Koen Crolla's Reviews > Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Tedious. Kimmerer is a botanist of Potawatomi descent who wrote this book to assuage her guilt at going to college to study botany (the "wrong" way to understand plants) and at not being fluent in the Potawatomi language. Most of it is just random anecdotes from her very middle-class life, mixed with some "traditional" stories in which all Native American peoples in North America are blended into one homogeneous Noble Savage, who obviously has a unique and more meaningful connection to nature than anyone else does.
As a book it's tailor-made to appeal to the American liberal reflex for self-flagellation, and the "solutions" it offers for our destruction of nature and over-consumption (which, naturally, has to be called Windigo [sic]) are extremely liberal and individualised as well—change your own relationship to nature by being more grateful and maybe thinking twice (in an extremely vague way) about the things you buy in the supermarket.
If you've never heard of the Indian Removal Act Braiding Sweetgrass may do some good by providing a third-hand account of some of its consequences, but for the most part it's just an aggravating waste of time.