Plants as Agents and Partners: Braiding Sweetgrass and the Expansion of Ethical Imagination

This study utilizes accounts of indigenous sweetgrass practices and myths in anthropological and religious studies fields to evaluate how indigenous approaches serve to expand Western ethical imagination around plants and ecological preservation. Indigenous harvesting practices and uses of sweetgrass are embedded in sacred myths and assumptions about the interconnectivity between humanity and plants. In this interconnection, plants and humans are envisioned to be in a sacred relationship of symbiotic mutuality. This study examines how harvesting practices contrast with dominant Western secular and religious paradigms of ecological ethics in approaches to plant replenishing. Initial studies regarding sweetgrass indicate that traditional indigenous approaches of human-plant relationality through sacred harvesting have proved more effective than predominant ecological approaches of not harvesting in promoting plant replenishment. Indigenous stories and practices challenge common Western paradigms of ecological preservation and potentially promote the rights of plant-life.