We remember the oft-used words of resistance, “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” A dark time and a time filled with light. It is the prophesied time of the Seventh Fire, a sacred time when the collective remembering transforms the world. What the “overstory” of colonialism tried to suppress is surging. “New” and ancient, with its origins in the Indigenous worldview of right relation between land and people. Braiding Sweetgrass, I hope, is part of that understory, seeded by many thinkers and doers, filling the seedbank with diverse species, so that when the canopy falls, as it surely will, a new world is already rising. A whole new ecosystem rises to replace that which no longer works in a changed world. Eventually, the old forest is disrupted and replaced by the understory, by the buried seedbank that has been readying itself for this moment of transformation and renewal. But, all the while it sets the stage for what happens next and something always happens that is more powerful than that overstory: a fire, a windstorm, a disease. A long-lived overstory can dominate the forest for generations, setting the ecological conditions for its own thriving while suppressing others by exploiting all the resources with a self-serving dominance. The forces of creation and destruction are so tightly linked that sometimes we can’t tell where one begins and the other leaves off. But as always, I take my guidance from the forests, who teach us something about change. The powerful purveyors of destruction are still in power, the skies darkening. This evidence might suggest that the medicine of plant stories has not worked very well to heal our relationships with land and each other. There was guarded optimism for leadership on climate change and justice for land and people, human and otherwise.Ī lot has happened since in climate urgency, with the political pain of vile Windigos come to office and all the wounds they have inflicted.

We could smell smoke but our home was not yet engulfed in flames. I began writing Braiding Sweetgrass in what seems, from this moment in the midst of a global pandemic and the upheavals it has generated, a more innocent time, when climate catastrophe was a hot glow on the horizon. Her words of hope, transformation, and courage feel especially poignant at this moment as we look to find ways to heal and address the monumental challenges that lie before us. In this excerpt from the new introduction to her acclaimed book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer draws upon the creation story Skywoman Falling and the wisdom of plants to guide us through our present moment of deep uncertainty.

Robin kimmerer