Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass” has become something of a hit around the nation; a book exploring both the author’s intersecting identities as an indigenous woman with rich cultural ties to her heritage and her knowledge and experience as a trained botanist. Kimmerer lays out a poetic accounting for our interwovenness with the earth even as our actions as a species have caused great damage, charging the reader to cultivate a deeper compassion, a sense of kinship and belonging to the broader Nature to which we belong, and real action in solidarity with the Earth and all this planet, human and more-than-human.

On this final Sunday of November, let us at last mark Native American History Month by exploring emerging theologies of ecology, honoring the woundedness of this land and the people who were here first; seeking both a deeper solidarity with our friends in the Native American community and a deeper relationship this land for whom many to most of us are immigrants to, all the while asking ourselves these questions Kimmerer poses to her students.”

“Do you love the Earth?”

“Do you believe the Earth loves you back?”

Topics: Generosity