Braiding Sweetgrass Quotes
"The visible became invisible, merging with the soil. It may have been a secondhand ceremony, but even through my confusion I recognized that the earth drank it up as if it were right."
"Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging—to a family, to a people, and to the land."
"The language that holds Puhpowee is one that I wanted to speak."
"A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning."
"It’s not just the words that will be lost. The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world."
"The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes."
"What will happen to a joke when no one can hear it anymore? How lonely those words will be, when their power is gone."
"To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language."
"I was born to these flowers and they came back for my birthday every year, weaving me into our mutual celebration."
"I knew the change might happen that fast. Now I am old and I know that transformation is slow."
"The questions scientists raised were not 'Who are you?' but 'What is it?' No one asked plants, 'What can you tell us?'"
"I could spend a whole day listening. And a whole night. And in the morning, without my hearing it, there might be a mushroom that was not there the night before."
"The primary question was 'How does it work?' The botany I was taught was reductionist, mechanistic, and strictly objective."
"I learned to fly. Or at least try. It was the bees that showed me how to move between different flowers—to drink the nectar and gather pollen from both."
"We carry our babies in internal ponds and they come forth into the world on a wave of water."
"Being a good mother includes the caretaking of water."
"I was driven to this chore by a mothering urge, to make a swimmable pond."
"Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold."
"The circle of care grows larger and larger, caregiving for my little pond spills over to caregiving for other waters."
"I have shed tears into that flow when I thought that motherhood would end."
"The pond has shown me that being a good mother doesn’t end until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish."
"I suppose I should welcome the freedom from all that feeding and worrying, but I’ll miss it."
"Being a good mother means teaching your children to care for the world."
"I wasn’t going home to an empty house. Even the horses were gone and the old family dog had died that spring."
"The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation."
"I began to know the feel of the gravelly bottom below the muck, the sucking mud by the cattails and the cold stillness where the bottom dropped away from the shallows."
"Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in."
"The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us the gift that we cannot provide ourselves."
"We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep."
"The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world."
"Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship."
"The Thanksgiving Address reminds us that duties and gifts are two sides of the same coin."
"Living as a neighbor to the Haudenosaunee, I have heard the Thanksgiving Address in many forms."
"Imagine raising children in a culture in which gratitude is the first priority."
"The Thanksgiving Address is a reminder we cannot hear too often."
"Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires."
"Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness."
"What would it be like to be raised on gratitude, to speak to the natural world as a member of the democracy of species?"
"The Thanksgiving Address, by its very nature of greetings to all who sustain us, is long."
"The Honorable Harvest asks us to give back, in reciprocity, for what we have been given."
"Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need."
"Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever."
"We are told to take only that which is given, and when we extinguish the other lives around us on behalf of our own, there is urgency to protect them."
"In our oldest stories, we are reminded that the need to resolve the tension between honoring life around us and taking it in order to live is part of being human."
"The teachings tell us that a harvest is made honorable by what you give in return for what you take."
"To say nothing of the fertilizer produced by a passing herd. Grass gives to buffalo and buffalo give to grass."
"Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us."
"We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world."
"Reciprocity is an investment in abundance for both the eater and the eaten."
"The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast."
"Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention."
"Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm."
"To have agency in the world, ceremonies should be reciprocal cocreations."
"The ceremonies that persist—birthdays, weddings, funerals—focus only on ourselves."
"People loved the salmon the way fire loves grass."
"The grasses remember the nights they were consumed by fire, lighting the way back with a conflagration of love between species."
"I want to stand by the river in my finest dress. I want to sing, strong and hard, and stomp my feet with a hundred others so that the waters hum with our happiness."
"Doing science with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity with the more-than-human world."
"The First Salmon Ceremonies were not conducted for the people. They were for the Salmon themselves, and for all the glittering realms of Creation, for the renewal of the world."
"When lives are given on their behalf they have received something precious. Ceremonies are a way to give something precious in return."
"When the season turns and the grasses dry on the headland, preparations begin; they repair the nets and get their gear together."
"To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it."
"The practice of forestry may be changing, but I am unaware of any instances where proficiency in the arts is sought as a professional qualification by timber companies or schools of forestry."
"Every drip it seems is changed by its relationship with life, whether it encounters moss or maple or fir bark or my hair."
"Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop."
"Pay attention when plants come to you; they’re bringing you something you need to learn."
"The Windigo is a human being who has become a cannibal monster. Its bite will transform victims into cannibals too."
"Starvation in winter was a reality for our people, particularly in the era of the Little Ice Age when winters were especially hard and long."
"It is on nights like this that the Windigo is afoot."
"Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story."
"Succumbing to such a repulsive urge doomed the gnawer of bones to wander as a Windigo for the rest of time."
"Creation stories offer a glimpse into the worldview of a people."
"The collective fears and deepest values of a people are also seen in the visage of the monsters they create."
"Stable, balanced systems are typified by negative feedback loops."
"Traditional upbringing was designed to strengthen self-discipline."
"A Windigo was a human whose selfishness has overpowered their self-control."
"Any overindulgent habit is self-destructive, and self-destruction is Windigo."
"The footprints of the Windigo are all around us, once you know what to look for."
"We’ve allowed the 'market' to define what we value so that the redefined common good seems to depend on profligate lifestyles."
"It is a terrible punishment to be banished from the web of reciprocity, with no one to share with you and no one for you to care for."
"The Sacred and the Superfund; Above the spring behind my house a drop forms at the end of a mossy branch, hangs in a momentary sparkle, and then lets go."
"The Peacemaker gathered together the leaders of all five Haudenosaunee nations and joined them with one mind."
"We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable."
"Ecological economists argue for reforms that would ground economics in ecological principles."
"We are all fed from the same bowl that Mother Earth has filled for us."
"Generosity is simultaneously a moral and material imperative."
"Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away."
"Each of us comes from people who were once indigenous."
"The generosity of the earth is not an invitation to take it all."
"The earth gives away for free the power of wind and sun and water."
"Ceremony is the way we can remember to remember."
"Gratitude for all the earth has given us lends us courage."
"The moral covenant of reciprocity calls us to honor our responsibilities."
"Gratitude is a powerful antidote to Windigo psychosis."