Tending The Gardens Of Skywoman: Storytelling And Place-Consciousness In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass

Abstract

This paper explores the conjunction of Indigenous storytelling, ecological ethics, and place-consciousness in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Using the Haudenosaunee creation story of Skywoman, the project explores how Kimmerer emphasizes as guiding values reciprocity, gratitude, and responsibility for human–nature relations. Rather than understanding the Earth as a resource for extraction and production, Kimmerer foregrounds the sacred garden to be cared for, thus offering an alternative epistemological paradigm for understanding the world that is in stark contrast to Western views of the natural world. Storytelling has agency as a tool to transfer ecological values, lessons on cultural memory, epistemic understandings into moral responsibility, and a way of creating forms of relationality between Indigenous knowledge and Western science. Kimmerer’s metaphor of braiding sweetgrass allows for many strands of knowledge to exist together and produces a stronger form of knowledge through assemblage. The concept of place consciousness is understood as reciprocal belonging, ecological responsibility, and cultural continuity through a land-based relationship based on the practice of reciprocity. This dissertation examines storytelling as ecological pedagogy and activism to show how both work outside of each other by styles of responding to ethical transformation that are not dependent on scientific data alone. This paper argues that “tending the gardens of Skywoman” is not simply metaphorical and instead calls for a reorientation towards a cultural, moral, and ecological consciousness with implications for sustainability, justice, and decolonial futures.