Raising Questions with Robin Wall Kimmerer
The things that baffle us create the best learning experiences for students--and readers.
In the past two years my learning and reading tastes have leaned classical. Although I received my Ph.D. in contemporary British literature, and taught in that field for many years, I find myself turning toward the ancients in my personal reading. This proclivity has gone so far as reviving my study of ancient Greek, a pursuit that I had not undertaken since my undergraduate days. Maybe the many weeks I spent staring down my mortal end reminded me of the things I had loved as a young man, and I wanted to return to them. Or maybe I’m just getting old.
I started this Substack because I felt myself wanting to write about the wisdom I was encountering in these classical authors, but I believe that we should search for truths everywhere—as does this month’s featured author, who mines her own ancestral traditions to bring wisdom to modern seekers. I first encountered Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants through the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame, where I now have a permanent position as a Professor of the Practice (woohoo!). Kimmerer’s book was our choice for a staff read in the spring semester of 2024, which means we read a new section of the book every other week and discuss it at our bi-weekly meetings. (1)
The book deserves all of the accolades it has received. Kimmerer writes beautifully, serves as a gentle guide and teacher to her readers, and addresses environmental concerns that matter to us all. I feel a special kinship with her and her project because she follows the same path I am trying to tread in this space, drawing attention to voices that have been drowned out by our many contemporary distractions. But while I tend to look towards the ancient worlds of Europe, she finds her inspiration much closer to home. In the book she describes herself as an “Anishinabekwe scientist,” and she focuses on cultural heritage of indigenous peoples from Canada and the United States.
I didn’t get very far into the book, which definitely deserves the title of a modern classic, before discovering a passage that offers a Substack-worthy lesson for both teachers and writers—and especially for the teachers who also write.
In both of my last two books, I made the argument that great questions drive great learning. The cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham first convinced me of the power of questions to frame whole courses, units, or class periods in his book Why Don’t Students Like School? Teachers sometimes forget about the deep questions about the human condition that created our disciplines. A political scientist who has mastered the intricacies of various political systems, and covers them routinely in his survey courses, might lose sight of the kind of fundamental questions that kicked off the whole discipline: Should we have a king, or just let everyone make their own rules and decisions? And if the latter, what system would be the best way to let us live in pace with each other? What happens when we start fighting?
Great teachers don’t lose sight of these fundamental questions, and surface them for each new group of learners they encounter. Great teachers are also curious people, alert to new questions that might arise in their lives and push them into new learning. A new question might inspire them to develop a new course, or add a new unit to an existing course. Witness the courses that are now springing up everywhere about generative artificial intelligence, with all of the attendant questions it has raised: How will this technology change human existence? Can we use it responsibly and ethically? What new things will it allow us to do? What old things will be sacrificed to it?
I just finished my next book (2), which makes the case that great nonfiction writers are great teachers (hence the title, Writing Like a Teacher). In the first chapter of that book, I argue that just as great college courses spring from fascinating questions, so do great nonfiction books. No surprise, then, to discover that Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book was launched with a question, one that actually emerged from an experience she had teaching a course in General Ecology. She had surveyed her students about their knowledge and attitudes toward the relationship between humans and nature, both negative and positive. The two hundred students in the course were well-informed about all of the ways in which humans were bad for nature—they could cite them line and verse—but almost none of them could point to examples of positive interactions. Kimmerer describes her response to this survey:
I was stunned. How is it possible that in twenty years of education, they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and their environment? Perhaps the negative examples they see every day—brownfields, factory farms, suburban sprawl—truncated their ability to see some good between humans and earth. As the land becomes impoverished, so does the scope of their vision. When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?
That question-inducing moment provides Kimmerer with an entry point to share her thoughts about how we can create those imagined futures. If we can’t observe enough examples of positive interactions around us, she suggests, we can find them in the wisdom of my people. The special genius of the book stems from Kimmerer’s equal emphasis on two different ways of understanding our relationship with nature: one emerging from her family’s history and traditions, and one coming from her work as a scientist at a Canadian university. Both forms of understanding, taken together, can lay the pathway for a better environmental future.
I expect that Robin Wall Kimmerer had been thinking about writing a book about the wisdom of her people long before she had that experience in her General Ecology course. Without question, a market exists for books about what we can learn from the early inhabitants of the Americas, and she had the credentials and knowledge to produce such a book. She could have easily have constructed a book that took the form of a lecture from her knowledge base, walking readers through indigenous wisdom traditions by era and region. In other words, it would have looked a lot like a survey course helmed by a teacher dedicated to covering as much as material as possible. Instead Braiding Sweetgrass, the product of a great teacher and writer, begins with a question that confronted her in the classroom.
Many nonfiction books and essays are launched by a specific question-inducing experience such as the one Kimmerer describes. But the books that really make a difference in the lives of readers will often have a deeper question lurking beneath the specific one, one that’s even more challenging or baffling. In writing Braiding Sweetgrass, the most profound question that Kimmerer had to answer was one that a contemporary reader might pose to her as well: Why should we listen to the voices from the past—even when, and even especially when, they might not have known some of the thing we know now? What we can learn about psychology from ancient philosophers who didn’t understand how brains work? (3) Or about ecology from indigenous peoples from centuries past who might never have peered through a microscope to observe the structure of a cell?
Kimmerer helps cement the notion that great teachers raise questions at the outset of a learning experience, whether they are in classroom or in their writing chairs. Those of us who are experts in in a knowledge field sometimes need reminding of this practice. For the past year, as I was working on Writing Like a Teacher, I have been giving some workshops and webinars on the topic, and working with individual authors on the side. When I ask people to describe their essay or book ideas, they typically start by telling me what it’s all about. “Here’s what I will argue,” they will say. Or “here’s what my research shows, or here’s what I know.” The impulse to lecture runs strong in our kind.
After they have provided me with their answer, I ask them to take a step backward. “Before we strategize about how to present your idea,” I will say, “remind me: What question are you answering again?”
Notes
My brother and I co-facilitate a monthly philosophy reading group, and this month’s discussion focused on a chapter of the Braiding Sweetgrass which contrasts the American Pledge of Allegiance with the Thanksgiving Address of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. In other words, the book provides fodder for rich discussions in multiple fields. In still other words, you should read it.
If the review and production wheels run smoothly, the book should be available from the University of Chicago Press in early 2025.
Answering this question has been a major book trend in recent years. I am currently reading a fantastic example of it in The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life. From the western philosophical tradition, Stoicism has become the wellspring of multiple books.