Links for Rohan Alexander’s reading group.
Hi, I’m Liza. I’m a Settler Canadian, born here, but lived half my life in Aotearoa New Zealand on Tainui and then Ngāti Whatua lands and now back on ‘Dish With One Spoon’ treaty lands.
I’m really delighted that your group has been reading Braiding Sweetgrass, especially as June is National Indigenous History Month in Canada, so nicely done. But more importantly, you’ve been reading this as we learn more and more about the unmarked graves of Indigenous children at residential schools and perhaps grappling with what the upcoming Canada Day can or should mean to you.
Rohan invited me along to say hi because he knows I read this book because, a while back, I was up tweeting at 3:00 a.m. about how I couldn’t stop crying because of the story of the creation of Turtle Island. I certainly found the rest of the book more soothing than that.
I wanted to highlight an early quote on sweetgrass from the book that was a perfect preface to the experience I was about to have with the book itself and that I wonder if many of you also had.
“Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten”
This book reminded me of so many things I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten and through stories connected my heart back up and not just my head. 15 months into a pandemic, in a new city I only moved to 18 months ago, I needed to connect back to life writ larger than just human life, to cycles of reciprocity and gratitude instead of news cycles. This book helped put my feet back on a path towards a balance I’ve been dearly missing.
If these were some of the things you connected with to, I’d especially encourage you to learn more about the Dish With One Spoon agreement, as living here we are all invited to this treaty and in it you’ll see much of what you may have found you’d forgotten when reading this book.
— Liza
Spend too much time on Twitter, crying at 3:00 a.m.? Or maybe at other times of day too?
This list is obviously so woefully not comprehensive, but maybe just think of it as a prompt. How are you seeking out and listening to Indigenous voices?
Thanks for inviting me, Rohan! And thank you to Paul for hosting.
If you are somehow reading this and don’t know Rohan, go fix that:
rohanalexander.com & @RohanAlexander
For attribution, please cite this work as
Bolton (2021, June 25). Liza Bolton: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Retrieved from blog.lizabolton.com/posts/2021-06-16-braiding-sweetgrass/
BibTeX citation
@misc{bolton2021braiding,
author = {Bolton, Liza},
title = {Liza Bolton: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer},
url = {blog.lizabolton.com/posts/2021-06-16-braiding-sweetgrass/},
year = {2021}
}