Robin Wall Kimmerer And Alice Vincent, Live at Conway Hall
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Gosh, you're all very well behaved, aren't you? Good evening, everyone. I'm Alice Vincent, and I'm a writer and an author of books including Why Women Grow. And I would love to welcome you all to Conway Hall for this very special 5x15 event with Robin Wall-Kimmerer. Yes, yes, yes. APPLAUSE

Five by 15 are delighted to host the second event with Robin after her sellout lecture at Kew Gardens last night. And I have heard words that there were no fewer than two standing ovations.

And I think it's fair to say that we're all pretty pleased about it too. I will be speaking with her this evening about her incredible work as a botanist, writer and a thinker, as a person who has truly transformed how people navigate their interactions with the world around them. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Robin. She is a mother, a scientist, a decorated professor and an enrolled member of the citizen Potawatomi Nation.

She is a professor of the environmental biology and the founder and director of the Centre for Native Peoples and the Environment. Robin's work celebrates our reciprocal relationship with nature and shows us how to awaken our ecological consciousness by learning from indigenous ways of knowing.

Her internationally best-selling books, Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss, not only teach us about the biology of different organisms, but show us other, more vital ways of living in the world. Robin's extraordinary books are on sale tonight from Newham Bookshop at the back of the room, and she is happy to sign copies after the event.

There will also be time for you to put your questions to Robin towards the end of our conversation tonight. So do have them ready when we open things up to the audience. And we will have some microphones circling. There are quite a few of us, so please wait for that microphone. And I'd just like to say if you do have something that you would like to share with Robin that maybe isn't necessarily a question, if you could save it for the sign-in queue.

And so without further ado, please give a very warm welcome to Robin Wall-Kimmerer. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's so nice to see you again. Good to be with you and with you all in this really charming space. It's fantastic.

So I've had the very great privilege of spending a bit of time with Robin this week. And I wanted to start with something that you said the other night, which was that when you begin writing a book, you like to have a companion from the non-human world to keep you company. And I would love to start right at the beginning of all of this, you know, with regards to when you first started writing Robin.

first with gathering moss and then braiding sweetgrass. And of course, you're an academic and you have written lots of things. But with regards to the book, what did that all begin? And when did you know that you had found your companions? You know, I think it probably comes from being a botanist and a naturalist that human beings are very interesting species, but they're not the only ones. They're not the only ones.

And so oftentimes, I just need a storytelling companion in the form of a plant or a place or sometimes an animal that can carry the story beyond the human realm, that really comes from a relational place. You know, what does that being mean to me? And they're often...

We don't really know that much about them. And so it creates an imaginative pathway to be able to imagine what they might be thinking or experiencing as well. And how do I know it's the right one? You know, it is a big part of my writing process. I'll just know one. I want to write about this, but who will it be? Who will carry that? Right.

And, you know, botanists have this, we like to take collective field trips where we all meet up and go looking for things. We call them a foray. A foray? Yes, we'll go on a moss foray or a plant foray. I want to go on a moss foray. That sounds great.

I might piggyback on tahe and we can go mosfore. Here we go. What I feel like I also have to do is to go on a metafore. Oh, I love it. I love it. I will never look at that word ever again in the same way. I have to find those companions who can help me interrogate whatever question it is I have.

I would love to know the circumstances in which you wrote those books. What does, you know, where were you at a certain desk? Were you roaming around? Were you in your garden? Where did you write? Where did it begin? That's hard to say because I feel like I'm always writing. Yeah. But I usually write at my desk and

In the woods or in the garden. I really have to go back and forth. And sometimes when I'm on a writing retreat, one of my favorite places to write is in my kayak. Really? Did you hear the hush then? Do you write in your kayak? No.

Really, if you take a clipboard, you can put it right on the top there. Does it not get wet? Well, maybe. Yeah, but I also write longhand. Do you? I do. By hand? Yes. Wow.

Yes. Wow. Yes, on golden rod yellow paper with a purple pen. Oh, my goodness. I think we probably all have those little prescriptions and rituals that help us, not always, but when I'm really being, okay, now I'm going to be writing. Now we're going to do it. I'm not just going to quietly look on Twitter. I'm like, I'm going to crack on. All right. It's got to be that yellow pad. Wow. I didn't know you were part of the yellow pad community.

Do we have a community? Yes, I wrote a piece about it once. This is total tangent. We will get back to Robin. But you're in company of like Barack Obama. Lots of good eggs write their books longhand on yellow pads. And we don't really have them in England. So it's, you know, like the yellow legal pad you guys have in America. We don't have them quite the same thing in England, but it's a romanticized thing. I can send you some.

Yes, please. I'm going to hold you to that. But let's talk about Goldenrod and Aster, because your work does come from the intersection of so many things. Botany, poetry, Western European science and indigenous knowledge. And I feel like I do want to find out how writing has helped you navigate being in the middle of these things.

But I feel like there is a pivotal moment in Braiding Sweetgrass where you see how splintered the world expected them to be. And I was wondering if you might be able to read a bit from that for us. I'd love to. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for choosing that in our chat. I mean, I would happily sit here while you read the whole book, to be honest. This comes from the chapter called Aster's and Goldenrod.

The girl in the picture holds a slate with her name and class of 75 chalked in. A girl the color of deerskin with long dark hair and inky unreadable eyes that meet yours and won't look away. I remember that day. I was wearing the new plaid shirt that my parents had given me, an outfit I thought to be the hallmark of all foresters. When I looked back at the photo later in life, it was a puzzle to me.

I recall being elated to be going to college, but there is no trace of that in the girl's face. Even before I arrived at school, I had all my answers prepared for the freshman intake interview. I wanted to make a good first impression. There were hardly any women at the forestry school in those days, and certainly none who looked like me. The advisor peered at me over his glasses and said, so why do you want to major in botany?

His pencil was poised over the registrar's form. How could I answer? How could I tell him that I was born a botanist, that I had shoeboxes of seeds and piles of pressed leaves under my bed, that I'd stopped my bike along the road to identify a new species, that plants colored my dreams, that the plants had chosen me? So I told him the truth.

I was proud of my well-planned answer. It's freshman sophistication apparent to anyone. The way it showed that I already knew some plants and their habitats, that I had thought deeply about their nature, and was clearly well-prepared for college work. I told him that I chose botany because I wanted to learn why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. I'm sure I was smiling then in my red plaid shirt, but he was not.

He laid down his pencil as if there was no need to record what I had said. Miss Wall, he said, fixing me with a disappointed smile. I must tell you that that is not science. That is not at all the sort of thing with which botanists concern themselves. But he promised to put me right. I'll enroll you in general botany so you can learn what it is. And so it began. Thank you so much. Yeah, yeah.

I am counting every round of applause because I do want to beat Q. So I think we're up to three so far, which is great. Was it writing that helped you occupy that space that people so clearly struggle to accept there is a crossover, that Venn diagram? Or was it something else?

Writing definitely helped me. And, you know, when I think of the trajectory of my writing, it's as much a conversation with myself as it is with anyone, as perhaps most of our writing is trying to, for me, make sense of all those different ways of knowing and how they come together.

And certainly in my career as an academic, working in an environment which tends, quite honestly, to be a bit of an intellectual monoculture. We all speak science and other ways of knowing are not generally embraced. And so this has been an internal dialogue for me since that first day of going to university. Like, wow.

You don't think this way? And I must not, is really what I was being told. So, yes, it is my working out that braid of sweetgrass. What does it mean to carry traditional knowledge? What does it mean to carry scientific knowledge and to be listening to the voices of plants? And how do you make those whole? It's very much about a journey of...

to wholeness, to bring all of those things together rather than keeping them apart, which is what is, I think, the expected pathway. Yeah. I mean, I feel like the entirety of this book is dedicated to knitting, to braiding those things together to show how actually they complement each other, that they're not in competition. Was that the realization, that journey to wholeness, was there a point at which you kind of

that maybe you were closer towards it than you were further away? To the wholeness? Yeah.

such a thoughtful question you know I think I never lost the wholeness I know I never lost the wholeness but there were certainly times long times in my life where I regret to say now that I became very quiet because I knew there was no one else in the room who thought the way I did or would even understand what I needed to say because it was coming from such a different philosophical premise and

And when I look at my younger self and realize how often I just said, no one will understand. And so I just did what I needed to do to have the currency in the scientific worldview, all the while knowing what I was being asked to leave behind, but not leaving it behind. Right. But gosh, what a duplicity, not duplicity sounds pejorative, but what a lot to carry to have to be quiet.

That's isolating. Oh, yes, it is. Yes, it is. And, you know, from so many different levels, not only being in almost, well, in my entire career, the only Indigenous scientist in my circles. Thank goodness.

that's changing. I was going to say, is that changing? Oh, it's so exciting. Good. Yeah. So exciting that I can now sit in a room full of indigenous scholars. So cool. Yeah, it is. But that had, that wasn't my experience coming up, which also, you know, really galvanized for me, um,

the imperative of making that so right for others. Um, right. That we don't always have to be alone. No. Yeah. But writing Braiding Sweetgrass was for me a real, um, feeling of sort of coming home and saying, I'm,

I'm doing this. I am going to be explaining to, in a sense, my audiences were, that I had in my mind, were my scientific colleagues for, you know, decades of dismissal on their part to be able to make a case that they would understand. But at the same time, I have to be storytelling in such a way that my Indigenous community will be saying, yes, yes.

That's true. So to be bilingual, I have to speak both of those languages and meet both communities where they are. Right. And language is a huge part of the book. You know, you talk about teaching yourself language.

the language of your ancestors and that you paint this amazing picture of all the post-it notes around your house. And I was very touched when we were backstage and we were talking about your grandchildren and I asked what they called you and they call you the... Anomalous, yeah. It's such a wonderful word. Yeah. Do you... When I was refreshing my memory of that chapter, I was wondering, oh, I wonder if Robin speaks to... How's that going for Robin? How's that... How is it going? Mm-hmm.

My language study has slowed down a bit. I've been... You've been pretty busy. I've been busy with...

And mostly what my language study right now is focused on plant names. Right. Because that's something that I can use all the time. Yeah. I might not be able to talk to my Potawatomi community, but I can always talk to the plants. And they're always there to teach me. The plants themselves are like the post-it notes. Yeah.

Oh, there you are, Miss Gwim the Ghost. Amazing. There's something I did want to touch on there, and you raised it right at the beginning, and I know that it's what you were lecturing on at Q last night, but I would love it if we could share with people, because I would really love to change people's minds just a tiny bit, if they took anything away from tonight, in how to talk to plants and how to talk about plants and what pronouns to use. And I was wondering if you would mind...

Talking a little bit about that. I would love that. Please do. I would love that. And it was interesting to be talking with my botany colleagues at Kew yesterday about this as well. Because, you know, in a setting like a herbarium or in a university and sometimes in a garden, we refer to those plants as objects, as if they were specimens, often for ornament or for commerce, you know,

But in the Potawatomi way and in my own way of thinking, they are persons. They are subject, not object. When my colleagues take our students on a field trip, they will be saying, what is that object?

What is that? And I will say, who is that? And just that one shift makes people say, what? What? Who is that? But then they fall into it as well. It's really addictive. It is. And you feel relationship to speak of them. Who is that?

is that ignites curiosity. You don't want to just know their scientific name and the habitat where they live. Who are you? And so that's a quite simple way to acknowledge the personhood of other beings, plants in particular,

But I've actually been doing some work with proposing new pronouns for plants. Would you like to share them? Indeed. And to share them, and I want to hear from you all as well about how that sits with you. Because, you know, in...

In English, let's say we... You like daffodils too, right? Yeah, yeah. Don't we remember that? Yes. So for those daffodils, we would say it is blooming. Mm-hmm.

We it the whole living world when we speak English. But would I ever say it about a member of my family or my own species? I would not. No, no, no. It would be so rude. It would be dehumanizing. Right, objectifying them. And yet we feel free to do that with all the rest of the living world.

Let's just stop right there. Isn't that why we are where we are in our relationship to the earth today? Because we've itted it. I think it's no mistake that English is the language of global capitalism because we it the natural world. And so long story short, what I was trying to think about is would there be a way to take the animacy of the Potawatomi language that does not allow us to it English

Anyone. We speak of those daffodils and those robins singing with the same grammar that we use for members of our own family. Right. Because they're our family. Because they are. Right. And so the pronoun that my language teacher and I came up with is derived from this word that means a being of the earth, which is bimadisi aki. Okay. Okay.

We're not going to use that. I was going to say, I mean, we could spell it out. We could try. All together now. Right. But aki, the last part of that phrase, means the earths.

And that little sound ki at the end of aki, K-I, is largely unclaimed in English. So couldn't we say of that birch tree, ki is growing by the riverside. I love that. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. It's an easy switch. We can have he, she, ki, and it, and whatever other pronouns we need. Let's all take that away. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, I love it. And then when people start telling me, well, you know, ki, of course, is another pronunciation of chi, of life force. Oh, that's good. And then a Navajo woman just told me, you know, that it means my mother's house. Ah.

I heard today, we were talking about this with others, it's the word in Japanese for a living tree. There's something special about that phoneme of a living being. There's lots of such examples. And then I knew it was the right sound when we go to the plural.

Because we need, we have to have a plural. And one of the ways we pluralize things in Potawatomi is to add an N. N. So then you would have kin. Oh, it's perfect. Then we would have kin. It's perfect. Right. And it was one of those moments when, you know, those moments where you think,

It's a pow-pow-y of a thought. It is. It is. My son has a... No, go on, go on. We can speak of the living world as kin, you know? Kin are growing in the garden. It's absolutely perfect. It's transformative. Are you going to write about that? I have written about it a bit, yes. I have a nice piece in Orion magazine called...

called Speaking of Nature, which is about that. And yes, in some of my forthcoming work, I am committed to just using it throughout. Amazing. Well, I'm so glad to hear that. You know, one of the things that is so remarkable about braiding sweetgrass is that, and gathering moss as well, is that they have this sort of fantastic texture.

plant-like patience to them. And to me, it reminds me of like an unfurling fiddlehead or the slow creep and resilience of moss, but that they have reached people and they've reached people slowly, but with great force and to the tune of hundreds of thousands of copies from a small independent publisher and then Penguin. But by being passed on

And for me, that feels so fitting because the whole book is about reciprocity and gifting and then a lot of spine in your work. But I was wondering, number one, how that felt for you. And number two, if there was a moment at which from an author perspective that you were like, oh, wait, it's, do you know what I mean? When you bumped into the enormity of your book somewhere. Mm-hmm.

When did you realize you were a big deal, Robin? You know, first I would like to say that when we look at the trajectory of breeding sweetgrass, it is, as a biologist, very satisfying to see it's an exponential growth curve. And what we know in biology is that exponential growth curve happens when you start from a really small number, but then they double.

And they double, and they double. And the way that Milkweed, my original publisher, continued publisher in the States, is that people are going to the bookstore, the booksellers report, they buy one and think, oh yeah, I'll dip into this. And they come back the next month and buy half a dozen because they want to give it to people. It's almost an identity marker, like,

I think you're going to get this. I think this will mean something to you. So the book is being passed hand to hand. And I love that because of its authenticity, because of the relationships that it creates, but also fascinatingly, that's how Sweetgrass moves.

Sweetgrass does make seeds, but they're mostly low viability. They don't fly very far. And so in our indigenous communities, sweetgrass is passed hand to hand. You dig up a little clump and you give it to someone you care about who will tend it well. And that's just what people are doing with the book. And so that...

exchange between the plant and the passage of the book is really gratifying. So great. Can we do a fun experiment? Sure. Can we have a show of hands? Who here was given braiding sweetgrass by somebody? There we go. And who here has given it to somebody? There we go. You just made the exponential curve. Yeah. But when, you know,

I feel like from a data perspective, maybe you were showing a chart or something, but did you sort of... When were you aware that this was happening? I actually remember the night that I...

I won't say that I understood it, but that I understood something was happening. Right. And I was giving a talk in Oregon as it happens. And, you know, after having talked to lots of intimate audiences, it was a huge crowd. And there was just this wave of energy of people like, we need this. We need what is in writing, Sweetgrass.

And it was like a physical tidal wave coming toward me. And it was frightening, actually. Really? Yeah. It does sound quite intense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you were saying that people have taken inspiration to act and do things as a result of the book, right? Such as?

I get mail virtually every day of somebody saying, I have answered the call because Braiding Sweetgrass is a call to action, right? I'm answering that call, but my reciprocity is fill in the blank. I've just written a song and I'd like to share it with you. I'm making this art and I'd like to share it with everybody. I decided that what was so important

is that everybody has opportunity to be in touch with the natural world. So I'm working in a community garden or creating a forest preschool. Um,

So much music has been made. Really? Oh, yeah. I've been working with musicians, sharing text with them for string quartets, for choral presentations that are wanting to amplify this. I think one of my most satisfying responses was when a financier from Wall Street wrote to say,

I can't do this anymore. Wow. Robin. I can't do this anymore. And, and said, I'm, I'm yeah. Yeah. I thought, good on you. And he, in fact, he took, he wrote to say he was taking all of his wealth and buying an organic farm up in the Hudson Valley. Um,

I guess one other one there that I would share that's really deeply meaningful to me, in those times where I suppose all of us as writers sometimes, do you have these doubts? Do you ever have these doubts, like, is my writing making a difference? Oh my goodness, that's the perpetual state I exist in the entire time. With brief interruptions, which made me feel like, okay, this is fine, and then it's back to the doubt. Right, right.

So, because clearly you have read the book, you might remember that chapter called Burning Cascade Head, which is this beautiful bluff overlooking the northern Pacific that the Native people used to burn as a beacon to summon the salmon home. It was just this beautiful ecological and spiritual act. The Nature Conservancy now owns that place.

And it has not burned in more than 100 years. And they should. It needs to happen for the birds and the butterflies, but they haven't.

And a few years after Braiding Sweetgrass came out, I got a little video in my email where they had burned the headland. And they said, you know, scientifically, we've known for years that we ought to do this. It's the right thing to do. But it's challenging with regulations and et cetera. So we didn't. But once we had the story out,

We had to. Yeah. We had no choice. We had to restore fire there. Just amazing. Yeah. The power of story. Right. It wasn't scientific information that changed people's minds. It was a story. And so I keep that one in my pocket. I bet. And the moving thing about it is that it feels like a restoration of a culture that

And the heritage that Braiding Sweetgrass is so deft and gracious in explaining the atrocity of the eradication of what happened to indigenous people, pretty much within living memory. And the sense of loss in the book, while never overbearing, is nevertheless present, the grief in it.

And the other day we did talk about grief and I found it very powerful. And I think we're living in actually very grievous times. I think a lot of us are grieving. I think we've been grieving for quite a long time. And you said something about the power of grief, which I found actually quite hopeful. And I wonder if you could speak to that. We are, I think, as a society, grief averse, right?

I don't want to go there or I'll go there briefly. The requisite time and then like Victorians will shrug it off and carry on. I'll get through my seven stages. Bye. Yeah. Right. And so I think that ecological grief, climate grief, grief for the loss of our, our plant and animal companions, right? If we're not grieving, then,

We're not paying attention. Right. Right. And so to me, grief is very healthy because it means you are paying attention and have a sense of ecological compassion for the losses that are happening for the more than human world and for our own species as well. Right. Right. For all of us. And so to me, grief, we need to let grief lay us low. We need to feel that.

Not so that we can stay fallen, but because for me anyway, it helps me get back up to say, no, the reason that I'm feeling this way is I love so much. You know, grief being that mirror of the intensity of that love. And then so the grief reminds me of the love, which helps me roll up my sleeves and do what I can. Thank you.

You know, you write so strongly of your Potawatomi heritage in regards to the caretaking and the raising of plants. And to the extent that you kind of, you had to bump into repeatedly the fact that not everyone was raised knowing how to do this. Could you give some examples of when you kind of did do that and how it changed you as a teacher and as a person and a thinker? And you realize, oh, not everyone knows how to

taught plants in this way or grow plants in this way. Yeah. And I'll preface that by saying that there were times in my life when I didn't know that it was a Potawatomi thing. It's just what we did. I wouldn't have said, well, this is part of traditional ecological knowledge. No, it's just what you do. Yeah. No one's like, oh yeah, my mum taught me that because this is this. It's just how you do things. Exactly. Right. And then to come to the realisation, prime

primarily as a teacher, because as I was teaching botany and ecology, I would use various metaphors or examples with my students. And especially as time progressed, I would get a blank stare like this.

Like, I don't know what you're talking about. And that kind of feedback was really helpful to me to know that my own experience of the plant world in particular was definitely not theirs. And then that helped me see more broadly what we as a society have forgotten about being in relationship to the living world.

And in that way, you know, being a teacher, I think has so helped me as a writer. Because every time you're teaching, it's an experiment with language, isn't it? It's an experiment with examples. Does this connect or doesn't it? And so I...

I think that really helped me. You know, there's a way in which, both in Braiding Sweetgrass and in Gathering Moss, that the trajectory of almost all of these essays is like a field trip. I teach in the field all the time. I think, well, let's all gather up, be sure we have our water bottles and our raincoats, let's get comfortable, right? And then we're going to walk along a known path.

and look at some familiar things, and then it becomes less and less familiar. The path becomes much more overgrown, and pretty soon we're bushwhacking. But that idea of meeting the audience where I think they are, and then taking them to someplace they never expected to go is kind of a helpful journey for me. It's such a perfect summation of what your work does, I think.

Even if you're the kind of person who reads a blurb, I'm not a blurb reader, but even if you were and you thought what you were picking up, the places that you take the reader are always quite surprising. And one of those I did want to talk about was motherhood and mothering and what it is to be a mother, even if you don't necessarily have human children.

I also really love that, you know, in your formal bio, you are a mother before all else, all very many accomplished things. Why is that? Well, I...

I very, of course, purposely put that first because I'm trying to topple a little bit of that hierarchy of what is important in life. You know, that first and foremost, to me, it's our relationships and the gifts that we carry and share. So to me, being a mother is my most important role. And as an academic...

Well, any of us, I suppose, whatever our field, we know that struggle to balance the demands of profession and career and work life against the demands of being a mother. So I want to put those first.

And writing so much about mothering was something I really debated about in the book. It wasn't my intention to write from that perspective, but of course it kept

creeping in. And as, as you know, so many writing mentors will tell us, pay attention to what you're not writing about because you're going to write about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so for me, that mirror of what is it to be a good mother to my children and to my community is that that same kind of energy is very much what is it to care for the earth and

and the reciprocal of that to be so palpably experiencing how the earth cares for me. It's not just empty words that we say Mother Earth, Shkak Mikwe, that really feels very present for me. So I didn't necessarily think that my readers were going to get being mothered by the earth right away,

But we all know what it is like to have a mother. And so that was an on-ramp, in a way, to talk about compassion, generosity, nurture, and then to see that we see that in the natural world as well. Braiding Sweetgrass came out 10 years ago, since then you've had three grandchildren. You've written about what it's like to be a mother. What is it like to be a grandmother in regards to the earth? Mm-hmm.

It's so different. Is it? It is. You know, I get such joy from seeing my grandchildren engage in

With the land in just that joyful way that children do. They know, you know, they know. They know deeper than we do. We forget. Yes, they do. And so it makes me really mindful of the ways in which we appear to be teaching people not to be in relationship to the earth. Or telling people that things are dirty is just...

It's got to stop. It's got to stop. Don't get dirty. Right, right. Don't pick the flowers. That stricture in particular, like, what do you mean?

What do you mean don't pick the flowers? How are you going to love them if you don't pick them and smell them, eat them, and put those little wilted things in a vase like my little four-year-old granddaughter? She can't go anywhere. And I really should carry a little vase. Yeah, you're going to have to get some sort of portable water bottle solution. I am. And what joy that brings me. Yeah, I bet. Yeah. And I will also say that part of that...

The difference in that relationship is also thinking about Potawatomi heritage and the way that that will be carried by my grandchildren. You know, they're very young, but they know some Potawatomi words. Do they? And they say thank you to the plants all the time. So that feels really important to me as an act of resistance against all things.

of those forces of colonization and assimilation to be able to say when my little grandson says, nope, my son, eating Manon and Manoman for breakfast, they look like, yes, you are. Yeah. I also love that story because it shows the radicalism of mothering, the radicalism of grandmothering, the radicalism of teaching of what people would have called old wives tales, the value and the importance and the

You know, people are so, as you said, you questioned whether you should write about it that much. And yet here you are making a resistance, a reaction to everything that has been lost, the things that people try to eradicate, and you are putting it through this incredibly generous, very domestic, innate care. That's so cool. It's really cool.

I'm going to ask Robin one more question and then we're going to move to your questions. So get thinking. This is something that I suspect you are asked a lot, but especially with your mentioning of colonialism there and we are living through some incredibly dark times. It feels like a lot of that darkness is coming as a result of land-based greed and colonisation. And

You have been thinking and teaching and writing for so long. And I suppose I would love to know, where do you find strength and resilience? And dare I say it, hope? Does it come from the land? Does it come from the things you were taught? Where does it come from? And where might we be able to find some of it? Mm-hmm.

It's a poignant question to think about where does that come from? And my own guidance certainly comes from the land, the strengths of the land. You know, some of my favorite plants, some of my favorite places to see plants are in toxic waste, quite honestly. Look at you, you know, the resilience, the creativity. They give me strength. But I feel also incredibly fortunate that

To have ancestral teachings, those moments when I can feel those ancestors so present. Really? So present. And I'll try to make this brief, but we have a teaching actually that I write about a bit in Braiding Sweetgrass that talks about this dark time.

It's this long story of prophecy. But the prophecy comes up to this particular point in time and talks about the time when after land loss, after language loss, after our children were stolen from us, after all of those things that happened, we will come to a time when you can no longer dip a cup into the creek to drink.

How long since you have drunk wild water? Yeah. When the air is too thick to breathe. And when our plant and animal relatives turn their faces away from us. Mm-hmm.

Indeed, you know. We're told that that was going to happen. Well, here we are. Yeah. Right? But in those teachings, it also says that in this time, all the world's people, led by the indigenous people, but all the world's people will stand at this fork in the road. And we have to decide what it is, which path we want, this beautiful, soft, green path, or this black, burnt, dead end.

And the power of this prophecy seems pretty obvious. Let's just go dancing down that green path. That's what we want. So we can't. We have to turn around and walk back along that ancestral path and pick up what was left for us. Wow.

And then when we do it, when we all do it, when we pick up our stories, when we pick up our language, when we pick up our ethics, and we pick up our responsibility for our more-than-human relatives, and we pick those all up, and then when we meet again at that fork in the road, we can go down that green path because we have what we need to make that green world. And to me, that teaching...

keeps me going because what our teachers tell us is we are those people. We are those people of the seventh fire, that each of us has this responsibility to pick up what is ours and what is that? For me, I sort of use the tool of saying, what do I love too much to lose? That's what I'm going to pick up. And if we all did that, there we go. Well, we'd drop a lot less as well. Yes, we would because we'd know the right thing to pick.

That's very helpful. You can have that one for free. Very helpful. So that is for me something I so often rely on to say, yep, this is the time of that prophecy and this is our work. So it's having a sense of purpose, especially a sense of purpose that was sort of sanctioned for the last thousand years. Like, this is what you need to do.

is really helpful. And that relates to hope in that, I don't, this probably sounds terrible, but I don't really get hope. No, well, that's why I was like, dare I say hope? Because it's a problematic word. To me, at least, I'd rather hear about what you have to say about it.

well, I want to hear what you have to say about that. Yes. That this notion of hope is so vague. Hope for what? You know, what that outcome is. Well, I hope that someone else will deal with it. Well, maybe if I hope enough, like, no, no, no, we have to do. Right. Exactly. And for me, it isn't so much about hope as it is about love. Um, because that is absolutely within my control. Um,

You know, I can, when, you know, a family member is sick, I hope they get better. But really what I do is just love them as hard as I can. And that also is what keeps me going. Love instead of hope. Yeah, I love that. Thank you. Who is going to be brave enough to ask the first question?

Right, we have four at the start. I saw this person with the white T-shirt first. Thank you very much, Robin, for a very interesting talk. Got a lot from it. I was curious to know how much, if any, people like, women like Rachel Carson, Candice Peart, Oracle Girl Jacqueline, has influenced you

Yeah, I think all of us are in the debt of those who have come before us.

blazing the way, giving us examples. Rachel Carson is a wonderful example, of course, of a woman scientist who stepped outside what it was that she was expected to do. Especially this notion in science that we mustn't be advocates. We hear that a lot in academic sciences, that we're going to compromise our impartiality and we can't be good scientists if we're also advocates, right? Right.

And so I think about her work in saying, no, no, no, we have a responsibility to be advocates because of the privilege that we've had in being practicing scientists. You know, I think another influence for me, especially in writing...

was the wonderful essayist Lauren Isley. People don't read Lauren Isley much anymore, but it was deeply formative for me because of his beautiful essays, which are so grounded in the facts of the physical world and yet so poetic at the same time. He really created that sense of sometimes a fact can be so beautiful that it's a poem.

And so that kind of writing that took a scientific notion and expanded it into a spiritual realm was really important for me in letting me know that that can be done. Thank you. Someone at the back, and then there were two on this side. I just want to acknowledge a vague order of bravery.

Thank you. I read your book a few years ago, Robin, and I had this question then, so it's lovely to be able to ask it now. You spoke at the end about the need to walk back along the path and pick up what was forgotten. And when I read your book, I really felt there is a lot of sadness and grief about the destruction of the knowledge of your people and so on.

I honestly felt a lot of sadness for myself reading it because, and I can only speak for myself, but as an English person, I feel like there's nothing to go and pick up anymore. Like to be English feels like to have no indigeneity at all. And, you know, you could go and find stuff in books, but it's like a plant. You can pull it up and it'll die and then you can't shove it in the ground and it won't start growing again. And, you know, I can't.

borrow your indigeneity, you know, and I don't want to. So I wonder, yeah, what your thoughts are about that. And I'm sure I'm not the first person to have asked it either. You know, the beautiful question, the poignant question that you're asking is actually a question that helped me form Braiding Sweetgrass in its tone at the outset. I remember meeting a person, he's a Texan

who was expressing that same sort of grief that you're talking about. In his case, he was saying, I know I'm living on stolen land, but I have lived here in a ranching family on this river for, I think he said, something like eight generations. And he said, but I still don't feel as if I belong here. And how can I have this intimate relationship with the world if I don't belong here?

And that grieved me so greatly that this man who had stewarded this land through his family for all of this time was not feeling well.

as if he could belong there. And it brought me back to some teachings of a really, really wise Seneca elder, Henry Lickers, who told me, he said, you know the problem with these people, as he used to say, these people, the newcomers. And he would say, well, they still have one foot on the ship. They haven't really committed to living here yet.

And that our job, he said, is to help people have both feet on the ground so that you live as if you belonged here. And I thought that was such a generous and healing way to think about things because when we feel like we don't belong, we don't fully commit ourselves to those acts of love and reciprocity when we feel like we don't belong.

And so to me, how do we find that sense of belonging? In reciprocity with the land. Give back to the land through the acknowledgement that that land is feeding you, that river is giving you a drink. The land is welcoming you, right? And so what are you going to do in return? And through those loops of gift giving and gift receiving, one starts to belong to a place. And my sense is...

In talking to people through the life of braiding sweetgrass, it feels to me like we are in this age of what I call the age of remembering, of remembering what it would be like to come from a place, to remember what it would be like

to live as if your ancestors were here, as if all the teachings you needed were in the land. That means we have to relearn them from the land. In Potawatomi culture, there's many things that we say, we don't say they've been forgotten. We say they're sleeping. They're sleeping and they need to be woken up again. And I think that's true for all of us. And the land is a great repository of

of that which has been forgotten, i.e. is asleep. So the way to become at home is to learn to listen to the land and how to learn from the land. Again, to be a member, because that's the other meaning of remembering, isn't it? Of not only casting our minds back, but with the intent of becoming a member again of that family. Thank you. On this side, yeah, go on.

Hello, thank you, Robin, so much. I'm a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance. We're a bunch, about 700 of us. We're worried about the climate and we're mental health workers, so we're looking at that side of it. And your words have been such an encouragement, especially in a dream group that I facilitate. And...

With that sort of spirit of reciprocity, how can we... We've got so much from you. How can we support and give that in return to you and support your work and what you're doing in the world and all the people in the room? I appreciate the generosity of that offer. That is not a question I hear very often. So thank you for that. You know, I think that...

One of the things that is really important to me and is probably to many of us is to know that we're not alone in doing this work. Have any of you ever felt that? You know, that you are alone. You're the only person who feels this passionately. And then when you discover there's somebody else, even one somebody else, it helps you raise your voice, right? So...

That, I think, is what's really important, is that we know each other are there and to be allies to each other. And I know that for me, that really helps just to know...

your organization has got that piece covered. So I could turn my attention here and these folks are doing this. So just knowing each other, which means raising our voices, right? And celebrating each other. And I think that one of the things that can also elevate this more broadly is how can we influence people

journalists, um, to tell these stories. Um, because oftentimes we don't know about each other because our stories aren't generally out there in, in so-called mainstream media. Um, and so the way that, that we could all be helpful to each other is to elevate those stories, um,

You probably know, does the whole world know this shameful thing about Fox News in the United States? You do? Okay, yeah. Sorry to poison the evening. But one of the things that I have been longing for, and you could help with, that we could all help with, is no more Fox News. How about Fox News? I want news...

I want news about foxes. What are the foxes doing? And blue jays and trillium. Yeah. Don't you think we would live in a different world if on the front page of the newspaper it told about who was migrating? Right. And instead of car accidents, how many of those migrating warblers just ran into a glass-lit all-night-long skyscraper?

That's the news I want. So let's all work on that. I think Foxy's up. Who's next? The mic made it. So there was a question in the mid. There's also one down at the front if that person has backed out. Don't be shy. It's your time. Okay. Okay.

A simple question. I was wondering about the little girl that was a botanist from the very beginning, what your childhood was like, how you were molded, the stories, the nurture, the love, and how you became you. What a sweet question. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.

You know, I really do credit the plants for many of who I am today because, you know, growing up,

especially away from my Potawatomi community, my Potawatomi extended family. But as you know, by virtue of Carlisle Indian School and removal, all of us Potawatomi are in diaspora. We don't live together. And there's a way in which my longing for that

when I'd ask my dad, well, how do we say that or how do we do this? And he'd have to say, I don't know. But he didn't just say, I don't know. He said, I don't know because that was stolen from us.

Um, that's that little girl. I longed for what I didn't know. And I knew that it was an injustice that I didn't know. But the plants, I thought to myself, I was a strange little girl, I guess. And I thought, well, how did my ancestors, how did those things that my ancestors knew, how did they know those things? I said, well, they learned them from the land. And so I can learn them from the land too.

And I think that's how I became a scientist. Those plants became my elders in a very real way. And as I grew up, both to be a scientist and to have, as all of our Potawatomi people became coming back together again as a nation and discovering what those plants were teaching us,

are our teachings. So I give all the credit to that, to the ability to listen and trust and have faith in those plants. Yeah, so I grew up in a household where we didn't have much by way of material means. We had a few books in the house, but we went to the library every single week. One of the books we had was a wildflower guide. Yeah.

And my parents would laugh and say, you know, we had one pair of binoculars for the six of us to go birding with. And that seemed like wealth. So I had parents who were inquisitive and generous. And yeah, so much gratitude for that, for growing up in that way. It's a lovely question. Thank you. Someone here. Oh, and someone here, Pish. Yeah.

Yes, one, two. Person in the scarf first, please. Hello. I have a question about academia. I'm trying to work out how to reconcile the messages I hear in your writing and being embedded within an academic institution.

there's kind of a global movement from the global south, an indigenous movement, which is looking at other ways of knowing and recognizing the harm that's done through schooling, going back to how education and schooling is used as part of a colonial project, but also the separation that happens through schooling between childhood and

And relationship with land and place. There's an equally incredible book called Kith by Jay Griffiths. So just like kin is your relationship with the beings around you, kith is your relationship with the land around you. And the importance of being able to be free in play and spirit in relationship with the land.

And that is embodied in indigenous knowledge creation systems and nurturing around the world. I think we'll look back in 100 years and we'll be shocked at having sent our children to school, but universities have a similar approach.

all sorts of different, whether it's about hierarchy or testing or all sorts of different things within it which are about separation and about judgment. So I'm curious about your experience of being in academia and whether you feel that current academic institutions today, whether you're considering

institutions or your grandchildren's nurseries or so on, or maybe they're home educated, how can we reconcile that with a need to develop

a loving relationship with the world around us. Yeah. Well, thank you. And I agree completely with the description that you've given of much of academia, the compartmentalization of knowledge, the separation, you know, who is the authority, who is the teacher, all of that, that...

Which is so embedded. And so my own work, you know, when I first began teaching, I'm embarrassed to say, I suppose I shouldn't be embarrassed by it, but I began teaching the same way I had been taught because that was the currency of my discipline.

If I was going to be a botany professor, this is how you do it. And then there came a point where I was like, wait, wait, wait. That was a post-tenure decision, I should say, as it has to be because it is so deeply ingrained, right? But things like our Center for Native Peoples in the Environment is explicitly designed to decolonize

that, that, that monoculture, intellectual monoculture of the university, to bring in multiple ways of, of knowing, to teach on the land, to, to really view the land as the teacher and culture as teacher, not necessarily the authority figure at, at the podium. So that has been very much part of, of,

of my work as well in trying to decolonize the university. And I am seeing it happening in pockets. But you know what? There's a lot of pockets.

At first, there weren't. But as to our point, when we think, oh, they're doing it over here, and so are we, all right, then we must have, you know, you get that permission and consent and critical mass from each other. You know, to think about the fact that, you know, just in a really personal example, that when I began in this work, I was the only Native student, you know, one of the only women in

And today we have 12 Indigenous environmental science graduate students who are pursuing their own research agenda fueled by traditional knowledge as well as the tools of Western science. You know, I live in a time when just a few years ago, President Biden put forward a memorandum that said Indigenous science and traditional knowledge must be elevated in all fields.

federal land management decision-making. They're like, say what? How could that possibly be? But I tell you this story to say it's changing. It's changing in an exponential way. It feels to me as if we are in a moment of profound change in academia. Not fast enough, but it's happening. We have time, I reckon, for a couple more questions. There's someone who had their hand up here and then maybe someone...

Yeah, move ahead. When you talk about listening to plants, would you, and speaking with plants, would you say they are beacons for our intuition? Are they messengers? I wouldn't want to quite literally put words in their mouths. They can be, but I don't know that that's necessarily their intention.

because they are living their own lives and being in relationship with many other species other than us. So I don't think I would want to necessarily privilege humans as being the target of their education. But if we listen...

If we really train ourselves to understand the examples that they set for us, we can see them as beacons. Does that make sense? Do we all have our own intuitive response to those thoughts and that's enough?

Yes. You know, I think that for so long, intuitive responses to the natural world have been truncated. It's like a moment.

muscle you know that if you don't work that muscle it's going to atrophy and you simply you're weak in that way and I think that there was a time when we lived in much closer relationship with the living world where we our intuitive senses and our ability to listen to the living world was I know it was just as clear as hearing conversation among our own species because we honed that skill and

And I believe we can hone that skill again. So it is something that we have to learn to do. But we're so distracted by all the things that are pulling our attention in other directions. And through academia, we have been told that that's not possible, that the plants couldn't possibly be our teachers and telling us anything. So if we're told that they're silent, then we're not going to be able to hear them. So it's a whole combination of things.

But I think we really have to cultivate that ability to learn from the living world. Robin, I'm going to ask you to choose somebody. Cowards way out. How about right here? Yes. Raise your hand higher. Yes. Yep. That's who I mean. Yep.

Daisy is coming through. We might actually be able to get one more in. Thank you so much. It's a couple of questions. I'll try to make it quick. When you say that you are a mother above first, I sort of feel that so much from you.

And I feel that the way that you speak, when I'm listening to Braiding Sweetgrass, when I'm listening to you speak today, it's so soft and loving and gentle in the way that when I'm trying to teach my children to speak,

An example of something that has happened in a loving way, it feels like that's what you're teaching, that's how your voice is. And what I'd like to ask you is, sometimes personally, because of the way that life is now, I feel that my intuition, my heart is...

is, you know, singing to the same tune as what you're telling us, but then I'll look at my life and I will think, crikey, you know, it's so far away from how it should be, you know, from the natural. And that's just...

always wanting to do the best for your children, you know, but caught up in this sort of modern life. And I wonder, apart from loving them and loving the land and showing them that you love the land, what else can I do? Well,

What can we do for our children? And, you know, I tell them the stories of my own grandmother, which are similar, you know, when we used to say with my cousins or grannies talking to the plants again. But she did. And she used to say, look how happy they look.

And, you know, it's so natural. It's so right. We know it's right. But what to do when actually sometimes your life and the way you're raising your children is not in line with that? You know, do you have any practical advice? I don't know. And also, will you please write some books for your grandchildren's age so that we can share them with our own children? Because they're so beautiful to hear you speak. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, the latter part I can answer more easily than the first, and that is that next year a children's picture book is coming out. Yes, yes. It'll be ready. It'll be ready for your son. Yeah. So I'm really excited about that. As much as one can distill all these ideas into the 34 pages that are allowed in a children's picture book...

But, you know, I'm really touched by your question because we all wrestle with that, you know, because we are embedded, really harnessed to institutions that it's hard to disentangle ourselves from. And what helps me to do it, and it's not like I do it perfectly, but not by a long shot, right? But is to, what helps me is to think of it not only as an act of love for my children,

for my grandchildren and for the land, but as an act of resistance.

And that really sort of screws up my courage because then it's not only an act of love, it's an act of coming out of anger as well. Like, no, I am not going to toe that line. We can't dismantle the whole thing at once, but we can make those choices. You say, I am going to live as if...

I was living in a world of gift and gratitude for my, with, with my children. I want to live as if my children should be, should have the right to pick berries along the roadside. Um, and thinking of it as an act of resistance, um, for me is really helpful and, and, and puts just a little bit more, um, oomph in it. Um, does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Um,

I think, regrettably, we are going to have to start your part of the evening, which is the longest signing queue we've probably seen in a good while. Thank you, Robin. It is such a pleasure to hear you speak. And I think we are all going to go home and start talking to our plants and using key and thinking about our kin. Wonderful. Thank you, everyone, for such thoughtful questions. Some of the best questions I've heard from an audience ever.

Thank you to 5515 and to the team at Penguin for bringing us all here tonight.

Copies of Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss and also Why Women Grow are going to be on sale at the back. And if you'd like to get your book signed by either of us, please start forming an orderly queue. And by my count, we are on to seven rounds of applause. So let's have another one. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. It was so fun to talk with you. Sorry? It was so fun to talk with you. Thank you. I, um, yeah.

Amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. It's lovely. Thank you. Thank you. Bye, all. Oh, is this the door?