Robin Wall Kimmerer on a Loving Kinship with Nature
- Yasmin Prabhudas
- Oct 19
- 5 min read
Indigenous Scholar’s Advocacy Draws on Tribal Traditions
Becoming a botanist was a natural career path for Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi citizen. The professor of environmental biology and best-selling author grew up in upstate New York, where she loved to wander through the countryside and forests.
Her books include Braiding Sweetgrass, Gathering Moss, and The Serviceberry. They emphasize the need to acknowledge a reciprocal relationship with the living world, highlighting particularly the contribution of the Indigenous wisdom of communities such as her own.
Kimmerer focuses on how traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) should play a prominent role in conservation. She encourages communities, policymakers, and educators to recognize nature’s own agency, as this is vital for the sake of the planet and humanity’s well-being.
Plant Elders
In an interview with Krista Tippett in the On Being podcast, Kimmerer explains: “I was lucky enough to grow up in the fields, in the woods of upstate New York … but disappointed also in that I grew up away from the Potawatomi people by virtue of history, of the history of removal and the taking of children to the Indian boarding schools [Her paternal grandfather had to attend one such boarding school].
“The questions that I had about who I was in the world, what the world was like, those are questions that I really wished I'd had a cultural elder to ask, but I didn't. But I had the woods to ask […] they really became my doorway into culture. In the absence of human elders, I had plant elders instead.”
“In the absence of human elders, I had plant elders instead.”
Indigenous Knowledge and Science
A watershed moment came when Kimmerer participated in a gathering of traditional knowledge holders while a PhD student. She commented during the podcast interview how their conversations “interwove mythic knowledge and scientific knowledge into this beautiful cultural natural history.”
She has not looked back since. In a 2002 article, “Weaving Traditional Ecological Knowledge into Biological Education: A Call to Action,” she states: “TEK observations tend to be qualitative, and they create a diachronic database, that is, a record of observations from a single locale over a long time period. The National Science Foundation, in its support of the Long-Term Ecological Research program, has validated the importance of such continuous data.
“In TEK, the observers tend to be the resource users themselves, for example, hunters, fishers, and gatherers whose harvesting success is inextricably linked to the quality and reliability of their ecological observations. In contrast, scientific observations made by a small group of professionals tend to be quantitative and often represent synchronic data or simultaneous observations from a wide range of sites, which frequently lack the long-term perspective of TEK.”
Kimmerer believes both insights are required to connect fully with the natural world.
Sacredness of All Beings
Kimmerer further takes inspiration from the Anishinaabe language of her Potawatomi ancestors. In an article titled “Nature Needs a New Pronoun: To Stop the Age of Extinction, Let’s Start by Ditching ‘It,’” she argues that English grammar can define a person’s relationship with the living world. “The language allows no form of respect for the more-than-human beings with whom we share the Earth,” she says. “In English, a being is either a human or an ‘it.’”
This, she states, reinforces the idea that human beings are “more deserving of the gifts of the world than the other 8.7 million species with whom we share the planet.” Using “it,” she believes, absolves humans of moral responsibility and promotes exploitation. She says: “When sugar maple is an ‘it,’ we give ourselves permission to pick up the saw. ‘It’ means it doesn’t matter.”
“It’ means it doesn’t matter.”
In Anishinaabe and many other Indigenous languages, however, all living beings are addressed in the same way as family members. “Because they are our family,” she explains.
She suggests introducing new pronouns for the natural world—ki for the singular and kin for the plural.
Reciprocity
Tied into the idea of nature as family is reciprocity. During the podcast interview, she says “sustainability” has embedded in it the idea that human beings have ownership over the natural world, entitling them to continue to consume its resources.
“The notion of reciprocity is really different from that […] because what it says is that our role as human people is not just to take from the Earth, and the role of the Earth is not just to provide for our single species. So, reciprocity actually kind of broadens this notion to say that not only does the Earth sustain us, but that we have the capacity and the responsibility to sustain her in return.”
“Not only does the Earth sustain us, but … we have the capacity and the responsibility to sustain her in return.”
This is highlighted in Braiding Sweetgrass when she talks about strawberry picking: “The field gave to us, we gave to my dad, and we tried to give back to the strawberries. When the berry season was done, the plants would send out slender red runners to make new plants. Because I was fascinated by the way they would travel over the ground looking for good places to take root, I would weed out little patches of bare ground where the runners touched down. Sure enough, tiny little roots would emerge from the runner and by the end of the season there were even more plants, ready to bloom under the next Strawberry Moon. … Because they had given us a gift, an ongoing relationship opened between us.”
Similarly, in Gathering Moss, Kimmerer outlines the lessons mosses can teach. In her interview with Tippett, she claims they are “really good storytellers in the way that they live.”
They have an “ability to cooperate with one another to share the limited resources that they have to really give more than they take,” she says.
She adds: “Mosses build soil; they purify water. They are like the coral reefs of the forest. They make homes for this myriad of all these very cool little invertebrates who live in there. They are just engines of biodiversity. They do all of these things and yet, you know, they're only a centimeter tall.”
Stewardship
Kimmerer’s philosophy is implemented in the real world through the Center of Native Peoples and The Environment, which she established under the auspices of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Along with offering fellowship and scholarship opportunities, it organizes programs that create a bridge between scientific approaches to stewardship and Indigenous nations’ TEK.
In one initiative, Growing Plants, Growing Knowledge: Restoration Education, students from the university work with Onondaga Nation young people to learn about ecological activities at Onondaga Lake, including cultivating plants and restoring wetlands. The project not only aimed to promote environmental stewardship but also to encourage Native American young people to take part in higher education environmental science programs.
Other initiatives involving students and Native American communities have included working on community gardens, plant knowledge revitalization, and forest and biodiversity monitoring.
Students equipped with an understanding of Indigenous ways can become better trained scientists and environmental activists as a result, Kimmerer says in her conversation with Tippett.
A Call to Reconnect with Nature
Kimmerer encourages people to show their love for nature by taking time out to help restore the land by, for example, getting involved in tree planting, community gardens, farm-to-school projects, and local and organic schemes.
She comments: “Just as the land shares food with us, we share food with each other and then contribute to the flourishing of that place that feeds us.”
*Yasmin Prabhudas is a freelance journalist working mainly for nonprofit organizations, labor unions, the education sector, and government agencies.
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