Braiding Sweetgrass

Format: Hybrid, 1:30pm @ Senior Center/Zoom (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82524617784?pwd=NXVVeExscTdpd3ZlY05uTEdvaVNuUT09)

Each BISCC Book group session offers a chance to explore the ideas that inform Braiding Sweetgrass, the second BI READS For Social Justice selection for 2023. You don’t have to have read the book in whole or at all to participate. Participants can ask or answer questions, make observations, or simply listen.

The fourth section of Braiding Sweetgrass, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” includes eight essays that share common themes of sacred reciprocity and connection, synthesis and integration. What stories, images or thoughts resonated and stayed with you from this section?

Questions to ponder:

In the preface, Kimmerer explains that her book is meant to be a “braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world.” If you have ever braided something, does this metaphor help you navigate these essays?

In Sitting In A Circle, Kimmerer talks about “becoming indigenous to a place” and how the land is the “real teacher”. Is it possible for the descendants of European white settlers to be indigenous to the land our ancestors occupied by displacement of native people?

In the ‘Umbilicaria: The Belly Button of the World’ essay, as elsewhere, Kimmerer talks about listening to plants to learn from them. Does this idea make sense to you? Is it a comfortable thought?