Braiding Sweetgrass and the Goddess of Creation

“For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives both material and spiritual, depended on it,’” says Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Caring for the land and reciprocity between humans and the wild is an essential theme in SkyWoman, a Haudenosaunee creation story that Kimmerer shares in her book. The story is about SkyWoman, the first woman or what she calls, “the original immigrant”, and it inspired me to do this linocut print. Here is a synopsis of the story:

In the beginning, there was no earth only a vast ocean and Skywoman who fell from the sky with a bundle of branches, fruits and seeds clutched in her hand. As she hurtled downwards, geese flew beneath her to break her fall. Nearing the water below, the Loons, Otters, Beavers and Fish of all kinds gathered together to try to find earth for her to stand on. Each creature dove to the bottom of the ocean but everyone found it far too deep except for the Muskrat, who came up to the top with a handful of mud which he spread over the back of Turtle for SkyWoman. SkyWoman was so moved by the extraordinary gifts of the animals, she sang and danced in thanksgiving and scattered the seeds she had brought and carefully tended each one until Turtle’s back turned into a lush landscape abundant with plants and fruits. From then on, all the animals were fed for generations by the fruits of SkyWoman’s original seeds and this generous landscape came to be known as Turtle Island, the original name for North America.

Carving some wildflowers into the linoleum

I love this idea of reciprocal care that is the focal point of this story. All too often we are made to believe that the “wild” is characterized by competition between species and survival-of-the-fittest. However, what this story shows, and what Kimmerer reveals in her book, is that survival of many creatures and plants has to do with symbiosis, or the phenomenon where species have interdependent relationships. She says many indigenous stories, just like this SkyWoman creation story, show how indigenous people have always recognized reciprocation and interdependence in nature, and have used this plant wisdom to guide their own reciprocal and interdependent human relationships.

Like Kimmerer, Susan Simard, renowned forest ecologist and author of Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (2021), also found scientific evidence there is a symbiotic relationship between trees in a forest, how they share nutrients and warn each other of predators through their root systems which are, in exchange, enhanced and made possible through a symbiotic relationship with fungi. Trees and fungi are in a cooperative collective mutually benefitting each other. There are so many other examples of symbiosis in nature such as coral and algae, clownfish and anemones or oxpeckers who eat ticks and parasites off of large mammals like rhinos and zebras and warn them of impending danger in return.

Noticing reciprocation in nature gives the wild more of a cooperative role in our imagination. Nature seems less brutal, more sensitive, with the capacity to engage in behavior that benefits the collective rather than focused solely on individual survival as we are lead to believe in science of the past. Nature becomes more of a subject rather than an object, a living agent with a consciousness, and in this way, it becomes much more difficult to be used at our own disposal. Perhaps once upon a time, a long time ago, long before science, it was with this awareness of nature’s true cooperative capacity that this folktale of SkyWoman came into being. I love the idea that folktales can arise from the landscape, and like the wild are alive with a consciousness too. They are seeking us and and not the other way around. Through our discovery of the folktale, if we choose to receive it’s wisdom, we are found.

Handmade 20” x 20.25” linocut print, black Cranfield Ink on Hosho Paper.

Ursula K. Le Guin, in her chapter, “The Beast in the Book” in Words are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books (2016) talks about the role myths and folktales have played in the human imagination, and the profound way they shape our psychology. Stories in which animal and human protagonists are close companions, help each other, and can easily communicate contributes to our sense of deep connection to the wild: “To be friends with the animals is to be a friend and a child of the world, connected to it, nourished by it, belonging to it” (28). She says, “Wilderness scares us because it is unknown, indifferent, dangerous, yet it is an absolute need to us; it is that animal otherness, that strangeness, older and greater than ourselves, that we must join, or rejoin, if we want to stay sane and stay alive” (34). This is what SkyWoman is about, the encounter between human and more-than-human worlds and how we need and belong to each other.

This linocut print shows SkyWoman in my imagination filled with native North American wildflowers, herbs and plants including: California Poppy, Cattails, Echinacea, Elderberries, Maple seeds, Mesquite, Dandelion, Prickly Pear Cactus, Valerian, and Wild Rose. I made this print for those who wish to be reminded of SkyWoman and this gorgeous landscape called Turtle Island and the careful tending, reciprocity and belonging to each other that is required for Turtle Island to be sustained.

References:

Kimmerer, Robin Wall (2014). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Le Guin, Ursula K. (2016). Words are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books. New York: Harper Perennial.

Simard, Susan (2021). Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Knopf.

Blog post cover Photo Credit: Jasmin Schreiber on Unsplash

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