1. I was walking in the woods yesterday and I had an epiphany. It wasn’t one I wanted to have. I was thinking about today’s class, where we are reading Kimmerer’s ‘Gathering Moss’. I’ve taught Braiding Sweetgrass in multiple classes every year since 2016. It’s eminently teachable

2. Both books are beautifully written. Students uniformly enjoy them as assigned reading. They do a great job communicating to non-Indigenous folks the contours of basic Indigenous relationships to more-than-human beings. They’re wildly popular with white readers.

3. I’ve found Braiding Sweetgrass to be a great entry point for non-Indigenous folks to Indigenous scholarship. But this is where yesterday’s epiphany comes in. Neither Braiding Sweetgrass or Gathering Moss tends to the deep deep lineages of Indigenous scholarship in Canada or US

4. As the popularity of ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ has soared, I’ve seen more and more white folks wax on about ‘braiding knowledge’. But they often don’t know any of the lineages of these concepts beyond what is presented in this one book. They confidently run with this.

5. Kimmerer does a commendable job of weaving in her own experiences, her family stories+nods to some very important knowledge keepers who deserve to be celebrated for their work. But Braiding Sweetgrass does not tend to the citational politics Sara Ahmed & others teach us about

Most environmental thinking is ripping off or erasing Indigenous and/or non-western peoples and cosmologies in one way or another and it’s tiring to watch this be so normalized in western scholarship. If you don’t have Indigenous people on your environmental panel, it is violence

Indigenous peoples represent 5% of earth’s human population but protect 80% of earth’s biodiversity (UN). Indigenous environmental defenders are frequently murdered for work protecting lands/waters/atmospheres. Indigenous cosmologies/onto-epistemologies are vital, radical.

Indigenous peoples exist in every human inhabited continent. Indigenous peoples represent what Mbuto Milando called ‘the 4th world’ (of non-dominant cosmologies) which Secwepemc thinker George Manuel theorized about. This UN definition is helpful (& inclusive, not exclusive):

The focus on dominance is helpful in identifying local+international power structures — Indigenous groups represent non-dominant cosmologies, onto-epistemologies that relate to lands/waters/atmospheres. But remember that Indigenous peoples dispossessed carry cosmologies with them

So also remember that work that @MaiaLButler does with Edwidge Danticat’s concept of ‘floating homelands’ is important node of thinking about Indigenous cosmologies, the 4th world. Non-dominant knowledge about being in/relating to the earth includes those dispossessed from
home.