Kaylen Kozlowski

Professor Melissa Santos

Eng-102-037

28 January 2018

Blog Post 1

In Braiding Sweetgrass, the story is mainly focused around many different creation stories. Skywoman played a huge role in the creation stories. For example, when the strawberry creation story was told, it was about how Skywoman’s daughter had died. When Skywoman buried her daughter, strawberry plants started to sprout from her daughter’s heart and they called them “Heart Berries.” When these stories were told they were passed down from generation to generation. When the novel first brought the idea of creation stories I immediately thought of fairy tales and how my parents and grandparents used to tell me them. I remember when I was little they would tell me them before I went to bed or when we were just hanging out at the house. The fairy tales that they told me were passed down from generation to generation. Some fairy tales have lessons as well that are imbedded in them, just like the creation stories. In the first chapter, Kimmerer explains how they used the creation stories to know the land when hunting. Though most fairy tales don’t include knowing the land they can include life lessons. One fairy tale that comes to mind is “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” In this fairy tale, the boy repetitively says that there is a wolf, but there never really was and the people in the town went to help every time that he said there was a wolf. When there actually a wolf by him, he cried out for help but no one came to help him because the people in the town did not believe him. The life lesson of this fairy tale would be not to lie. That is how creation stories are similar to fairy tales which relate to my life.