Robin Wall Kimmerer Quotes

The earth is so richly endowed that the least we can do in return is to pay attention.

The plants are our oldest teachers.

A path scented with sweetgrass leads to a landscape of forgiveness and healing for all who need it.

To become indigenous is to grow the circle of healing to include all of Creation.

To carry a gift is also to carry a responsibility.

By honoring the knowledge in the land, and caring for its keepers, we start to become indigenous to place.

To be indigenous is to protect life on earth.

The South, zhawanong, the land of birth and growth. From the South comes the green that covers the world in spring, carried on the warm winds.

Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.

Wabunong—the East—is the direction of knowledge. We send gratitude to the East for the chance to learn every day, to start anew.

Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again.

Nanabozho did not know his parentage or his origins—only that he was set down into a fully peopled world of plants and animals, winds, and water. He was an immigrant too. Before he arrived, the world was all here, in balance and harmony, each one fulfilling their purpose in the Creation. He understood, as some did not, that this was not the "," but one that was ancient before he came.

It is said that the Creator gathered together the four sacred elements and breathed life into them to give form to Original Man before setting him upon Turtle Island. The last of all beings to be created, First Man was given the name . The Creator called out the name to the four directions so that the others would know who was coming. Nanabozho, part man, part manido—a powerful spiritbeing—is the personification of life forces, the , and our great teacher of how to be human. In Nanabozho's form as Original Man and in our own, we humans are the newest arrivals on earth, the youngsters, just learning to find our way.

We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa's sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.

Wild things should not be for sale.