Robin Wall Kimmerer Quotes

Nuts are like the pan fish of the forest, full of protein and especially fat—"poor man's meat."

Our lands around were wanted by settlers, so in long lines, surrounded by soldiers, we were marched at gunpoint along what became known as the Trail of Death. They took us to a new place, far from our lakes and forests. But someone wanted that land too, so the bedrolls were packed again, thinner this time. In the span of a single generation my ancestors were "removed" three times—Wisconsin to Kansas, points in between, and then to Oklahoma. I wonder if they looked back for a last glimpse of the lakes, glimmering like a mirage. Did they touch the trees in remembrance as they became fewer and fewer, until there was only grass? So much was scattered and left along that trail. Graves of half the people. Language. Knowledge. Names. My great-grandmother Sha-note, "wind blowing through," was renamed Charlotte. Names the soldiers or the missionaries could not pronounce were not permitted.

Look at the legacy of poor Eve's exile from Eden: the land shows the bruises of an abusive relationship. It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land.

Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.

Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness.

There is such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait.

Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair. Golden green and glossy above, the stems are banded with purple and white where they meet the ground. Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand its scientific name: Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.

I don't know about hope, but I do know about love. I think we are in this perilous moment because we have not loved the Earth enough, and it is love that will lead us to safety. I'm dreaming of a time when we are propelled not by fear of what is coming towards us, fearsome as it is, but by love for a beautiful vision of a world whole and healed. One of the great gifts of Indigenous environmental philosophy is that it provides that expansive vision of what it means to be a human: it is an invitation to be a member of the sacred web of life, to belong. As we join the oriole in singing thanks to the Earth, we can live in such a way that the Earth will be grateful for us...Let us ask each other, what do you love too much to lose?

The call for land protection cannot be one of removing Indigenous and local people from land, but of harmonizing people and land, of aligning economies with the laws of nature. Let's remember that ecology and economy share the same root word, oikos, the Greek word for home. Our work is not just to protect the remnants of biodiversity but to restore them with a combination of the tools of environmental science and the philosophy and know-how of Indigenous knowledge. Restoration must also include restoration of an honourable relationship with land, of re-storyation, the adoption of a new narrative for the relationship between people and place. One that asks not 'What more can we take from the Earth' but 'What does the Earth ask of us?'

We are all related, woven together in webs of reciprocal connection, where what happens to one happens to all.

The land is a sharp reflection of the worldview of the peoples who care for it, or don't.

My Anishinaabe people, as well as the Haudenosaunee people who are my neighbours, have adopted the bowl as the symbol for the nurture and provisioning of the land. We have agreements with one another, known as the One Bowl, One Spoon treaties. The land is understood as the Bowl, filled by Mother Earth with everything that we need. It is our responsibility to share it and keep that bowl full. How we take from the bowl is represented by the spoon. There's just one spoon, the same size for everyone, humans and more-than-humans alike. Not a tiny one for some and a gouging shovel for others. One of the oldest 'conservation policies' on the planet is a statement about sharing, about justice, about reciprocity with the gifts of the land.