Editor's Note: This story is part of our series, Sacred Earth which examines the intersection between climate change — and faith, worldview, philosophy, psychology, and the creative arts. This series is sponsored by the Fetzer Institute.

KALAMAZOO, MI — Author Robin Wall Kimmerer spoke to a packed Chenery Auditorium on July 12 about "two-eyed seeing" — seeking knowledge and understanding about the natural world with both a Western science worldview and an Indigenous worldview.

"In two-eyed seeing, we say, Yes, it's important to look at the world through the lens of Western knowledge, but it's also essential that we look at the world through the Indigenous lens as well, rather than erasing it," she says.

Kimmerer is the author of the bestseller "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants." (2013, Milkweed Editions)  She is a botanist, director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and a member of the Potawatomi Nation.

She spoke for the Kalamazoo Nature Center's Terry Todd International Speakers Series.

One bowl, one spoon

Kimmerer began by guiding the audience through the North American Indigenous spiritual, cultural, and ancestral perspectives of the natural world. 

To many in the audience — members of the Gun Lake Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band and other Native Americans who were in attendance — it was familiar. To others, not so much.

She spoke of the Dish with One Spoon treaty between the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nations of 1701. "Of course, you've studied this, right? In the history classes, in your environmental classes?" Kimmerer asked, to a lot of awkward laughter from the audience.

Rachel Koetje, Kalamazoo Nature Center Robin Wall Kimmerer at Chenery AuditoriumIt's probably "the oldest sustainability policy on the planet," she says. 

"What this beautiful document tells us is that we agree, we two nations, that we are all fed from the bowl that Mother Earth has filled for us. And we agree that it is one bowl, just one bowl that we all eat from. And we also agree that we will work together to keep it clean, to keep it full," she says.

"Because when it's empty, it's empty."

The treaty is not only an agreement that they won't deplete the land, it's about sharing, she points out. "There's only one spoon. It doesn't say that there's a big spoon for some people and a little tiny spoon for others. This is a statement about environmental justice and how it is that we will live together."

What does the earth ask of us?

Kimemrer spoke of an Algonquin scientist colleague who asked her tribal council for a travel grant to a sustainability conference. 

The elders asked, "What's sustainability?"

The scientist told them it's "the way our people have lived and have been put in place since time immemorial." She then added the current, human-centered definition, that sustainability's goal is that we can "enjoy the attainment and continued satisfaction of human needs."

Rachel Koetje, Kalamazoo Nature Center Robin Wall Kimmerer at Chenery Auditorium"And they were scowling at her," Kimmerer says. 

The elders gave her the grant, but told her to pass along the message, "That sounds like they're just trying to find a way to keep on taking."

That people need to give to the Earth, instead of just take, is a value that goes back millennia on this continent.

"This question of 'What does the Earth ask of us,' is so ancient and so fundamental to Indigenous ways of knowing that we are in a great place. That is an important part of our creation story."

Kimmerer told the story of the Sky Woman who fell to an unknown watery world. She was saved and helped by all the animals familiar to the Great Lakes, the geese, the sturgeon, beaver, otter, loon, muskrat, snapping turtle. They worked to make her a home with soil on top of the turtle.

But the Sky woman also contributed, as an act of gratitude, Kimmerer says. "She had in her hand a branch from the tree of life that had all the medicines, all the berries, all the foods, all of our plant relatives on that one branch. And so she scattered those seeds over the Earth to give us the land and the bounty that we have today."

Young woman in a "mugshot"

The act of braiding sweetgrass, in the title of her book, is like braiding the hair of Mother Earth, Kimmerer says.

It's an act of care, like braiding the hair of a loved one. And the strands represent her approach to ecology.

"How is it we show Mother Earth that we care so much for her? With our Indigenous knowledge and with the tools of Western science, both of which we can use to care for the land. But both of those knowledges are human knowledges. So we also want to honor in the third strand the knowledge of our plant relatives themselves, who are among our world's teachers."

Rachel Koetje, Kalamazoo Nature CenterPhyllis Davis, Tribal Council Member for the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians of Michigan.It was a long struggle for her to get to her professional point in academia with her cultural viewpoint intact, she says.

When she was a girl braiding sweetgrass, she wanted to study botany, so she applied to the forestry school at SUNY.

She knew she'd likely be the only woman, and the only Native person on the campus.

For her first meeting with a professor, he asked her why she wanted to be a botanist.

She wanted to know "why goldenrods and asters were so beautiful together."

The professor told her "That's not science." When she said she wanted to learn the why's behind Indigenous knowledge, why some plants can make medicine, why some reeds can bend to form baskets, he said "That's not science."

"That's why I look so happy," she said, putting up on the Chenery screen her freshman photo, showing an unsmiling young woman looking as if she's in a mugshot.

She got the message that the ways of thinking that she grew up with weren't welcomed.

Rachel Koetje, Kalamazoo Nature CenterSharpfeather, a Pottawatomi drumming groupIt was "an echo of my grandfather's first day of school," at an Indian boarding school.  "As a little boy of nine years old, taken away from his family in Shawnee, put on the train... to go to school, whose mission, as you know, was ‘kill the Indian to save the man.’" 

Full assimilation didn't work with Kimmerer. She learned the Western science taught at the school while keeping her culture. 

"I had a really hard time," she says. "It's really challenging to have your whole worldview upended. And my strategy for this was to hang tight to what I believed, and learn their way of knowing as well, to think about what kind of relation can we make between them."

Two-eyed seeing

Kimmerer points out the Western scientific definition of “ecosystem” as she was taught at SUNY. She put up a diagram of the ecosystem, which looked like the schematic for a household appliance. It shows "the dominant metaphor (of) the ecosystem as a machine, and the natural world understood not as our family, but as subjects, but as objects." 

As for the land we, and the ecosystem, live on, "in American society, it is understood first and foremost as property." If one owns property, one could "tenderly steward it," or "you could wreck it. You can, because it's yours."

She was taught the importance of "natural resources" at the school. "Sounds benign enough," Kimmerer says, but they're resources to be preserved so that sooner or later they can be extracted for profit. "Land has capital."

"But what if we could put on a different set of glasses, together, and think about what land means through the lens of many Indigenous peoples?"

Rachel Koetje, Kalamazoo Nature CenterRobin Wall Kimmerer signing books at Chenery AuditoriumThe land is a source of "identity for Native peoples," she says. It sustains life, is home to both humans and all other life, it's a connection to their ancestors. "Land as the library, land as the teacher, the ones who can guide us on our way, the holders of knowledge."

Land should never be thought of as property, "because land is sacred.... the place we accept our moral responsibility to life."

The view, and related views, of land-as-property, have led to "climate catastrophe" and "the sixth extinction" event that the planet is going through,  she says. 

Science is showing a rapidly changing climate and massive drops in biodiversity.  A recent UN report shows "nightmarish loss" of species in the past half-century, she says.

"But very importantly, within this report, we see one bright spot," Kimmerer says. "There are places on the planet where biodiversity is thriving. And those places are stewarded by Indigenous peoples…. Biodiversity experts suggest that 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity is in Indigenous homelands."

She says, "So, shouldn't the environmental science community, shouldn't the political community, be saying, 'Well, why is that?''"

Kimmerer says why is because, "in a nutshell, it's Indigenous land management, Indigenous science, this integration of the well-being of land and people. Not that we preserve nature over here and then wreck it over here, but that the well-being of all depends on balance."

She continues, "Indigenous values and worldview, thinking about the land as our family, as relatives, as our kinfolk, as our moral responsibility — we see on the ground what that looks like and why that matters."

Ki, kin

All life forms have gifts to give, she says, from the birds' songs to humans' language.

"But sometimes we use language in a really destructive way." 

Kimmerer thought of the word "it," and how this pronoun is usually used to refer to non-human life.

One can point at a bird, and say, "It is singing," she says.

"What if my grandma came up here on the stage and I said, 'It's bringing a cup of tea.' "What does that mean if I it-ed my grandmother? I stole her personhood, I denigrated her, I disrespected her, I made her into a thing — deeply disrespectful, right?"

When she learned the Potawatomi language, she found that different pronouns are used to refer to "a blue jay and an airplane."

She extracted "ki" from a longer word in the language, as a replacement for "it," to use for living beings. 

A black bear came up on the screen above the stage. "Ki is having a feast on those berries," she says.

But what would the plural version be? Just add an "n," she says.

"When we add that 'n,' we can speak of our relatives. We can say to those geese, 'Kin are flying south in the winter. Have a good trip. We'll miss you.' We can speak about the plants, the forests, all the beings around us, as our kinsfolk," Kimmerer says.

"We need a transformation toward kinship, that's the living world. I hope you give it a try," she says to applause. 

In a closing that led to a standing ovation, and a rush to the book-signing table, Kimmerer says, "The Earth asks us to change."

The current dominant U.S. "policy and environmental leadership just talks about changing platforms, changing technology, changing tax structures. All of that's important. We need all of those solutions," she says.

But Kimmerer is asking for a deeper change to help address the climate crisis and plunging biodiversity. 

"What we can mostly change, first, is ourselves, to change our minds, away from this outdated, destructive model of human exceptionalism and domination of the living world to a model of kinship, a model of justice and mutual respect among all species," she says.

"And this is the path forward led by Indigenous philosophy."

A local view of two-eyed seeing – translating between the lenses

After Kimmerer's talk, we had a conversation with Mary Parr, the Pierce Cedar Creek Institute's stewardship manager, about her reaction to what was said.

Parr works to preserve the 850-acre Hastings-area nature center and biological field station. She's also a member of the Pine Marten clan and of the Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa tribe.  

Mary Parr, stewardship manager at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute"For me, what is so inspiring about Robin is just that, I am a woman in land management and stewardship. I'm also pursuing my Master's in biology, so I'm on my way to being a scientist. I am an Indigenous woman," Parr says.

"It's very influential to see other people that look like you excel. A lot of her work is just very inspiring to me as an individual and has really helped me integrate."

Kimmerer's work makes Parr ask herself, "How can I integrate my culture into what I do as a land manager? How can I teach the next generation of undergraduate students that I work with every summer to also utilize that two-eyed seeing?"

"I think Robin really provides a lot of questions," Parr says.

"Tribal and Indigenous philosophy is based out of a lot of relationships with nature, it's not necessarily us having dominion over those plants and animal relatives. So it really questions our linguistics and our language of how we refer to those things," Parr says.

"I think it really makes us question what those things mean to us," she continues — questions on if plants and animals "are resources that can be consumed or if they are beings that we use for the benefit of our lives and our families and sustaining ourselves. And those things, we need to have gratitude for, and recognize their contribution to sustaining our lives as humans."

In the stewardship field, Kimmerer's questioning "makes us ask and ponder, you know, our role as land managers — and even the word 'manager' insinuates that we have dominion over the thing we're managing."

Indigenous philosophy "calls us to reevaluate how we consider these natural resources," Parr says, to see that "they are plant and animal relatives that are beings with rights and beings with language among their own species, and how we can understand them and their biology and life cycle, and how we can provide for them in a reciprocal way so that they can continue to not only serve us but continue their role in the ecology of the environment."

"Robin really provides a lot of eloquent, poetic language that is scientific and accurate, to give us that pathway and direction towards that."

Kimmerer's "two-eyed seeing," Parr says, "recognizes the importance of seeing in our Indigenous lens and recognizing plant and animal relatives for who they are, and all of the culture surrounding that, but also has a lens of recognizing that we do live in this very capitalistic world," Parr says.

"We have to be able to translate between the two of them, especially when we're communicating with government officials or people that maybe are not as familiar or open-minded with indigenous ways of thinking," she says. "It's a way that within ourselves we can translate what that means in both worlds, but then also facilitate those ways of communicating to, you know, make change and pull bigger levers."

But, Second Wave asks, how do we get this across to the wider public? A lot of people aren't looking through the Indigenous lens or the scientific lens.

"It's a lot easier to not recognize what's happening with our world and just continue business as usual," Parr says. "It is often really hard to get people excited about climate change, and making a change in their lives, because it's really hard to change. Often it involves being vulnerable, communicating with people, and learning new things, which can be uncomfortable."

Parr recommends that people get face-to-face with nature, and create a "relationship with nature. And the more you learn about nature, the more you often develop a sense of appreciation. And with that appreciation comes respect," she says.

"When I'm working with people that may not believe in climate change or are having difficulty making changes in their life, I often go back to that appreciation. What are their favorite spots? What are their favorite things to do in nature?

"And then, how can we protect those for not only them and the rest of their lives, but their grandchildren's lives and the people after them?"