I liked Braiding Sweetgrass a lot, and I'd like to say I loved it like I did Kimmerer's previous book, Gathering Moss, but I didn't. They contain all the same great aspects: the seamless blend of contemporary Western science and Indigenous ways of knowing, the evocative prose, the deep love of nature, the history and myth, the call. But Braiding Sweetgrass suffers for its page count, clocking in at over twice the length of Gathering Moss with not enough to say.

The first three of the five total sections of the book (Planting Sweetgrass, Tending Sweetgrass, and Picking Sweetgrass) are immeasurably strong, consistently surpassing anything in Gathering Moss in every category. Kimmerer's storytelling ability is on even greater display than before, weaving together the accredited biological facts of the world with thousand-year-old "unproven" Indigenous knowledge as well as their practical and spiritual applications. The division between these two worlds ceases to exist, and their bond only becomes stronger as Kimmerer recounts her efforts to have Indigenous knowledge recognized in the scientific world. Her personal and familial anecdotes are all winners here, especially in the chapter written from her daughter's perspective, "Witch Hazel." It does make you look at the world with a more compassionate eye, and love it more. But from this point forward, in the final two sections (Braiding Sweetgrass and Burning Sweetgrass), the quality of writing begins to decline.

After a solid 200 pages, it seems the reader cannot be trusted to have absorbed any of the overarching, often plainly stated messages up to this point, because they are repeated just as plainly over and over again. I'm curious to know how many times the word "reciprocity" is said in the book, particularly in this latter half, as Kimmerer recounts her thesis statement an extra dozen times, just for good measure. The thing about such melodramatic, sappy prose as Kimmerer is so good at is that it can overstay its welcome. And it does. As time goes on and the same ideas are restated in increasingly spiritually-charged language, bordering on and then sinking deep into woo-woo territory, they lose a lot of their impact and don't feel like much except padding.

The final section, Burning Sweetgrass, is especially bizarre as it introduces — of all things — a framing device in the W*ndigo. Its beginning and end bookend Burning Sweetgrass in two six-page chapters that hardly felt worth reading. I couldn't help but frown to no one in particular as I turned the pages in the grand finale, "Defeating W*ndigo," and realized that this nonfiction book decided to end with a chapter of fanfiction, rendered primarily in eyesore-inducing full italics. To give credit where it's due, this ties into themes introduced earlier. Namely, the idea that 1) Indigenous myth exists in a circular fashion, and must be honored as past, present, and potential future, and 2) that contemporary Americans, Native or not, need to create and tell our own stories to move ourselves forward. This is Kimmerer's attempt at doing so, but it falls flat as the legend of the W*ndigo has grown over the course of Burning Sweetgrass, from animal-like bogeyman to selfish individual to community ruined by greed to the metaphorical spectre of late-stage capitalism draining the world of all its resources. The sort of "kill it with kindness" strategy Kimmerer presents is hard to swallow after having read the excellent chapter "The Sacred and the Superfund," in which she recounts how Onondaga Lake became one of the most polluted lakes in the United States after the city of Syracuse and local corporations dumped several million pounds of untreated waste into it, to the point that pure mercury could be spooned off of the lakeshore, canned, and resold. Throughout these latter chapters, including her new myth, Kimmerer struggles to connect story with reality, leaving the bulk of the work to increasingly purple prose. Burning Sweetgrass, while it has its moments, is a rough finale to what is otherwise a very good — if slightly overlong — book.

Favorite quotes:

"It's funny how the nature of an object—let's say a strawberry or a pair of socks—is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or as a commodity... That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage." p. 25, 27

"Maybe it was the smell of ripe tomatoes, or the oriole singing, or that certain slant of light on a yellow afternoon and the beans hanging thick around me. It just came to me in a wash of happiness that made me laugh out loud, startling the chickadees who were picking at the sunflowers, raining black and white hulls on the ground. I knew it with a certainty as warm and clear as the September sunshine. The land loves us back." p. 118

"...each plant does what it does in order to increase its own growth. But as it happens, when the individuals flourish, so does the whole." p. 130

"This wise and generous plant, faithfully following the people, became an honored member of the plant community. It's a foreigner, an immigrant, but after five hundred years of living as a good neighbor, people forget that kind of thing." p. 208

"They say, 'If people only knew that snow leopards are going extinct,' 'If people only knew that rivers are dying.' If people only knew... then they would, what? Stop? I honor their faith in people, but so far the if-then formula isn't working People do know the consequences of our collective damage, they do know the wages of an extractive economy, but they don't stop. They get very sad, they get very quiet... The Haunted Hayride of toxic waste dumps, the melting glaciers, the litany of doomsday projections—they move anyone who is still listening only to despair. Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth. Environmental despair is a poison every bit as destructive as the methylated mercury in the bottom of Onondaga Lake." pp. 318-319