On Campus Program

Braiding Sweetgrass Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Presenter: Robin Wall Kimmerer

CULTIVATE A RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LIVING WORLD

This summer, join the acclaimed New York Times best-selling author, mother, scientist, and decorated professor Robin Wall Kimmerer for a weekend program on the Kripalu campus. With this renowned teacher as your guide, explore how living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. Robin brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Explore the dominant themes of Braiding Sweetgrass—including the cultivation of a reciprocal relationship with the living world—as Robin circles toward a central practice: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.