I re-read Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013). 

Occasionally you will come across a book that weaves itself into your worldview and stays there. I am a different, better person for having read it--though as with all books that reshape me, I struggle to adequately describe it.

Part memoir, part botany text, part indigenous philosophy, Braiding Sweetgrass shows us a different way of thinking and existing, a world where an economy of gifts and reciprocity replaces our current economy of capitalist extraction. It's a world where people care for each other...and not just human people, but animals and plants. A world where maple trees are people, and so are rivers, and so are the domesticated ducks who live in the pond out back.

I worry I am making this sound fluffy or Disneyfied. The book is neither shallow nor saccharine. It is a serious book that draws on indigenous knowledge and the lessons of plants to describe a better way to live. The topics are heavy, but the tone is hopeful. I listened to Kimmerer narrate the audiobook with her soothing voice (she reminds me in several ways of religious writer Anne Lamott) and I kept breaking out in tears as I walked my dog, not just because of the heaviness of the topics but because of the joy and hope. 

The other reason I love this book is because Kimmerer is a superb writer. As she contemplated college, she was torn between botany and poetry. Usually when I read, my editor brain is turned on, thinking of spots where I would have chosen different words or phrasing. Not with this book. Kimmerer's words are a pleasure to read. 

Today is American Thanksgiving, a holiday mired in whitewashed politics and history. I’m trying to unlearn the propaganda I imbibed as a child, trying to teach myself indigenous history.

So here I am reading a book by a *checks notes* white man…?

It’s a classic in the field. The way our systems and education and history have shaped things, most classics in most fields are written by white men.

William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983) is a seminal work of ecological history. Cronon studies how natives interacted with the natural environment and compares it to European interactions.

It’s a short book, but dense. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Bob Souer, and I will confess I zoned out at times. But the gist is: European-style, balls-to-the-wall exploitation of the land is not sustainable. Your crops will fail if you keep planting the same seeds on the same fields, year after year. Your multiplying sheep will trample the ground, compacting the soil so they have to graze further and further afield.

There is more subtlety in this book than “Natives good, Colonizers bad,” but I have to say, the Europeans don’t come out looking great. Also they were shit at honoring treaties.

I’m glad I read the book, since it is a foundational text of ecological history, but it was a slog. I used to have patience for academic writing. It was necessary when I was an undergraduate history major. I am losing that patience as an adult.

I listened to Black Indians (1986; rev. 2012), written by William Loren Katz and narrated by Bill Andrew Quinn. It examines the intersection of Black and indigenous cultures in North America and what would become the United States.

Okay, I just looked it up and Katz died in 2019 (age 92!) so it won’t hurt his feelings if I criticize the book a little. I was hoping for more discussion of the broader themes of race and culture, but that is perhaps a contemporary bias. I shouldn’t expect much sociology in a forty-year-old history book.

A kinder perspective would be to appreciate that Katz, a white man, did scholarship about minoritized groups well before that was common in the literature, even if it does wander sometimes into the noble savage stereotype.

Katz is strongest when speaking about individuals. Of the people he describes, three stand out:

• Wildfire, also known as Edmonia Lewis, was born in 1844(?) to a Black father and a Chippewa mother. After studying sculpting at Oberlin, she made a career as a sculptor and was an active abolitionist.
  
• Labor hero Lucy Parsons, born 1851 or so, became a social anarchist and, finding that too mild, ultimately landed on anarcho-communism. Her ancestry is uncertain, but she was born into slavery and claimed a Mexican and Native American heritage.
• Bill Picket (born 1907?), of Black and Cherokee ancestry, was a showman who invented the rodeo.

The book has aged better than you might expect. It’s not flawless, but it’s a quick read and I learned quite a lot.