Braiding Sweetgrass evaluation

David Hague 

Eng 102-037 

Professor Santos 

February 13th, 2018 

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer Book Review 

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer is a non-fiction book about nature, and is filled with creation stories, plus some of Kimmerer's personal experiences with nature. Kimmerer wants to share her stories with the people, to show them how important nature is and why everyone should take nature seriously. Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. This is important to know because she uses her knowledge as a botanist to use Sweetgrass as a metaphor about how animals and humans can to be on Mother Earth, and how humanity can return the gifts that nature has given us to restore balance to Earth.   

For example, in the beginning of the book Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer starts with a creation story called "Skywoman Falling" It's about a woman who fell from the sky who created nature with just a little bit of dirt, and then it slowly became, our Earth today. Stories like these is why I personally enjoyed this book, however there are things that I personally don’t like about this book. Kimmerer uses this book to tell the readers about all these stories about how important nature is and what mankind should do to give back to nature. But despite her good intentions she doesn’t have the answer to help bring back nature to what it was. She gave examples about how to help little by little and do-little things each day that can help nature. One example was in the story "The Offering" Kimmerer stated, my mother had her own more pragmatic ritual of respect: the translation of reverence and intention into action. Before we paddled away from any camping place she made us kids scour the place to make sure that it was spotless" (35). That is a way to help nature and give back, but unless everyone does something like this Nature will just remain the same. I also read an evaluation by Longwood Gardens on the book, and it really helped me understand the book much better, because I didn’t read the entire book. 

In conclusion, I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy creation stories and Nature in general, because there are some interesting stories in this book. I would not recommend this book if you don’t like nature stories and if you have a tough time understanding metaphors and things of that nature because it is present throughout the book.