Quotes from Robin Wall Kimmerer

and we stand there together, grateful in the rain of blessings.

This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.

You can tell they are sisters: one twines easily around the other in relaxed embrace while the sweet baby sister lolls at their feet, close, but not too close

The circle of young cedars look like women in green shawls, beaded with raindrops catching the light, graceful dancers in feathery fringe that sways with their steps.

The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It's too beautiful for English to explain.

When we call a place by its name, it is transformed from wilderness to homeland.

Someone's already been this way this morning." "Someone is in my hat," she says, shaking out a deerfly. Someone, not something.

What will happen to a joke when no one can hear it anymore? How lonely those words will be, when their power is gone. Where will they go? Off to join the stories that can never be told again.

Sweetgrass is best planted not by seed, but by putting roots directly in the ground. Thus the plant is passed from hand to earth to hand across years and generations.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.

My mother had her own more pragmatic ritual of respect: the translation of reverence and intention into action.

I hope I am also teaching them to know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents

the Thanksgiving Address was spoken to greet the day: "Let us put our minds together as one and send greetings and thanks to our Mother Earth, who sustains our lives with her many gifts.

Ceremonies large and small have the power to focus attention to a way of living awake in the world. That is the power of ceremony…it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine. The coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle; transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

Leave this place better than you found it," she admonished. And so we did. We also had to leave wood for the next person's fire, with tinder and kindling

In winter, when the green earth lies resting beneath a blanket of snow, this is the time for storytelling. The storytellers begin by calling upon those who came before who passed the stories down to us, for we are only messengers.

Had all the things in the market merely been a very low price, I probably would have scooped up as much as I could. But when everything became a gift, I felt self-restraint. I didn't want to take too much.

ceremony brought the quiescent back to life

it is not the land that is broken, but our relationship to it. Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecological systems that sustain them. We restore the land, the land restores us.

But the Mohawk call themselves the Kanienkeha - People of the Flint - and flint does not melt easily into the great American melting pot

We do not pay at the pump for the cost of climate change, for the loss of ecosystem services provided by maples and others. Cheap gas now or maples for the next generation? Call me crazy, but I'd welcome the tax that would resolve that question.

In her house, we learned that everything we put in our mouths, everything that allows us to live, is the gift of another life. I remember lying with her at night as she made us thank the rafters of her house and the wool blankets we slept in. My grandma wouldn't let us forget that these are all gifts, which is why you take care of everything, to show respect for that life.

Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget.

In the indigenous view, humans are viewed as somewhat lesser beings in the democracy of species. We are referred to as the younger brothers of Creation, so like younger brothers we must learn from our elders.