This winter, I read three books that gave me an insight into the culture that we inherited from the Native Americans who called North America home long before the Europeans "discovered" this place.
Dwight Jon Zimmerman’s Saga of the Sioux (Henry Holt and Company 2011) is an adaptation of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee that sets the scene by describing how Native Americans’ culture and traditions in North America were shattered in the time of Sitting Bull as the U.S. Army invaded the last remnants of Native territory in the U.S. in order to create roads for settlers headed toward the gold fields. This 200-page book was designed for younger readers, but it paints a clear picture of this critical period in the Native American experience.
In Becoming Kin (Broadleaf Books, 2022), Patty Krawec takes a longer view, describing how even the earliest European settlement in what is now Canada and the U.S. wreaked havoc on longstanding native American communities, essentially taking their ownership of their tribal lands away from them. Krawec, whose ancestral roots are in the Anishinaabe, as well as Ukraine, lives in Canada. Her book is subtitled An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future. It tells how European settlers took over Native American lands, pushing Indigenous communities from their homelands and forcing them to re-settle on lands controlled by the European settlers. It is a powerful story of disenfranchisement of an entire culture and a call for today’s generation to recover their identity and kinship with each other and their culture.
At the same time, though, Krawec gives us an important insight into how Indigenous Americans experienced--and continue to experience--their relationship to the world around them. She demonstrates how they see nature as a community of living things that require respect at every level and how we humans are part of that community.
That relationship with Nature is the focus of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which has the subtitle Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. In a time when the environment seems to be increasingly threatened by human technology and mis-use of the living world around us, Braiding Sweetgrass has powerful lessons from our indigenous neighbors about how to live within nature—as a part of nature--rather than on nature. It is an important book that brings to life a perspective on our relationship with the world in which we live.
