We are the Basket and the Basket Weavers

Each quarter, a group of students, faculty, and staff at WWU convene an environmental justice reading group to read and discuss recent texts. This quarter (Fall 2019) the group is reading Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. The following entry reflects the group’s discussion last week.

We are the Basket and the Basket Weavers

By: Amelia Flores and  Kameron Reitan

 

Q: Where does learning occur? Who are our teachers and who listens to the lessons? How can we orient/open ourselves to be open learners?

 

Abstract: Learning is, in a Western perspective, presented as a classroom. Teachers giving students concrete answers. Learners absorb knowledge and regurgitate answers on tests and marked right or wrong. Learning has become a binary process. We have lost our creativity and our ability to listen to the teachers that surround us and exist outside the classroom. This blog post is based on the writings of Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer in her text, “Braiding Sweetgrass” (2013). This post extends the concepts written in her book and ideas found in the Section Braiding Sweetgrass. We acknowledge the indigenous ways of knowing communicated in this text and use this as a vehicle to directly challenge our readers that learning is a constant and ongoing process which we need to recalibrate ourselves to listen to the human and non-human teachers that we interact with every day and this way of knowing has existed since time immemorial.

 

To begin, the chapter In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to a Place, Kimmer tells the story of Nanabozo who is said to be the original man of Turtle Island. It is said that Nonabozho recognized himself as an immigrant to the world he was placed on and practiced walking as if each step was a greeting to mother earth. Additionally, he understood that his environment as an educator and respected the knowledge in which the plants and animals carried since time immemorial. In this process one of the responsibilities he had was to learn the names of all the plants and animals with the purpose of building relationships and understanding them as complex wholes.

 

Given this background of the story of Nonabozho, we can compare this to our own understandings of entering a space. In terms of the broader society, it seems that we often don’t enter spaces with the intent to build relationships with our surroundings and view inanimate objects as holders of knowledge. My question is, if we centered some of these practices within our educational spaces, would our relationship with learning change? I would argue yes because our Westernized educational systems are so absorbed in hegemonic and individualistic praxis that we often disassociate learning from community and well-being. However, if we allowed for space to build personal relationships with our educators and viewed ourselves as educators as well, we could build a more intimate relationship with learning.

The Western style of learning has become a binary process. We believe that real learning occurs in sterile environments– contained by 4 white walls and dictated by a series of curriculums. But with the learning that Nonabozho emulates, understanding and recognizing the environment as an educator, how can we carry this process of learning within ourselves. We must first recognize that this process of learning has existed since time immemorial and work on building relationships based on this idea. Ask yourself, where do you learn? What has been the most impactful in your life and what did you take away from it? How does privilege and settler identity play into this idea of building relationships with your environment?

 

When we engage in these sorts of relationships with engaging in the world, we are simultaneously the basket and the basket weaver. This metaphor is based on the transformation processes that Kimmerer writes about, “The marvel of a basket is in its transformation, its journey from wholeness as a living plant to fragmented strands and back to wholeness again as a basket. A basket knows the dual powers of deconstruction and creation that shape the world. Strands once separated are rewoven into a new whole. The journey of a basket is also the journey of a people” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 256). Learning shapes us as individuals and we choose how to engage in learning. It is a continuous and dynamic system. We are the product of creation as we create the product. But engaging in the spaces like Nonabozho practices is not easy work. This work challenges the institutional practices that have been instilled with colonization and generations of violence.

 

Throughout this section of Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer discusses education and the difference between Western education and Native/Indigenous education. In the United States we mostly focus on Western education, as well as having a Western philosophy regarding nature. In the last two chapters, Kimmerer focuses on observing nature by just being, and ways of giving back to the land through planting trees. I would like to explore how Western philosophy and capitalism influence how we observe nature and how we give back to the land.

 

Kimmerer talks about in Old Growth Children, a man planting trees that once existed and were nature to that region but had been cut down by the timber industry. Currently, there is a campaign going around for planting trees. Trillion Tree Campaign was created by the United Nations Environmental Programme. How does this modern campaign relate to Franz Dolp planting trees? By planting trees do we somehow become closer to nature? What does it mean when Kimmerer refers to the trees as “Old Growth Children”? How does that differ with the capitalist/western view of trees? If we would change our perspective on trees and give them personhood, would we exploit them as much as we currently do?

 

In Witness to the Rain, Kimmerer talks about just being in nature and observing. How does our modern technology separate us from this? Even when people go into nature it is about taking photos and not observing. If we were to simply observe, what could we learn as a society? How does the capitalist/Western view point shape how we observe nature?