In honor of the season of gratitude, festivities, long nights, rest, and reflection upon us, I thought we could all use a conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer. So this week we revisit a BEST OF with her - a renowned Indigenous scholar, award-winning author, land and culture tender, MacArthur Genius Grant winner. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
As importantly, Dr. Kimmerer is also a mother, a gardener, and an all around wonderful human.
"I think that is our deepest longing - to belong to each other and to belong to this larger community of life
and for me this notion of tending the garden at all the scales we’ve been implying here is a powerful way to belong."
-Robin Wall Kimmerer
Her best-selling books, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants as well as Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, are something of a philosophical north stars for many of us, and this week Dr. Kimmerer's newest book The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World is out from Scribner press.
I have been truly honored to interview Robin several times including back in 2018 for inclusion in my first book The Earth In Her Hands (Timber Press).
As always with Robin's work, The Serviceberry is in my mind exactly what we collectively need in this exact moment.
The dedication in it reminds us: ALL FLOURISHING IS MUTUAL.
Enjoy!
"What I came to understand is that traditional knowledge of plants was so much bigger - so much richer than the scientific worldview would allow because it brought in not only that which we can observe -empirical so-called scientific knowledge, but it also brought in history and story and spiritual teachings,
and mind-body emotion and spirit,
so I came to understand that this was a much bigger
and powerful way of knowing that creates a different framework for living in the world - it’s not just about information and data
it’s about wisdom.”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer
More about The Serviceberry:
John Burgoyne, the illustrator for The Serviceberry is a member of the New York Society of Illustrators and an alumni of Massachusetts College of Art. John has won over 100 awards in the United States and Europe including Society of Illustrators, Communication Arts, Hatch Awards, Graphis, Print, One Show, New York Art Directors Club, and Clio. His work can be found at johntburgoyneillustration.com.
PR for The Serviceberry from Scribner:
As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.
Meanwhile, the serviceberry's relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.
As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world. The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that hoarding won't save us, all flourishing is mutual.
ALL FLOURISHING IS MUTUAL
"The bounty in my bucket today is a western species—A. alnifolia, known as Saskatoons—planted by my farmer neighbor, and this is their first bearing year, and they produce berries with an enthusiasm that matches my own.
Saskatoon, Juneberry, Shadbush, Shadblow, Sugarplum, Sarvis, Serviceberry, these are among the many names for Amelanchier. Ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance. The tree is beloved for its fruits, for medicinal use, and for the early froth of flowers that whiten woodland edges at the first hint of spring. Serviceberry is known as a calendar plant, so faithful is it to seasonal weather patterns. Its bloom is a sign that the ground has thawed, and that the shad are running upstream—or at least it was back in the day when rivers were clear and free enough to support the spawning of shad.
Calendar plants like Serviceberry are important for synchronizing the seasonal rounds of traditional Indigenous people, who move in an annual cycle through their homelands to where the foods are ready. Instead of changing the land to suit their convenience, they changed themselves.
Eating with the seasons is a way of honoring abundance, by going to meet it when and where it arrives.
These Serviceberries were not coerced and their carbon footprint is nothing. Maybe that’s why they taste so good—they come only this time of year—these ephemeral sips of summer, without the aftertaste of harm."
Robin Wall Kimmerer
all photos courtesy of Robin Wall Kimmerer and Scriber Press; all rights reserved.
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'Indigenous languages, lifeways, and relations with the land have all been subject to the violence of colonialism.
Maize herself has been a victim, and so have you, when a worldview which cultivated honorable relations
with the living earth has been overwritten with an ethic of exploitation, when our plant and animal relatives
no longer look at us with honor, but turn their faces away.
But there is a kernel of resurgence, if we are willing to learn.
The invitation to decolonize, rematriate, and renew the honorable harvest
extends beyond Indigenous nations to everyone who eats.
Mother Corn claims us all as corn-children under the husk;
her teachings of reciprocity are for all.”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer, from interview/recording
Robin’s work and heart in her books "Gathering Moss" and "Braiding Sweet Grass", as in all that she does as a mother, professor, and citizen are eloquent restorying – reframing, and rematriating (returning to its maternal source, first explained to me by Indigenous plantswoman and seed steward Rowen White)- of a compassionate, respectful, responsible, and reciprocal relationship to our are greater than human world & its wondrous diversity of creatures and beings.
Robin's words and shared wisdom provides us all with a "beautiful scaffolding" of greater understanding as to what and where we are citizens, what being a citizen and being a Gardener means - and where some of our best teachers can be found if we are willing to open up and listen to them.
You may also enjoy Robin's essay Tallgrass in the journal The Clearing, hosted by Little Toller Books.
THINKING OUT LOUD this week..
Wow where to even start this week, huh? You know I like this level of conversation about our gardens – you do too, which is why you’re here. This metagardening, quantum gardening level of engagement lights a fire.
So I’ll keep it really simple by pulling out a phrase Robin Wall Kimmerer likes to use herself in relation to her gardening practice and that is this: "We should not only be raising our gardens, we should be raising a ruckus!”
A Ruckus on behalf of all that the world needs and all that we have to offer as gardeners.
So here’s my challenge to myself and to you if such a challenge resonates – to set a goal of expanding how and for what cause I share out my gardening love even more – maybe even a little differently? – will I plant a row for the local soup kitchen, will I save seeds to share at the local seed swap, will I write letters to the editor of local or national papers or online news sources about gardening/citizenship/right relationship to the land and the many peoples harmed in the colonization of this land these past 243 years, will I help to plant gardens in the community, will I paint or write poetry inspired by the garden or natural world and share that forward? I am not yet sure, but that’s the challenge – to take the gifts my garden brings to me and share them out more widely in one more even small way.
I hope to see you out there doing the same.
I cannot think of a better person to have speak to us on right now than Robin Wall Kimmerer. To share her world view and understanding of ours rights and responsibilities as citizens of this world are inspiring and igniting. Later in the conversation you’ll hear her strong belief in one of responsibilities as gardeners being that of sharing the gifts and knowledge that the garden offers to us with others.
WE Gardeners can and do level up and contribute to social, environmental, and cultural justice to improving and rethinking our larger cultural values and literacy.
SO from this gardener citizen to each of you – thank you. I can’t imagine a better group of beings with whom to change the world.
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