Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Sceintific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013.

To be heard you must speak the language of the one you want to listen. So, back at school I proposed the idea of a thesis project to my graduate student Laurie. Not content with purely academic questions, she had been looking for a research project that would, as she said, “mean something to someone” instead of just sitting on the shelf. [158]

COMMENT

The shelf is of course a library shelf. Grad students have to produce original research so they gravitate towards narrow, hyper-specialized ideas. Academic libraries collect student theses and dissertations which are seldom heavily used. They are listed in the library catalog and in specialized databases, which is to say, if you want to read them you have to go looking. Student work is usually considered a fairly marginal contribution to scholarship. I have heard of grad students slipping money into their dissertation as a reward for anyone who actually bothers to read it.  In fact, I recently helped a friend get an M.S. Thesis through Interlibrary Loan and when he opened it he found a ten dollar bill tucked into the pages. 

     Laurie decides to investigate Indigenous knowledge about picking sweetgrass. [1]  Members of one tribe say that you must pluck each blade and leave the roots.  Another tradition says you must pull up the whole bunch, but not take every bunch.  A white male dean calls the research “a waste of time” because everyone knows that if you disturb a plant it will damage the population.  

     Nevertheless, she persisted, pursuing the Indigenous idea that, “If we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away.”  When she presented the resaerch to a committee of white, male scientists, Laurie rephrased this idea as “if we remove 50 percent of the plant biomass, the stems are released from resource competition. The stimulus of compensatory growth causes an increase in population density and plant vigor.”  The scientists applaud.  

     As a librarian, I find that theses and dissertations are often useful sources for hyperlocal research.  One way to make  your research original is by deep focus on a very specific geographic place within the globalized geography of knowledge. 

[1] Laurie A. Reid. The Effects of Traditional Harvesting Practices on Restored Sweetgrass Populations. Thesis (M.S.), State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, 2005.