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Robin Wall Kimmerer

218 quotes

“Generations of grief, generations of loss, but also strength—the people did not surrender. They had spirit on their side. They had their traditional teachings. And they also had the law. Onondaga is a rarity in the United States, a Native nation that has never surrendered its traditional government, never given up its identity nor compromised its status as a sovereign nation. Federal laws were ignored by their own authors, but the Onondaga people still live by the precepts of the Great Law.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It’s not enough to grieve. It’s not enough to just stop doing bad things.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Plants are the first restoration ecologists. They are using their gifts for healing the land, showing us the way.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sweetgrass is a teacher of healing, a symbol of kindness and compassion.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did. Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land. We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers. All stories are connected, new ones woven from the threads of the old.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In many indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, the present, and the future exist. Creation, then, is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone—it is also prophecy.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ignorance makes it too easy to jump to conclusions about what we don't understand.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Naturalists live in a world of wounds that only they can see.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness"—estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world is more than your thoughtless commute. We, the collateral, are your wealth, your teachers, your security, your family. Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of Creation.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our histories are inevitably braided together with our futures.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The gifts of the earth are to be shared, but gifts are not limitless. The generosity of the earth is not an invitation to take it all.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it’s really love more than hope…We hear so much of: ‘Well, do you have hope?’ Hope for what? For me it’s about helping people fall in love with the world again. We know as people the power we have when we really recognise our love for someone or something. Hmm! – there’s nothing that’s going to stand in our way. (The Guardian, 2024)”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I fear altogether too many scientists hide behind this notion that our objectivity will somehow be compromised by advocacy. I couldn’t disagree more…When we have the privilege of understanding how the living world works, who better than the scientific community to also stand up and tell this story? (The Guardian, 2024)”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the English language is a language of objectification of the living world, right? When we see that beautiful moon, we say “it” is shining; those swallows, “it” is chittering as “it” flies overhead. In English, we “it” the living world, whereas in Potawatomi that’s not possible. We use the same grammar for each other as we do for our plant and animal relatives. (Orion Magazine, 2021)”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think we need to re-member these ancient ways of living that are already there and reimagine ourselves in them. (Orion Magazine, 2021)”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most people don’t really see plants or understand plants or what they give us...People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how it’s a gift.” (The Guardian, 2020)”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We tend to shy away from that grief,” she explains. “But I think that that’s the role of art: to help us into grief, and through grief, for each other, for our values, for the living world. You know, I think about grief as a measure of our love, that grief compels us to do something, to love more.” (The Guardian, 2020)”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Laws are a reflection of social movements,” she says. “Laws are a reflection of our values. So our work has to be to not necessarily use the existing laws, but to promote a growth in values of justice. That’s where I really see storytelling and art playing that role, to help move consciousness in a way that these legal structures of rights of nature makes perfect sense. I dream of a day where people say: ‘Well, duh, of course! Of course those trees have standing.’” (The Guardian, 2020)”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I just have to have faith that when we change how we think, we suddenly change how we act and how those around us act, and that’s how the world changes. It’s by changing hearts and changing minds. And it’s contagious." (The Guardian, 2020)”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“when you know the plants, you just feel more at home wherever you go (2015)”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People have forgotten that plants were once regarded as our oldest teachers (2015)”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the indigenous worldview of respect and reciprocity carries the values that we need to survive (2015)”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As we give thanks for the Earth, will we live in such a way that the Earth can be grateful for us? (2015)”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can’t think of a single scientific study in the last few decades that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It’s always the opposite, right? What we’re revealing is the fact that they have a capacity to learn, to have memory. And we’re at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“in a sense, the questions that I had about who I was in the world, what the world was like, those are questions that I really wished I’d had a cultural elder to ask; but I didn’t. But I had the woods to ask. And there’s a way in which just growing up in the woods and the fields, they really became my doorway into culture. In the absence of human elders, I had plant elders, instead.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it delights me that I can be learning an ancient language by completely modern technologies, sitting at my office, eating lunch, learning Potawatomi grammar.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“there was no question but that I’d study botany in college. It was my passion — still is, of course. But the botany that I encountered there was so different than the way that I understood plants. Plants were reduced to object. What was supposedly important about them was the mechanism by which they worked, not what their gifts were, not what their capacities were. They were really thought of as objects, whereas I thought of them as subjects. And that shift in worldview was a big hurdle for me, in entering the field of science.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why is the world so beautiful? is a question that we all ought to be embracing.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“that kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim, because attention is that doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity. And it worries me greatly that today’s children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than 10 plants.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the English language, if we want to speak of that sugar maple or that salamander, the only grammar that we have to do so is to call those beings an “it.” And if I called my grandmother or the person sitting across the room from me an “it,” that would be so rude, right? And we wouldn’t tolerate that for members of our own species, but we not only tolerate it, but it’s the only way we have in the English language to speak of other beings, is as “it.” In Potawatomi, the cases that we have are animate and inanimate, and it is impossible in our language to speak of other living beings as “its.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just as it would be disrespectful to try and put plants in the same category, through the lens of anthropomorphism, I think it’s also deeply disrespectful to say that they have no consciousness, no awareness, no being-ness at all. And this denial of personhood to all other beings is increasingly being refuted by science itself.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“what is the story that that being might share with us, if we knew how to listen as well as we know how to see?”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“science asks us to learn about organisms, traditional knowledge asks us to learn from them.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the language of “it,” which distances, disrespects, and objectifies, I can’t help but think is at the root of a worldview that allows us to exploit nature.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that’s really important to recognize, that for most of human history, I think, the evidence suggests that we have lived well and in balance with the living world. And it’s, to my way of thinking, almost an eyeblink of time in human history that we have had a truly adversarial relationship with nature.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea of reciprocity, of recognizing that we humans do have gifts that we can give in return for all that has been given to us, is I think a really generative and creative way to be a human in the world. And some of our oldest teachings are saying that what does it mean to be an educated person? It means that you know what your gift is and how to give it, on behalf of the land and of the people, just like every single species has its own gift.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“a lot of the problems that we face in terms of sustainability and environment lie at the juncture of nature and culture. So we can’t just rely on a single way of knowing that explicitly excludes values and ethics. That’s not going to move us forward.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we can’t have an awareness of the beauty of the world without also a tremendous awareness of the wounds; that we see the old-growth forest, and we also see the clear cut. We see the beautiful mountain, and we see it torn open for mountaintop removal. So one of the things that I continue to learn about and need to learn more about is the transformation of love to grief to even stronger love, and the interplay of love and grief that we feel for the world. And how to harness the power of those related impulses is something that I have had to learn.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The guidelines of the Honorable Harvest are not usually written down, they are reinforced in small acts of daily life. But if I were to list them they would look something like this: Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you can take care of them. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for a life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. Never take the first one. Never take the last. Take only what you need. Take only that which is given. Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.: Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share. Give thanks for what you have been given. Give a gift in reciprocity for what you have taken. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the Earth will last forever.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My Anishinaabe people, as well as the Haudenosaunee people who are my neighbours, have adopted the bowl as the symbol for the nurture and provisioning of the land. We have agreements with one another, known as the One Bowl, One Spoon treaties. The land is understood as the Bowl, filled by Mother Earth with everything that we need. It is our responsibility to share it and keep that bowl full. How we take from the bowl is represented by the spoon. There's just one spoon, the same size for everyone, humans and more-than-humans alike. Not a tiny one for some and a gouging shovel for others. One of the oldest 'conservation policies' on the planet is a statement about sharing, about justice, about reciprocity with the gifts of the land.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The call for land protection cannot be one of removing Indigenous and local people from land, but of harmonizing people and land, of aligning economies with the laws of nature. Let's remember that ecology and economy share the same root word, oikos, the Greek word for home. Our work is not just to protect the remnants of biodiversity but to restore them with a combination of the tools of environmental science and the philosophy and know-how of Indigenous knowledge. Restoration must also include restoration of an honourable relationship with land, of re-storyation, the adoption of a new narrative for the relationship between people and place. One that asks not 'What more can we take from the Earth' but 'What does the Earth ask of us?'”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't know about hope, but I do know about love. I think we are in this perilous moment because we have not loved the Earth enough, and it is love that will lead us to safety. I'm dreaming of a time when we are propelled not by fear of what is coming towards us, fearsome as it is, but by love for a beautiful vision of a world whole and healed. One of the great gifts of Indigenous environmental philosophy is that it provides that expansive vision of what it means to be a human: it is an invitation to be a member of the sacred web of life, to belong. As we join the oriole in singing thanks to the Earth, we can live in such a way that the Earth will be grateful for us...Let us ask each other, what do you love too much to lose?”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as "the younger brothers of Creation." We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They've been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our lands around were wanted by settlers, so in long lines, surrounded by soldiers, we were marched at gunpoint along what became known as the Trail of Death. They took us to a new place, far from our lakes and forests. But someone wanted that land too, so the bedrolls were packed again, thinner this time. In the span of a single generation my ancestors were "removed" three times—Wisconsin to Kansas, points in between, and then to Oklahoma. I wonder if they looked back for a last glimpse of the lakes, glimmering like a mirage. Did they touch the trees in remembrance as they became fewer and fewer, until there was only grass? So much was scattered and left along that trail. Graves of half the people. Language. Knowledge. Names. My great-grandmother Sha-note, "wind blowing through," was renamed Charlotte. Names the soldiers or the missionaries could not pronounce were not permitted.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The federal government's Indian Removal policies wrenched many Native peoples from our homelands. It separated us from our traditional knowledge and lifeways, the bones of our ancestors, our sustaining plants—but even this did not extinguish identity. So the government tried a new tool, separating children from their families and cultures, sending them far away to school, long enough, they hoped, to make them forget who they were. [...] Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren't looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places. Whether it was their homeland or the new land forced upon them, land held in common gave people strength; it gave them something to fight for. And so—in the eyes of the federal government—that belief was a threat.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source