***

Okanagan writer Jeannette Armstrong, in her essay “Land Speaking,” makes a point that is congruent with Elder William Dumas’s observation that the land tells us the stories. She writes, “Language was given to us by the land we live within.”Footnote ⁶ The trajectory of this gift is similar to what William Dumas noted: in both cases the land is described as the originator of stories and language, respectively. This is fundamentally different from colonial understandings, which generally place humans or a human-like God as the originators of both language and stories, with the land being simply one of many “things” that can be gestured toward using language. These Indigenous philosophies of language and belonging reverse the trajectory of Western mimesis, starting with the land as the source of not only sustenance but also of knowledge. If we follow the implications of this idea, it means that when we study Indigenous stories and literatures, we are in a way studying the land and trying to learn from it. Whatever else the stories might be, they can be understood as messages from the land to us, as human beings. For any scholar like myself, trained in the vast academic realm influenced by Saussurian linguistics, that can be a difficult idea to come to terms with. But when we are reading Indigenous stories, I feel it’s crucial to think seriously about the ways in which the stories do, in an essential way, come from the land. To accept this idea is to open oneself to the possibility of an Indigenized ethic of interpretation, one that is more embodied and more active than the hermeneutic practice of reading is usually considered to be.

Jeannette Armstrong’s discussion of the Okanagan origins of language continues in a fascinating way. She writes:

As Armstrong suggests here, learning the language of the land is a matter of survival, and it is also what makes possible the creation of human language itself. This leads me to ask: What are the ways in which the land speaks to us through the stories of Indigenous writers and storytellers? What are the lessons we can learn from these stories about how to pay more nuanced attention to the land, how to accept the land’s gifts and live in a respectful way? In the world’s current state of environmental and social precarity, these questions are probably more crucial now than they have ever been. I would like to address them by thinking about a subset of Indigenous stories, the ones that present teachings about the plants and medicines that grow on the land. Such plants and medicines themselves can be understood as particular ways in which the land communicates with us, not via language but through the intimate and embodied realm of our senses, as well as within particular ceremonial contexts. Cree scholar and traditional knowledge holder Mary Siisip Geniusz signals this communicative capacity of plants in the title of her book: Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask. Footnote ⁸ I am interested in learning how to ask, and how to understand the answers—how to attune ourselves to the forms of intimate knowledge that are transmitted to us through, for example, the taste of blueberries or the scent of sage. I also want to better understand how that knowledge then gets translated or embodied into the stories that humans share with one another.

With this in mind, I propose a thought-experiment in literary classification and contextualization. Instead of categorizing Indigenous literatures by nation or genre or historical period, I want to raise the possibility of studying them through the rubric of the medicinal plants that guide or inform the stories. What could we learn if we were to think deeply about the literature of sage, the literature of tobacco, the literature of maple sugar, the literature of cedar? Such a way of gathering our stories could be trans-Indigenous if we chose, moving across different cultural traditions while still bringing a focus to the ways in which these highly valued plants are connected to humans across broad spatial realms. It would be a way of paying particular attention to what we might call (thinking of Jeannette Armstrong) the first translation, that process by which the stories move from the land into language. To me, medicine plants are an important crossing point of that translation because they arise from the land and they also signify in powerful nonlinguistic ways, through their scent, their flavor and their many other effects upon human bodies, psyches, and spirits.

In the remainder of this essay, I want to focus on stories of the plant called sweetgrass, which is known as wihkaskwa in Cree, wiingaashk in Anishinabemowin, and fwayn di buflo in the Michif language. Cree Elder Russell Willier describes sweetgrass as one of “the four plants for opening the door to the spiritual world,” along with sage, tobacco, and cedar.Footnote ⁹ Sweetgrass is regarded as a sacred medicine in most of the Indigenous nations where it is found. The plant ranges throughout Canada and across the central and northern United States, and is also present in northern and central Europe. Indigenous harvesters often gather sweetgrass and dry it in three-stranded braids that bear a striking resemblance to a braid of human hair as it is traditionally worn in many Indigenous nations of Turtle Island. In the cultures I am most familiar with—Métis, Cree, and Anishinaabe—sweetgrass is used in ceremonies for the purposes of healing, purification, and clearing the mind. Its rich and aromatic scent, both when fresh and when it is burned, is regarded as an important part of its healing power. Indeed, one could say that the plant’s scent is its most direct mode of physical communication with human beings, bringing them knowledge that has bodily, spiritual, and psychological effects and meanings.

My main reason for choosing to write about sweetgrass here is simply because I love it and because I feel an intimate, sensory connection to it that has the resonance of a kind of communication. (I have only rarely declared love for a plant, but sweetgrass inspires this emotion in many.) The scent of wihkaskwa makes me feel good—alive, refreshed, calmed, rested, cleansed. It reminds me of my connection to the earth, which it holds and broadcasts in its very scent. I make no apologies for focusing here on the affective and sensual aspects of my relationship to this beautiful plant. For a few years now, I have kept a braid of sweetgrass on my bedside table, and it has become a part of my everyday life, probably even a part of my dreams. Its scent has come to remind me of home, and it has many other associations too, ones that begin to take the form of stories over time. One reason for that “storification” process is that sweetgrass braids are commonly given as gifts, and gifting is often the way in which a story comes into being. For example, a few years ago I attended a workshop where the Musqueam scholar Jordan Wilson and his partner, the Kainai/Sámi filmmaker Elle-Maija Tailfeathers, had brought gifts of sweetgrass braids for each participant. This sweetgrass had been gathered in Jordan’s home community of Musqueam. When I returned home, I kept that braid of sweetgrass beside my bed, and the scent of it reminded me of the gathering that we had shared at the workshop and all the new friends I had made there. It also reminded me of the two years I had spent as an uninvited guest on Musqueam territory when I was teaching at the University of British Columbia. The Musqueam land itself was present to me in the scent that suffused those strands of the braid. I remembered the long walks I used to take on that land, my struggles with learning the ways of a new place and a new job. That particular sweetgrass gift introduced me to one of this medicine’s most powerful effects: the stimulation of memory.

Another braid of sweetgrass was given to me by one of my graduate students, Chuck Bourgeois, when we met to discuss his thesis on narratives of Métis identity. When he gave it to me, he described the place in northern Manitoba where he had gathered this sweetgrass, and he told me stories of his love for the land, as well as his time spent in the woods with Métis and Anishinaabe teachers. I accepted this gift with an understanding of the ways it would symbolize our relationship as two Métis scholars working on questions of Métis culture and identity. When I agreed to be on Charles’s committee, the university required me to sign a series of forms that would govern that relationship, but for me, the much more important embodiment of that relationship is this sweetgrass. This particular braid tells me something about what my role is as a teacher and a mentor. And I feel it is not merely a symbol of that role; it embodies that relationship physically, through the way it announces itself in the air and through the bodily and psychological effects it has on me. The braid is a connection woven between me and my student, and also a connection between both of us and the land. It is a gift and a responsibility. It is a story of generations and of continuity within the Métis community, here on the territory that we recognize as the Métis homeland.

Forgive these personal accounts, but I felt it was important to begin with a discussion of my experience with the plant itself, to interpret braids of sweetgrass not as texts but as embodied interlocutors, before I move on to consider narrative representations of sweetgrass. Because if we are to understand something about that moment of translation from the land to the stories, we need to spend time thinking about the physical aspects of the plant and how it acts upon ourselves and our world. The main textual example of a story inspired by sweetgrass that I want to consider here is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.Footnote ¹⁰ Kimmerer is a Potawatomi scholar who is very knowledgeable about her people’s plant knowledge and is also trained as a forest biologist. Braiding Sweetgrass is informed by both sides of her education, but it is much more of a story and philosophical meditation than it is a scientific treatise, and her major focus in the book is on Indigenous knowledge and the mutually beneficial relationships between plants and humans. I want to consider this book in detail because I believe it presents a rich and philosophically nuanced portrayal of the land telling stories to humans through the agential intermediary of plants.

Braiding Sweetgrass opens with a gesture of gifting that is unusual in the medium of writing, but is very common in the ceremonial uses of sweetgrass. Kimmerer writes in the preface, “Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair.”Footnote ¹¹ Through this opening, the reader is immediately welcomed into a particular kind of relationship by becoming the recipient of a gift, one that structures the whole narrative that follows. As Kimmerer later explains, in her Potawotami culture, sweetgrass is not meant to be purchased, but only ever exchanged as a gift. And so, even before she begins her story, she positions the writing itself similarly, as a gift like the sweetgrass—a gift that is intimately connected to the land and bearing the strength of the land’s nourishment and regenerative powers. It is also, like all gifts, an invitation to a reciprocal relationship. Braiding Sweetgrass is a fundamentally generous book, and the gesture of the sweetgrass gift at the beginning is the first sign of that. In fact, throughout the book Kimmerer describes sweetgrass as being itself a generous plant, and one might say that the gift at the beginning is a gesture she has learned from her long relationship to the plant.

It is only after this opening gesture that she recounts the traditional Potawotami account of sweetgrass as it is told in her people’s story of the creation of Turtle Island, and Skywoman’s role as the one who brings seeds and branches to plant in the newly created soil. Kimmerer writes, “Our stories say that of all the plants, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the very first to grow on the earth, its fragrance a sweet memory of Skywoman’s hand.”Footnote ¹² So within the traditional Potawotami story, the sweetgrass is described also as a gift, one brought to the earth and tended by Skywoman for the benefit of those who will occupy the earth after her. And the way in which humans are taught to tend and respect sweetgrass in Potawotami culture completes the circle of the gift relationship. She writes, “When we braid sweetgrass, we are braiding the hair of Mother Earth, showing her our loving attention, our care for her beauty and well-being, in gratitude for all she has given us.”Footnote ¹³ Thus it is a human ethic of care for the earth (echoing Skywoman’s tending of the plants) that expresses how sweetgrass is “both medicine and a relative.”Footnote ¹⁴ This relational ethic is implicit in the way that a sweetgrass braid resembles a braid of human hair. Interestingly, Kimmerer points out that the sweetgrass plant itself even benefits from being harvested because it thrives in disrupted areas of ground and it responds to mild stress by becoming more vigorous. In a sense, she says, the sweetgrass itself is thankful for being harvested, and it becomes stronger through this relationship. The book as a whole is a meditation on the many plants that respond positively to respectful human actions, even when these actions involve harvesting. It is about the mutual sharing relationships that we can have with the natural world when we come to understand that world as the bearer of gifts rather than as the site of resources to be exploited.

For Kimmerer, sweetgrass is also a medium of memory, and in that way it is comparable to oral stories, which are of course reservoirs of community memory as well. The sweetgrass is, as she says, “a sweet memory of skywoman’s hand,” and thus it provides a sensual connection back to the original creative principle of Turtle Island. But it is also connected to a more cyclical form of memory through the action of ceremony. She writes, “Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we ‘remember to remember,’ and so sweetgrass is a powerful ceremonial plant.”Footnote ¹⁵ There are ceremonies associated with the tending and the harvesting of the sweetgrass, and of course it is used as a key element in many other ceremonies. Kimmerer does not discuss these ceremonies in detail but she focuses on the plant’s role in relation to memory, bringing something from the past into the present and saving it for the future. The idea of sweetgrass triggering memories of “things you didn’t know you had forgotten” suggests that the plant itself embodies cultural teachings that have been preserved from the deep past—as if the land’s own memory is speaking through the scent of the sweetgrass. She writes, “When Skywoman scattered her handful of seeds across Turtle Island, she was sowing sustenance for the body and also for the mind, emotion and spirit: she was leaving us teachers. The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to listen.”Footnote ¹⁶ This listening is remarkably similar to William Dumas’s idea that “the land tells us the stories.”

It is important to note that the “listening” Kimmerer writes about is generally not accomplished through the sense of hearing, but instead it most often happens in the realm of scent. She describes the sweetgrass calling out to human beings who may be searching for it, announcing its presence on the breeze:

This subtle olfactory message is described in agential terms, with the grass “beckoning” to the potential harvester who, if attracted to the meadow, will revitalize and strengthen the plant through the act of cutting and braiding the grass. There is a nearly erotic element to this relationship, one that becomes clearer when we understand that the plant’s regeneration and thriving depends upon a mutually beneficial interaction with humans. Kimmerer goes on to describe plants having complex and nuanced communication systems, such as in the case of pecan trees that can send signals to one another through the release of pheromones that “are wafted on the breeze, laden with meaning.”Footnote ¹⁸ Kimmerer, utilizing both her PhD in botany and her traditional Potawotami knowledge, contextualizes the scientific studies of pecan trees in terms of traditional teachings about the communicative power of plants: “There is now compelling evidence that our elders were right—the trees are talking to one another.”Footnote ¹⁹ In making this observation, she is largely addressing the sceptics who trust scientific forms of evidence more than Indigenous modes of observing the land.Footnote ²⁰ For herself and her Potawotami teachers, the evidence has been visible all along in the traditional teachings of their community, but for those who trust only scientific forms of observation, she points out that the two modes of inquiry lead to the same conclusion. Kimmerer’s struggle, as simultaneously a biologist and a traditional knowledge holder, is to avoid any pressure to “verify” traditional teachings through scientific inquiry. For her, the observation process does not privilege one kind of knowledge over another. No matter what methods of observation we use, she argues, the key task for human relatives of these plants is to attune our senses to the messages they send, so that we can more fully appreciate the stories that the land is telling us.

Throughout Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer is also continually observing the ways in which her relationship to plants is fundamentally “a gift economy, ‘goods and services’ not purchased but received as gifts from the earth.”Footnote ²¹ For her, plants are not commodities but are spontaneously generating beings that offer themselves to humans, in an economy that is at its base noncapitalist, even though food has become commodified within the colonial sphere. She describes her annual practice of gathering wild strawberries: too small and fragile to be marketable, yet highly valued for their extraordinary flavor, and probably most valued because they are spontaneous gifts from the earth. “After fifty years they still raise the question of how to respond to their generosity. Sometimes it feels like a silly question with a very simple answer: eat them.”Footnote ²² This answer is much more than simply a reflex. It is an ethic, expressing the importance of maintaining an economy of bodily intimacy with the plant. Though it involves consuming the berry, this act is very different from consumption and accumulation within the capitalist realm. It is instead a sensual relationship that links the human with nature in a bodily way, and it is also an invitation to reciprocity because gifts of course contain that imperative within them. “This is the same reason we do not sell sweetgrass,” Kimmerer adds. “Because it is given to us, it should only be given.”Footnote ²³

The kind of gift relationship Kimmerer presents here involves what I would describe as “open reciprocity” because the gift does not initiate an expectation that another gift should be presented to the original giver. The reciprocity relation is not a circle but instead something more like a scattering—in the way that plants regenerate by releasing seeds. The gift is intended to be shared anywhere, without restrictions, as long as it is shared. Thus it does not matter whether there is an imbalance in power between the giver and receiver (as in the case of Skywoman bringing wiingaashk to earth); the expectation is that the recipient of the gift will pass that gift along to any other being, including the animate land itself. In this way, the gift relationship resists reification into established social hierarchies or into closed economies.Footnote ²⁴ The ceremonial power of sweetgrass is predicated upon its status as an open reciprocal gift, one that inspires further gifts to others. Kimmerer tells the story of an Elder, Wally, who has to explain to his people at a ceremony that he cannot pay for the sweetgrass he burns there “because it cannot be bought or sold and still retain its essence for ceremony.”Footnote ²⁵ The sweetgrass begins as a gift from the plant itself (a legacy of Skywoman’s first gift to humans), and its value is perpetuated only through further gifting. In a sense, the plant is teaching humans about the importance of generosity in their own relations, with one another and with the world. Indeed, giving is described here as a way of generating value rather than relinquishing it, and sweetgrass is revealed to be the heart of an economic system that is the opposite of extractive capitalism. She writes, “The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes.”Footnote ²⁶ One might say the same thing about stories.

These practices of gift and generosity are also important in Kimmerer’s engagements with the ethics and politics of teaching Indigenous forms of inquiry within a university setting. For her, teaching is one important mode and method of sharing the gifts she has been given by the plants she studies. She describes, however, repeated struggles with the ways in which science and the university attempt to commodify knowledge and how scientific method works precisely to discourage humans from acknowledging their relationships with the beings they study. In some cases, she shows how the pose of scientific objectivity gets in the way of fully understanding the natural world. When her graduate student Laurie expresses a desire to do a study on the regenerative capacity of sweetgrass after it has been harvested, Kimmerer advises her, “It’s the grass that will teach you . . . so you have to get to know it.”Footnote ²⁷ Laurie’s graduate committee and even the dean of the faculty express deep dissatisfaction with the project, and they disparage its methodology. But Kimmerer argues that the basket makers who harvest the sweetgrass have long been practicing a traditional form of observation that “sounds a lot like experimental science to me.”Footnote ²⁸ In the end, Laurie’s project exposes a bias among her committee members, who “had been taught that harvesting causes decline. And yet the grasses themselves unequivocally argued the opposite point.”Footnote ²⁹ By describing the sweetgrass plants as arguing the point of the research, she elevates them from the status of object to that of willing participants in the study: active storytellers. Throughout this chapter and in much of the book, Kimmerer models a pedagogical method that resists institutional and disciplinary pressures to objectify and commodify knowledge. In doing so, she provides a blueprint for everyone who is devoted to the work of indigenizing the academy.

Kimmerer also portrays sweetgrass as being essentially connected to love, in various forms, especially the generous physical intimacy shared among family members—as embodied in the act of braiding a loved one’s hair: “There is such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait.”Footnote ³⁰ In other sweetgrass stories, this theme of love is often present. In Métis filmmaker Jessie Short’s film Sweet Night, sweetgrass is associated with a quiet, generous eroticism, in addition to its connections with Indigenous cultural resurgence and continuity.Footnote ³¹ In the film, two young women, the Métis Andy and her unnamed non-Indigenous friend, walk in a grassy field overlooking a distant cityscape of Calgary. Andy’s friend notices the scent of sweetgrass in the meadow and points it out to Andy, who admits that she is a city girl and has never encountered sweetgrass before. The friend then offers to show Andy how to braid sweetgrass, and as they begin to do this, their hands meet, and it leads to a first tentative kiss.

Later, as Andy travels home on the C-train, she holds a sweetgrass braid in her hands, caressing it and smelling it, when a young man of Indigenous appearance standing nearby recognizes the sweetgrass and begins talking with her, seemingly drawn by the attraction of the sweetgrass itself. In a sense, the sweetgrass seems to be acting as a love medicine in the film, embodying Andy’s reclamation of her Métis heritage at the same time as she awakens to her sexuality in a quietly empowering way. One might object that Andy has learned about her own Métis cultural practices from a questionable source—a non-native friend. But to me, the film makes clear that the land itself is offering this empowering teaching to the young Métis woman. The sweetgrass is in a sense telling the story, and it is inspiring the loving erotic relationship that begins in the meadow and seems to resonate with Andy’s continued attractiveness to others, as symbolized by the young man’s interest in her. By the end of the film, the braid of sweetgrass has enabled and encouraged Andy’s generous embracing of the erotic side of herself, as well as her pride in her heritage. That it does both of these things at once is not a coincidence. Her pride, and the glowing happiness and pleasure she radiates at the end of the film, are themselves an important part of her attractiveness.

Drew Hayden Taylor’s novel Motorcycles and Sweetgrass also presents sweetgrass as an embodiment of cultural pride, resurgence, and generosity, this time within an Anishinaabe context.Footnote ³² The novel is, among other things, the gently humorous coming-of-age story of the young teenager Virgil, who struggles to maintain a connection to his culture in the face of intergenerational trauma and the recent death of his matriarch grandmother, as well as the temptations presented by the dazzling technologies and consumer items of colonial culture. To escape the stresses of his life, he often skips school and spends his time sitting on a large rock in the forest, near his family’s traditional patch of sweetgrass. Though he knows about the cultural uses of sweetgrass and he has watched his grandmother picking it, he has never done so himself. The unspoken implication is that if Virgil does not continue the family’s relationship with the patch of sweetgrass, the plants will eventually disappear, and with them a part of his heritage will be lost. He seems unaware of this possibility, or at least not particularly worried about it. In fact, his interest in visiting this spot is not because of the sweetgrass at all, but because the train tracks are nearby. He fantasizes about taking the train one day to leave the community, and he has developed a kind of connection with the VIA rail conductor who blows the horn in greeting whenever the train passes by Virgil sitting on the rock. Virgil has come to look forward to this gesture, which he sees as “an acknowledgment of his existence by somebody other than his family.”Footnote ³³

Themes of movement and transportation are present in all of the sweetgrass narratives I have examined here, which might be seen as a countercurrent to the rooted nature of plants and, implicitly, of indigeneity itself. Kimmerer writes about her own people’s diaspora “after removal, after allotment, after the boarding schools,”Footnote ³⁴ and the concluding scene of “Sweet Night” occurs on a municipal train, while Motorcycles and Sweetgrass also contains recurrent imagery of one particular Indian motorcycle. It might be tempting to suggest that human movement in these works is always related to disconnection and dislocation from the land, separating people from the locations of their local medicines. The appearance of the VIA train beside the sweetgrass in Hayden Taylor’s novel might be associated with the threat of cultural disconnection for Virgil, but in other ways I feel that these works suggest some positive aspects of human movement, and indeed of plant movement as well. Kimmerer shows that sweetgrass thrives in the places where humans demonstrate intimate care for the plant, and from this we can extrapolate to reach the conclusion that in a certain way, the medicines follow the people, arising essentially out of the relationship between people and land. The underlying message of these works is that humans’ love for the land is not sedentary, but alive with movement.

These works’ depictions of sweetgrass also resist colonial and capitalist divisions between urban and rural space. While Andy in “Sweet Night” makes her first connection with sweetgrass outside of the city, the medicine continues to express its power when she travels on the C-train back into the urban space. Kimmerer also describes many relationships between humans and plants that thrive in suburban and urban landscapes. Willier and Geniusz point out that many medicine plants can be found within city limits, even though they are often labeled “weeds” in that context. The overtly colonized spaces of cities are in fact often subject to the decolonial agency of native plants that reassert their connection to the land. These books raise the possibility that the plants growing on the edges of boulevards and suburban lawns and gardens are trying to communicate with us, trying to tell us the stories that the land wants us to sense. By the same token, non-Indigenous urbanites are often surprised to learn of Indigenous land claims within the city limits, perhaps because they have a sense that colonization is somehow “complete” within the urban space. The presence of Indigenous people in the city, and their assertion of prior claims to their intimate relationship with that land, is a powerful reminder that everyone has a relationship to the land, and we all remain connected to the ethics of that relationship whether we acknowledge it or not. Sweetgrass can grow in the city, and it does. More urban citizens need to gain the skills to recognize its scent and the teachings that are embedded there.

For Virgil, the teachings of sweetgrass arrive in an unexpected way, in a space far from the tantalizing city but nonetheless connected to it by the train tracks. He is walking out to his favorite rock, trying to process his grief after he has attended his grandmother Lillian’s funeral, when he is greeted not by the train but by a mysterious stranger wearing motorcycle leathers, reclining on the rock. The man offers the boy a surprising gift: “a perfectly braided length of sweetgrass.”Footnote ³⁵ And just as this gift is presented, the man asserts the cultural value of the plant, saying “Just smell that. Now that’s Anishnawbe.”Footnote ³⁶ It is as if the sweetgrass is in some essential way an embodiment of Anishinaabe identity itself, and this embodiment is expressed through its scent. For Virgil, who is tempted by the allure of colonial culture at the same time as he has lost his culturally knowledgeable Anishinaabe grandmother, this assertion of cultural identity comes at a crucial moment. He is struggling to understand who he is and what his role in life should be, especially after the loss of his grandmother. As a member of the next generation, Virgil in a sense represents the future of his people.

The fact that the visiting stranger, who calls himself John, is waiting there at the family’s sweetgrass patch, and that he knows how to harvest the plant respectfully, suggests that he may be a relation of Virgil. John has in fact already been seen in the community by this time, most notably when he has come to visit (and even to kiss) Virgil’s grandmother Lillian just before her death. John even expresses deep love and respect for Lillian, hinting at a past relationship. The nature of this connection never becomes fully clear, but the man’s identity is eventually revealed.

It turns out that John is a manifestation of the Anishinaabe culture hero/trickster Nanabush, who has come to the Otter Lake First Nation out of respect for Lillian and with a mission of cultural regeneration in mind. True to Nanabush’s fallible and humorous nature, this mission does not go exactly according to plan, and in fact he comes into conflict with many of the Anishinaabe people whom he ostensibly wants to help. Yet by the end of the novel, after many tribulations and battles, there are signs that Nanabush’s time in the community has made a positive difference. This is signaled in his final meeting with Virgil, when Nanabush appears to the boy in his own form. Instead of saying good-bye, Virgil offers the spirit being a gift: one of the sweetgrass braids that Nanabush himself had made before their first meeting at the rock. “I took one of these from the pile you made,” Virgil says. “I think you should keep it. A little something from Otter Lake.”Footnote ³⁷ Nanabush’s response to this offering is as important as the boy’s act of giving: “That is truly the smell of the Anishnawbe. I accept your gift. Even though I made it.”Footnote ³⁸ With this acceptance of the gift that Nanabush has himself created (and has also given, by leaving it there on the rock for Virgil or anyone else to take), the energizing circulation of gift-reciprocity is established. Virgil has learned, seemingly unconsciously or without instruction, that sweetgrass is an important medium of the gift for Anishinaabe people. Perhaps he has absorbed this teaching from the sweetgrass itself, or maybe he has learned it from the example of the spirit-being Nanabush, who has reintroduced him—also through gift—to the beauty of his own land and culture that was right before him all along. By regifting the sweetgrass to Nanabush, Virgil shows that he is Anishinaabe in an essential, active, and bodily way, just like Nanabush has characterized the plant itself when he earlier said, “Just smell that. Now that’s Anishnawbe.”Footnote ³⁹

I believe Nanabush’s repeated identification of the sweetgrass with the Anishinaabe people in the novel is not meant as simply a metaphor. It is instead an acknowledgment of an embodied experience of connection and communication, an experience that takes place largely through the nonlinguistic medium of the plant’s scent. Nanabush is able to interpret the land through the plant, and in a way he is also able to sense an embodied essence of the Anishinaabe people, linking the two together in an assertion that is also a relationship. Through his action, sweetgrass is revealed to signify as material, as a physical embodiment of the relationship between the earth and human beings. To say “that’s Anishnawbe” about this smell is to posit an essential connection—perhaps even a kin relationship—between the Anishinaabe people and the sweetgrass plant. And like in many Indigenous worldviews, this connection is one of mutually supportive action. The human acts of tending, harvesting, and gifting the plant are what enables it to thrive, and in the same way, the sweetgrass enables the continuation and thriving of the Anishinaabe culture through its role in ceremony. Virgil learns through his own experience with the sweetgrass that being Anishinaabe is not a thing or a state of being; it is an action of giving, which establishes and perpetuates his identity in relation to all of his kin, including the natural world.

One might object that mimetic forms of representation such as novels, films, and memoirs are fundamentally different from the physical mode of signification that I have identified in the scent of sweetgrass, but I feel that these two realms are not as far apart as they might seem. Yes, mimetic forms are bound up in the representational expectations of metaphor, and physical sensations like the scent of sweetgrass are less likely to be understood as metaphorical. But enforcing a strong boundary between these modes of signifying is counterproductive. By looking and listening for the ways in which mimetic forms can gesture toward more intimate physical modes of communication, we open our minds and our bodies to the possibility of noticing the stories that the land is telling us. Stories of sweetgrass can invite us to seek out the physical presence of this medicine, to learn from it in an embodied way, and to think of it as a kind of interlocutor, perhaps even a relation. Indigenous people have been learning this form of communication for many generations, and their stories reflect this relationship in a profound way.

Much of the work that is often gathered under the rubric of new materialism seems to be aiming toward a similar goal of inviting or convincing people to attend more sensitively to the physical matter around and within them. I am heartened by this movement, despite the blind spots that have sometimes been displayed in early steps of the process. It is a good thing for theory to be moving away from abstraction and separation, and toward intimate engagements with the material world. The consequences of believing in a separation between the human and the nonhuman are all too visible in the ongoing devastation wrought by colonialism, capitalism, and individualism. The advent of anthropogenic climate change has awakened us to the fact that the land does respond to human activity in a material way—that we are not at all separate from our environment. The land has been speaking to us all along, and now it can no longer be ignored, even by those in the West who have denied this relationship for so long. In a time when it is difficult to be hopeful about the prospects for humans thriving on earth, I pin my hopes on the teachings of Indigenous cultures that have for centuries developed nuanced ways of listening to the land. When these teachings are given their proper respect and attention in the broader milieu—including the realms of theory and philosophy—the humans of this world will be poised to move forward in understanding their place and their role. I fully believe that non-Indigenous allies are also capable of sensing the voices of the land, which are provided as gifts to us all through our senses and through story. Those who can resist the impulse to commodify and control these stories, those who open themselves to sensory experiences of the land by understanding them as gifts that inspire and require open reciprocity, will be welcome to do so. Kimmerer remarks, “A path scented with sweetgrass leads to a landscape of forgiveness and healing for all who need it. She doesn’t give her gift only to some.”Footnote ⁴⁰