Indigenous wisdom meets Western science

New York Times best-selling author Robin Wall Kimmerer, Distinguished Teaching Professor and Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, discussed the importance of engaging with the natural world through multiple lenses during a two-day residency at Skidmore.

A revered plant ecologist and a 2022 MacArthur Fellow, Kimmerer’ books include “Gathering Moss,” “Braiding Sweetgrass,” and her most recent, “The Serviceberry.” During her visit, she delivered two well-attended lectures and met in small group settings with students, faculty, and staff. Encompassing science, art, history, language, sustainability, and justice, her poetic and inclusive messages resonated with the Skidmore community. 

Kimmerer’s visit also embodies the cross-disciplinary approach Skidmore takes to the sciences and discovery. That spirit of inquiry is also at the heart of the state-of-the-art Billie Tisch Center for Integrated Sciences, which was completed last year. 

In her lecture “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” on March 27 and her talk “The Fortress, the River, and the Garden: A New Metaphor for Knowledge Symbiosis” the following day, Kimmerer spoke about multiple ways of knowing and seeing. 
  
“For me as an Indigenous scientist and researcher, writer, and teacher, three strands are represented in ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ — knowing the tools of Western science, the wisdom of Indigenous knowledge, and the teachings of the plants themselves, because both Western and Indigenous sciences are trying to understand what the plants already know,” she said to the capacity crowd gathered in Gannett Auditorium on March 27.

A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer described an Indigenous worldview that land “is a library, a teacher, and a source of knowledge.”  
  
In much of STEM education, nature is seen as object — as a natural resource or as property, she explained during her second lecture in Filene Recital Hall, attended by many faculty. “Through the Indigenous lens, the land is a source of identity, humans are inseparable from the land, and the land is a sustainer. … Are we as educators educating our students for a human-dominated world or for a symbiotic relationship with other species? Are we consumers, or are we citizens? We can invite our students to think about that.” 
  
Her experience as an undergraduate student majoring in botany at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry was eye-opening, she recalled, as she was the only Native person and one of the only women in the program at the time. 
  
“I had no vocabulary of resistance. I was alone. There wasn’t anybody else there who was going to stand up for Indigenous science or Indigenous ways of knowing,” she said. “It has shaped everything that I’ve done since that time as a campaigner for inclusivity in academia. … I’m very proud to tell you that right down the hall from where my professor said ‘Miss Wall, that is not science,’ we have today the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.”

As we find ourselves on the brink of climate catastrophe, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) — embracing different ways of knowing — could make all the difference, Kimmerer suggested. Citing estimates that most of the world’s remaining ecological diversity exists in Indigenous homelands — and almost all of them are threatened by economic expansion and development — she called for intellectual pluralism and diversity of thought.

Change can happen when we make it happen.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Best-selling author, educator, and plant ecologist

“We find ourselves embedded and harnessed to, in many cases, an economy which is relentless in asking, ‘What more can we take?’ When I think the question that we need is, ‘What does the earth ask of us?’ Yes, my students still have to learn plant names, molecular structures. But this is what I really want them to learn: How will we reciprocate the gifts of the earth with our own gifts? 
  
There are many powerful tools that we humans have for showing gratitude and reciprocating care for the earth, she said. “Doing good science is a powerful way to care for the earth, but so is doing transformative art that changes people’s minds, regenerative agriculture, soil care, and circular economies. 
  
“One particular gift we humans have is language,” Kimmerer said, “and it seems particularly appropriate here at Skidmore, where you have so many endeavors that celebrate the written word across disciplines, as well as the scientific disciplines.” 
  
While the English language uses the word “it” to describe living beings that are not human, the Potawatomi language uses special grammar to distinguish all beings who are alive, including plants and animals, from inanimate objects. 
 
“Could we perhaps heal our commodification, our thinking about land as property, natural resources, if we changed our grammar?” she asked, offering several examples of how our words and perspective inform our relationships and actions.  
  
“Whether we call the world a world of gifts or we say natural resources … words matter,” she said.

Kimmerer is also co-founder and past president of the traditional ecological knowledge section of the Ecological Society of America, and she is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Humans and Nature. Her research focuses on mosses and restoration ecology. 
  
Erika Schielke, senior teaching professor of biology, led the effort to bring Kimmerer to campus as a distinguished scholar in STEM. 
  
“In reading Dr. Kimmerer’s work, one of the aspects that stands out most strongly to me is the sense of joy,” she said. “Her writing captures the joy, wonder, and gratitude with which she approaches her research.”