For several years now, I’ve wanted to attend River Restoration Northwest’s annual conference in Oregon, which is why I was excited to participate in their virtual talk on Biocultural Restoration Feb 1. The keynote speaker was Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose book Braiding Sweetgrass is a go-to-read on my bedside table.

As an indigenous mother and distinguished plant ecologist, Robin is well-versed in both western Scientific Ecological Knowledge (SEK) and indigenous or Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). I love how she frames both approaches as two lenses through which we perceive the land and how like a pair of spectacles, both lenses are needed to move forward in healing the land and, more importantly, our relationship to it.

While descendants of European settlers predominantly approached land as ‘property’ with invisible lines of ownership and as a bundle of rights of commodified resources, Indigenous peoples see Land (capital L) as Sustainer, as Source of knowledge, as Nature’s pharmacy, as ‘Inspirited,’ as Home to many beings, as Alive. Perhaps the most significant distinction is the idea of being in a reciprocal relationship with the Land, one that does not ask, “what more can I take?” but, “what can I give in return for these many gifts?”

As land stewards, restorers of rivers, restorers of ecology, we are called upon not only to heal the land but to ask, “How can we heal the relationships between people and place?”  How can we reintroduce TEK into our restoration discourse, projects, and policies?  Could it be as simple as asking ourselves this question each day as we begin anew?

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What sparkles as an idea inside me—and I’m curious about for you—is this idea so embedded in our indigenous brothers and sisters’ knowledge that the earth is Alive, that it is a Being, and that there is Animacy in our land and waters. When you strip apart all the components (like that disturbing Body Worlds exhibit that keeps touring our natural science museums!), you lose the animacy and emergent properties of the whole.

Robin perhaps says it best in this passage from “Learning the Grammar of Animacy” in Braiding Sweetgrass:

Science can be a language of distance, which reduces a being to its working parts; it is a language of objects. The language scientists speak, however precise, is based on a profound error in grammar, an omission, a grave loss in translation from the native languages of these shores.

My first taste of the missing language was the word Puhpowee on my tongue. I stumbled upon it in a book by the Anishinaabe ethnobotanist Keewaydinoquay, in a treatise on the traditional use of fungi by our people.  Puhpowee, she explained, translates as “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery.

In the three syllables of this new word, I could see an entire process of close observation in the damp morning woods, the formulation of a theory for which English has no equivalent. The makers of this word understood a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything….So when I learned that the word for rising, for emergence, belonged to the language of my ancestors, it became a signpost for me.

– Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, pg 49.

I marked this passage with stars and exclamation points in the book’s border and felt maybe the same puh-pow! Robin may have felt as a new doorway of insight opened.

So, I leave you to ponder this passage, and of course to pick up Robin’s book if you haven’t done so already! She’s a gifted storyteller and it’s a wonderful read for both scientists and laypersons alike.

Be well, do your best,

Lauren