It is September 1895 in Indian Territory, and two skinny boys are trotting home across the prairie in nothing but their underwear. Their dungarees are slung over their shoulders like yokes, tied shut at the ankles and bulging with pecans they found in a creek-bottom grove after a day of catching no fish. One of those boys was Robin Wall Kimmerer’s grandfather. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer opens its second essay with that comic, tender picture and then, without raising its voice, unfolds what stands behind it: a family forced off its lands around Lake Michigan, walked west at gunpoint along what the Potawatomi call the Trail of Death, moved again and again, and finally talked into trading land held in common for individual allotments that were mostly lost within a generation.
The Pecans Know Something the Treaty Makers Did Not
The essay works because the botany and the history keep answering each other. Pecan trees fruit in synchrony, whole groves and whole counties at once, and nobody is quite sure how, though fungal threads linking their roots may share out the stored sugar. The leaders who weighed the allotment offer met all summer in a grove of those same trees. Kimmerer lets the pecans make the argument the council could not hear: stand together or be picked off one by one.
The essay also gives the book its most natural connection to the holiday. Kimmerer explains that she bakes pecan pie only at Thanksgiving, though she is not especially fond of it, because serving the nuts at a crowded table honours the trees that welcomed her exhausted ancestors to an unfamiliar country. That is the register of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer at its best: a household habit opened up until a whole history is visible inside it.
A Family Ceremony, Made at Home
The essays in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer that stay longest are the domestic ones. On canoe trips in the Adirondacks, Kimmerer’s father poured the first cup from the camp coffeepot onto the rocks every morning and toasted the gods of Tahawus, the Algonquin name for Mount Marcy. As a teenager she came to resent it as a borrowed rite, a stand-in for a language and ceremony taken from her grandfather at a boarding school door. Years later her father admitted it probably began as a way to clear grounds from the spout. Then he added that it had turned into something else, a kind of thanks. “The land knows you, even when you are lost,” she writes, and the essay has earned the sentence.
That honesty runs through the middle of the book. “A Mother’s Work” follows a single mother raking algae out of a farm pond for twelve years so her daughters might swim in it, freeing tadpoles from every rakeful, nearly destroying a warbler’s nest, and finding in a net-like alga called Hydrodictyon an image of children leaving home. The pond is barely clear by the time the second daughter goes to college. “Witch Hazel” is told through the eyes of one of those daughters, who remembers an elderly Kentucky neighbour named Hazel Barnett and the Christmas party her mother staged in Hazel’s abandoned home. Neither piece needs a thesis. Both make one anyway, quietly.
The craft essays in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer carry the same weight. Watching the Potawatomi basket maker John Pigeon split black ash along its growth rings, each strip a year of the tree’s life, readers learn more about attention than any instruction could teach. And in “Putting Down Roots” Kimmerer finds her own grandfather, Asa Wall, in the register of the Carlisle Indian School, taken there at nine, and the plain record hits harder than anything around it.
When Robin Wall Kimmerer Turns Preacher
The trouble is that Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer does not always trust its scenes. Kimmerer is a superb storyteller and an insistent teacher, and the teacher often gets the last word. “Burning Cascade Head” reconstructs a salmon ceremony on the Oregon coast from surviving fragments, beautifully, then spends pages comparing it with a high-school graduation in an analogy that sags. “Old-Growth Children” sets pioneer cultures against old-growth ones in a contrast too neat to hold the world. In “Epiphany in the Beans” a man who once named his car as his truest sense of place is later said to have tried to end his life in it, and the anecdote is used as a parable in a way that feels careless with a real person. A late essay ties a prophecy of the Seventh Fire to climate change with more conviction than argument.
None of this sinks Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, but it changes how to read it. Taken a chapter an evening, the repetitions feel like a teacher returning to a principle. Taken in a weekend, they press.
The later essays also carry heavier material than the gentle title suggests, from removal, boarding schools and industrial poisoning to war, roadkill and a household fleeing a gas explosion at night.
Not every late piece leans on argument, though. “Collateral Damage” follows Kimmerer ferrying spotted salamanders across a wet road on the night American bombs began falling on Baghdad, and the parallel, which should be too much, mostly holds. The book closes on a Potawatomi giveaway, where the honoured person is the one handing out the gifts, and the image is the right one to end on.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Botanist Who Went Home
Kimmerer grew up in the hamlet of Ballston Lake in upstate New York and is a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation. Before returning to her alma mater in Syracuse in 1993, she taught biology and botany at Centre College in Kentucky, the years that gave her Hazel Barnett. At the forestry college in Syracuse she founded and led the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. The pecan essay first appeared in Orion magazine, where it won a John Burroughs award of its own. She still prefers to write first drafts by hand on yellow legal pads, in green or purple ink.
Recognition has come late and in a rush: a National Humanities Medal in 2023 and a place on the Time 100 list in 2025. Richard Powers has said Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer helped shape his novel The Overstory. Her shorter follow-up, The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, compresses the same ideas about abundance into a single argument.
What It Leaves Behind
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer is uneven in the way that generous, overfull books often are, and the sermons can crowd the stories. But the stories are extraordinary, and the best of them are set at kitchen tables, beside farm ponds and in pecan groves, the very places a holiday weekend tends to gather a family. Readers who want a gentler, older picture of the season might set it beside An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott, which treats the harvest table as a matter of family pride, while those drawn to the science and the urgency should go next to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or to Powers’s novel of trees. Kimmerer’s own lesson is simpler than either. Before the meal, notice who fed you.