Reading Group: Braiding Sweetgrass

Reading Group: Braiding Sweetgrass

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Information

Information

By popular demand, we’re pleased to host a second reading group on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013).

Braiding Sweetgrass is a soaring ode to the living world in all its complexity, and a bitter indictment to current capitalist economic models and Western understandings of the ecological. Kimmerer’s insight stems from her position as both a member of the Citizen Potawomi Nation and as a botanist, and she frequently challenges many assumptions held in mainstream Western society around landscape, community, language and ecology.

Before the session, all participants will be sent a series of interconnected passages from Braiding Sweetgrass to read in advance. We will meet in an open and generative environment to discuss these together. The session will begin with a brief introduction to the passages and a short reading, then participants will split off into break out rooms for a more intimate 15-20 minute discussion about the particular passages. Everyone will then come back together and each group will feedback ideas for us to discuss as a group.

All participants will be sent the relevant passages to read as a PDF in advance of the event.

We encourage you to support your local booksellers by buying a copy of the book online via Bookshop.org

If you missed January’s Reading Group on Braiding Sweetgrass, you are welcome to download the reading materials here.

“In the settler mind, land was capital, property, real estate or natural resources. But to our people it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinsfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the sense of all that sustained us” – Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

JACK YOUNG

Jack Young is an artist and participatory educator living in Bristol. He writes experimental fiction and non-fiction and has published works with Entropy; 3:AM; Burning House Press; Caught by the River and epoqué press, amongst others. His forthcoming chapbook, Urth will be published later in 2021. He also co-hosts the literary podcast Tender Buttons. As an educator, Young has worked with institutions in Barcelona and London including MACBA; Institut Broggi; the Royal Academy; Horniman Museum; Gasworks and Tate. He is currently working on a series of texts and participatory events titled “The Body Forest” that will explore ideas around the way we consider our connection to the more-than-human world and investigate ways to de-centre the human while thinking about community, time, desire, and language. Find out more about Jack via his website, or Twitter.