"Planting Sweetgrass"
"Tending Sweetgrass"
"Picking Sweetgrass"
"Braiding Sweetgrass"
"Burning Sweetgrass"
This being week 9 I had the class divide up in groups to discuss each of the "Picking Sweetgrass" section's first five chapters, and then form groups with someone in charge of each chapter, to think about how the argument flows. The chapters - each of which could be a free-standing essay - take the reader from experiencing the love of a garden as it feeds us to an appreciation of the synergy of the "Three Sisters" (corn, beans and squash - and a fourth, the gardener), to the work of the Pigeon family weavers of black ash baskets to a study finding that sweetgrass is healthiest near human communities who use it and eventually to to a chapter on living as a human citizen of the "Maple Nation."
What I hoped students would see is the way Kimmerer moves outward from thinking about gardens as the exception in human relationships with other species to something more like the norm - though embattled. In gardening human beings can feel a reciprocity of care with the plants they tend. In planting and caring for the Three Sisters, all species are nourished - and all are needed, as, without human beings, these domesticated species would perish. In members of a Potawatomi family of basket weavers finding black ash trees willing to become baskets, asking their permission to fell and then laboring to make them into a thing of beauty (all these images are from their FaceBook page), we learn of the responsibility one should feel toward the materials we use. In that and the sweetgrass chapter we learn of plant populations which thrive over generations because
of wise human use - and how the loss of those human partners devastates their plant partners too. And learning that maples populations are being driven northward out of their traditional regions by climate change we are called to recognize our responsibility for them, who give us so much, and to use our gifts to protect them. 
It is - or should be - gardens everywhere, humans sharing our gifts in reciprocal relations with other peoples, from the apparently local and private sphere of a vegetable garden to the planet threatened by climate calamity.
Kimmerer's stories are each so compelling, so full of anecdote and insight and song, that on a first reading you don't really notice the deft way her moral claim on us deepens and broadens. So I wasn't that surprised that students were caught on the details of the particular chapters. I didn't discern just how skilfully the book is assembled until my first rereading.
What did surprise me - though it probably shouldn't have - was that student accounts of their discussions and analyses were still caught in the language of the earlier sections of the book. Human people, they expounded, are able to learn from and even communicate with other species (plants as teachers!), to observe and respect them in a spirit of gratitude and reciprocity. Yes, yes and yes. But this section of the book is about picking sweetgrass. The basket chapter starts with the chopping down of a tree! As students read, this section of the book culminates in a discussion of the "Honorable Harvest."Just about everything we use is the result of another's life, but that simple reality is rarely acknowledged in our society. (148)
Our appreciations were still from the stance of a species separate from the rest of nature: we observe, we thank, we even care for. But the basic fact that we use, that we take life to further our own, remains too difficult a thought. Committed to reducing, reusing and recycling we wish we could find a way to have no ecological footprint at all. The burden of "Picking Sweetgrass" is that wise use is not only possible but necessary. The community which Kimmerer calls the "democracy of species" (173) demands that we give but also desires that we take. It wants and needs us to be part of it.
Kimmerer wouldn't be surprised at our inability to imagine use as anything but parasitic. Early in Braiding Sweetgrass she mentions a class for environmental protection majors where students were flummoxed when asked to describe "positive interactions between people and land" (6). In this section, she has something more like our class in view, telling of a similarly stymied "graduate writing workshop on relationships to the land." 
The students all demonstrated a deep respect and affection for nature. They said that nature was the place wher ethey experienced the greatest sense of belonging and well-being. They professed without reservation that they loved the earth. And then I asked them, "Do you think the arth loves you back?" No one was willing to answer that. ... Here was a room full of writers, passionately wallowing in unrequited love of nature. (124)