; not subjects.
My natural inclination was to see relationships, to seek threads that connect the world, to join instead of divide. But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed.
I have learned the names of all the bushes, but I have yet to learn their songs.
People often as k me what one thing I would recommend to restore the relationship between the land and people. My answer is almost always, “plant a garden.” It is good for the health of the earth, and the health of the people. A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation and practice. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate - once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed. Something essential happens in the vegetable garden. It’s a place where if you can’t “I love you” out loud, you can say it in seeds. And the land reciprocates, in beans.
On windgo - according to Ojibwe scholar the word is derived from root meaning “fat excess” or “thinking only of oneself”