Born 1953, enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Trained as a plant ecologist at SUNY and Wisconsin, with a doctorate in 1983. Now Distinguished Teaching Professor at SUNY-ESF and founding director of its Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
Her first book, Gathering Moss (2003), is a lyrical field science of bryophytes. Her second, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), is something harder to name — a book about gratitude, reciprocity, and the grammar of the living world, written by a scientist who is also a fluent Potawatomi speaker.
Braiding Sweetgrass spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. It has become, quietly, one of the most influential nature books of the twenty-first century.
Braiding Sweetgrass
A Potawatomi botanist weaves indigenous wisdom with Western botany and ecological science — a meditation on gratitude, reciprocity, plant intelligence, and what it means to be in right relationship with land and food. One of the most beloved ecological books of our time.
Food & Agriculture
Growing, sharing and consuming nourishment — the ancient and future re…
→Nature & Cosmos
The living systems of existence — from ecosystems and oceans to stars,…
→Ecology
The study of relationships between living organisms and their environm…
→Indigenous Wisdom
The knowledge systems of the world's original peoples — deep ecologica…
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