Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2013 best-selling book, Braiding Sweetgrass catalyzed a shift in climate change discourse among scientists, lawmakers, and laypeople. Acknowledging this at a recent discussion hosted by Humanities New York, Kelsey Leonard—a water scientist and fellow policy change-maker—nonetheless wondered if a fundamental tenet of the book had not been deliberately misinterpreted to the detriment of Indigenous wisdom?
Kimmerer took the opportunity to clarify the concept of “knowledge sovereignty” with a metaphor involving the Three Sisters Garden: a planting technique that creates an ideal microclimate for growing corn, squash, and beans, named for a Ganondagan legend.
Read the excerpt from this portion of the interview, and find the full video below.
Kelsey Leonard: Some have come to a determination of interpretation that “braiding knowledges” means fitting Indigenous knowledge into already existing systems. Is that what you intended? And even now, having maybe seen the concept evolve, where do you hope the idea of braiding knowledges goes in the future?
Robin Wall Kimmerer: I’m grateful to you for illuminating that question, because in my work and all of our work at the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment and the broader Indigenous Science Community, of which you and I are both a part, the model that we really try to use is of knowledge sovereignty. That Indigenous knowledge is intrinsically a sovereign way of knowing as is Western science. They’re very different assumptions about what knowledge means, where knowledge comes from. And so to me, when I think about the metaphor of the braid in Braiding Sweetgrass, it’s: How do we take these strands of knowledge to care for the Earth? But they are separate strands of knowledge. When they are braided together, the notion is of sovereign knowledges in conversation with each other.
That’s a fundamental tenet of Western science. That knowledge for knowledge sake, right? It’s not connected to responsibility.
The metaphor that I actually like to use the most and have written on a fair bit is this idea of planting a knowledge garden. I see here my friends from Ganondagan, so I’m going to think about a Three Sisters Garden, right? And you and I in the university, I feel like I’m trying to plant a knowledge garden. And for too long, Indigenous knowledge, if mentioned at all, was just sort of a sidebar. And what I really like to think about is, when we plant a Three Sisters Garden, we plant the corn first. We plant the elder knowledge first. And to me, that’s traditional knowledge. That’s where we should start. And then after that corn is well established and growing up, then we plant the bean. And to me, Western science is an analog to the bean. Very curious, very wandering all over, unconstrained by accountability for knowledge. That’s a fundamental tenet of Western science. That knowledge for knowledge sake, right? It’s not connected to responsibility.
But in a Three Sisters Garden, what happens? That bean is guided by the corn. And so both of them flourish. And so that’s how I like to think about it, is prioritizing the elder knowledge and providing an intellectual scaffolding of sorts for the tools of Western science to be used in a way that embody the values of respect, relationship, reciprocity, reference.
So the corn doesn’t become the bean. The beans don’t become the corn, but they’re more productive when they grow together. And then of course that leaves the squash, right? The squash in the garden, right? What is that squash doing? It’s creating a microclimate where those two species of plant or of knowledge could grow together. And since you and I are both in universities, as I imagine many of you are as well, I think that’s what education is for. Can we create education and research structures that create a microclimate where Indigenous knowledge can lead and Western science can be guided? So I am not talking about blending knowledges in any way, but having them grow together in complementarity the way that corn and beans do.
Watch the full video:
