Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a plant ecologist, writer, mother, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is currently a Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. Throughout her book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), Kimmerer tells stories: the book itself is a memoir, telling the author’s story; simultaneously, Kimmerer tells stories from Indigenous cultures to introduce topics such as environmental reciprocity, moral obligations to the Earth, and how humans have changed the environment in ways both good and bad. Kimmerer challenges her readers to reconsider their relationships with the human and more-than-human world. She also engages with dynamic ways of thinking about citizenship and what it means to belong to a place or a community, suggesting ways that Indigenous worldviews can productively shift how mainstream/Western societies live on the Earth. In this chapter, “People of Corn, People of Light,” Kimmerer relates part of the Maya Creation story, the Popol Vuh.
As you read, reflect on the consequences of the stories your own culture chooses to shape our behaviors. How do your own origin stories, scientific or sacred, represent an ilbal, a “seeing instrument, or lens, with which to view our … relationships”? And ask yourself, What people do you think we are? Wood? Light? Corn? Why?
Download “People of Corn, People of Light”
