Quotes from Robin Wall Kimmerer

Creation stories offer a glimpse into the worldview of a people, of how they understand themselves, their place in the world, and the ideals to which they aspire. Likewise, the collective fears and deepest values of a people are also seen in the visage of the monsters they create.

The old teachings recognized that Windigo nature is in each of us, so the monster was created in stories, that we might learn why we should recoil from the greedy part of ourselves. This is why Anishnaabe elders like Stewart King remind us to always acknowledge the two faces—the light and the dark side of life—in order to understand ourselves. See the dark, recognize its power, but do not feed it.

Can settlers be trusted to follow Nanabozho, to walk so that "each step is a greeting to Mother Earth"? Grief and fear still sit in the shadows, behind the glimmer of hope. Together they try to hold my heart closed. But I need to remember that the grief is the settlers' as well. They too will never walk in a tallgrass prairie where sunflowers dance with goldfinches. Their children have also lost the chance to sing at the Maple Dance. They can't drink the water either.

I have shed tears into that flow when I thought that motherhood would end. But the pond has shown me that being a good mother doesn't end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn't end until she creates a home where all life's beings can flourish.

In return for the privilege of breath

enough to live in the boundary layer is a distinct advantage. Mosses have found the microhabitats where their size becomes an asset.

Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it.

Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them.

The grasses feed the ants with seeds and the ants feed the grasses with soil. They hand off life to one another. They understand their interconnections; they understand that the life of one is dependent on the life of all. Leaf by leaf, root by root, the trees, the berries, the grasses are joining forces, and so there are birds and deer and bugs that have come to join them. And so the world is made.

It seems hard to argue with gratitude for berries.

It is not the land that has been broken, but our relationship to it.

You have to concentrate; you have to give yourself to the listening. It takes effort, especially in a time when we are accustomed to sound bites and immediate gratification.

Our gift was time and attention and care and red-stained fingers. Heart berries, indeed.

Maybe we've all been banished to lonely corners by our obsession with private property. We've accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy. It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.

A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them

It's been a balanced exchange: I worked on the pond and the pond worked on me, and together we made a good home.

I dream of a world guided by a lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an Indigenous worldview - stories in which matter and spirit are both given voice.

Our mental maps had all the landmarks we kids needed:

To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language. Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own. I think now that it was a longing to comprehend this language I hear in the woods that led me to science, to learn over the years to speak fluent botany.

In moving from a childhood in the woods to the university I had unknowingly shifted between worldviews, from a natural history of experience, in which I knew plants as teachers and companions to whom I was linked with mutual responsibility, into the realm of science.

The legal action concerned not only rights to the land but also rights of the land, the right to be whole and healthy. Clan Mother Audrey Shenandoah made the goal clear. It is not casinos and not money and not revenge. "In this action," she said, "we seek justice. Justice for the waters. Justice for the four-leggeds and the wingeds, whose habitats have been taken. We seek justice, not just for ourselves, but justice for the whole of Creation.

Hyde reminds us that in a gift economy, one's freely given gifts cannot be made into someone else's capital.

incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being?

We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath.