One book I’ve been making my way through during these pandemic months is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

To be honest, it’s maybe a little outside the scope of my typical fare. I can’t remember if I’ve ever read anything that concerned botany and the only book from recent memory I recall reading that foregrounded the indigenous experience was Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which I tackled a few years ago. What led me to Braiding Sweetgrass I know stemmed partly from my desire to read something outside the rather depressing books I typically trend towards, but also with a hope that I would gain new insight and appreciation for a perspective that seems, at least via descriptions of the book, more inclined towards the natural beauty of the world.

I am admittedly not done with it, having put it down for a couple of months as I picked up new reads. But the format of it — a collection of essays separated into three sections — does lend itself the quality of a book you can walk away from and return to as needed.

I started thinking more of this book as the Thanksgiving holiday loomed. Like so much of the overdue reckoning that has come in recent years in regards to how history is taught and how certain holidays are observed, the indigenous experience as it relates to Thanksgiving has started to get more notice.

I thought about one essay in particular — “Allegiance to Gratitude.” In it, Kimmerer begins by noting her daughter’s early refusal to recite the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance, and from there draws a connection to the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address — a practice similar to a pledge but one, as Kimmerer notes, that encompasses a scope far grander than that limited by the confines of nationalism.

The address, also known as Words That Came Before All Else, essentially invokes a gratitude for the natural world, and the abundance that it provides. But it doesn’t invoke that necessarily as simply a celebration of a bountiful harvest, but rather speaks to a reciprocal relationship between all living things — that of the natural elements but also humanity as part of it.

Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now let us bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one.

The contrast Kimmerer draws throughout the essay with the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance provides, I think, a good example of that between the tangible reality of the material world and the concept of “imagined communities” foundational in abstracting the idea of a “nation.”

We are thankful to our Mother the Earth, for she gives us everything that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she still continues to care for us, just as she has from the beginning of time. To our Mother, we send thanksgiving, love, and respect.

I was talking with a dear friend the other day about the weird place I often find myself in regards to tradition, particularly as it relates to holidays. There is a latent pining, I think, for the substantive feeling you often attributed to holidays when you were younger — that they embodied something more than when you get older and it begins to feel more like you’re going through the motions. My typical refrain is to blame consumer culture, though capitalism has of course made it a cottage industry in itself to offer anti-consumerist critiques within the subgenre of “Finding the True Meaning of ________” media products. And at the same, I wonder if I’m simply basing my desires more upon a romanticism of the past, rather than for what the foundations of a holiday have always been.

In the case of the Thanksgiving holiday, the service it provides in obfuscating the U.S. colonial past is already well-noted. What I’m just as interested in is the notion of gratitude it embraces.

Especially in these particularly bleak times, there has hardly been a day that goes by that, in my thoughts, I count myself thankful for things like family, friends, and health. But there is always that latent recognition that the gratitude we express is produced largely by an existence that persists in spite of a system that is designed to make it difficult. To that end, I can’t help but wonder if gratitude itself, when defined within the parameters of a holiday, takes on a commodity form itself — one only amplified by the image-cultivating tendencies of the social media age.

That’s not an attack on the good aspects of this ritualized practice of self-reflection, necessarily. Again, to recognize and be thankful for one’s good fortune is, I think, a key aspect to humility and embracing the things that give life substance. My point is that when it functions to obscure the source of hardship, therein lies the issue.

A good point Kimmerer makes: “You can’t listen to the Thanksgiving Address without feeling wealthy. And, while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness. The Thanksgiving Address reminds you that you already have everything you need.”

The absolute kernel of truth here I think is that of the recognition that scarcity is largely artificial as a political concept. That’s not to say there are infinite resources in the world and that we can trend towards a path of unobstructed growth forever, but rather that the earth provides so that all don’t need to live in want — it’s the makeup of society that makes it so that’s not always recognized. This “politics of scarcity” is particularly valuable when utilized by both far-right movements and neoliberal pushes for austerity operating on the notion that there is not enough to go around and playing people against each other based upon that idea.

The only point I might differ is on the notion of “contentment as a radical act.” I do get the point being made here, of valuing the true substantive aspects of life over those needs cultivated by consumer culture. However, I might say the more radical act would be to push for contentment on a mass scale — to actually ensure that the earth that does provide enough when allocated equitably does, indeed, meet the base needs of all.

But I think this is one reason I was drawn to this essay. Kimmerer wonders throughout how different society might look if something like the Thanksgiving Address were to replace pledges across the world — creating societies founded upon a gratitude for the earth and cultivating a “democracy of species.” I’ve long embraced a language similar to this when reckoning with my own personal politics, and I certainly feel that the Left ought not to shy from accusations of utopianism when presenting the ideal of the future.

I think these inclinations are often so easily dismissed because of how capitalism uses them in, as I mentioned before, its own performative anti-consumerist media (see, Avatar). But I always feel that the best place one can position oneself is that place where you can recognize the true aspects of an idea while understanding how it’s being taken advantage of and watered-down.

To that end, perhaps something like the Thanksgiving Address ought to become more standard practice, as Kimmerer suggests. Not simply as a means of expressing gratitude, but also one where that gratitude highlights the reciprocal, and communal, relationship with the natural world and each other.