The following is an excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Facing History & Ourselves, “An Offering” from Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults”, last updated July 26, 2024.
“Our people were canoe people. Until they made us walk. Until our lakeshore lodgers were signed away for shanties and dust. Our people were a circle, until we were dispersed. Our people shared a language with which to thank the day, until they made us forget. But we didn’t forget. Not quite.
“Gods of Tahawus
“Our family spent summer canoe camping in the Adirondacks, and every day began with my father pumping the tank on the Coleman stove for the morning coffee.
“I can picture my father, in his red-checked wool shirt, standing atop the rocks above the lake. When he lifts the coffeepot from the stove, the morning activity stops. We know, without being told, that it’s time to pay attention. He stands at the edge of camp with the coffeepot in his hand and pours coffee onto the ground in a thick brown stream. My father lifts his face to the morning sun and speaks into the stillness, “Here’s to the gods of Tahawus.” The stream of coffee runs down oar smooth granite to merge with the lake water. Then and only then does he pour out steaming cups of coffee for himself and my mother. So begins each morning in the north woods. Gratitude, the words that come before all else.
“I never questioned the source of those words, and my father never explained. They were just part of our life among the lakes. But their rhythm made me feel at home, and the ceremony drew a circle around our family. By those words, we said, “Here we are.” I imagined that the land heard us and murmured to herself, “Oh, here are the ones who know how to say thank you.”
“Tahawus is the Algonquin name for Mount Marcy, the highest peak in the Adirondacks. It’s called Mount Marcy to commemorate a governor who never set foot on those wild slopes. Tahawus, “the Cloud Splitter,” is the true name, invoking their essential nature. Among our Potawatomi people, there are public names and true names. My father had been on Tahawus’s summit many times, and he knew it well enough to call them by name. I imagined that this beloved place knew my true name as well, even when I myself did not. When we call a place by name, it is transformed from wilderness to homeland.
“Do you know the Indigenous names of the places you live? If not, how can you find out?
“Sometimes my father would name the gods of Forked Lake or South Pond or Brandy Brook Flow, wherever our tents settled for the night. I came to know that each place was home to others before we arrived and long after we left. As he called out the names and offered a gift, the first coffee, he quietly taught us the respect we owed these other beings.
“I knew that in the long ago times our people raised their thanks in morning songs, in prayer, and in the offering of sacred
“ tobacco. But at that time, my family didn’t have sacred tobacco and we didn’t know the songs. They’d been taken away from my grandfather at the doors of Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
“My mother also had a ritual of respect. Before we paddled away from any sampling place, we had to make sure it was clean. “Leave this place better than you found it,” she reminded us. We also had to leave wood for the next person’s fire, with tinder and kindling carefully sheltered from rain by a sheet of birch bark. I liked to imagine their pleasure, those other paddlers, arriving after dark to find a ready pile of fuel to warm their evening meal. My mother’s ceremony connected us to them too.
“On Sundays, when other kids went to church, my family would go out along the river to look for herons and muskrats or to the woods to hunt for spring flowers or on picnics. The words came along. This time, the pot was full of bubbling tomato soup, and the first drink poured was for the snow. “Here’s to the gods of Tahawus”—only then would we wrap mittened hands around our steaming cups. These offerings were made only under an open sky and never back in town where we lived.
“Ceremony
“As I grew to adolescence, the offerings began to leave me angry or sad. I heard in the words a message that we did not belong because we spoke English and that ours was a secondhand ceremony. Somewhere there were people who knew the right ceremony. People who knew the lost language and spoke the true names, including my own.
“In the same way that the flow of coffee down the rock opened the leaves of the moss, ceremony brought the dormant back to life. Ceremony opened my mind and heart to what I knew but had forgotten. The words and the coffee called us to remember that these woods and lakes are a gift. Ceremonies large and small have the power to focus attention to a way of living gratefully and awake in the world. It may have been a secondhand ceremony, but even through my confusion, I recognized that the earth drank it up as if it were right. The land knows you, even when you are lost.
“A people’s story moves along like a canoe caught in the current, being carried closer and closer to where we began. As I grew up, my family found our tribal connections that had been frayed—but never broken—by history. We found the people who knew our true names. And in Oklahoma, when I first heard the sending of thanks to the four directions at the sunrise lodge—the offering in the old language of the sacred tobacco—I heard it as if in my father’s voice. The language was different, but the heart was the same.
“Ours was a solitary ceremony but fed from the same bond with the land, founded on respect and gratitude. Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging—to a family, to a people, and to the land.
“Now the circle drawn around is bigger, encompassing a people to which we again belong. But still, the offering says, “Here we are.”
“Still, I hear at the end of the words the land murmuring to herself, “Oh, here are the ones who know how to say thank you.”
“Today, my father can speak his prayer in our language. But it was “Here’s to the gods of Tahawus,” that came first, in the voice that I will always hear.
“At last, I thought that I understood the offering to the gods of Tahawus. It was, for me, the one thing that was not forgotten, that which could not be taken by history. The knowing that we belonged to the land, that we were the people who knew how to say thank you. Years later, I asked my father, “Where did the ceremony come from? Did you learn it from your father and he from his? Did it stretch all the way back to the time of the canoes?”
“He thought for a long time. “No, I don’t think so. It’s just what we did. It seemed right.” That was all, or so it seemed.
“Weeks later, when we spoke again, my dad shared, “I’ve been thinking about the coffee and how we started giving it to the ground. You know, it was a boiled coffee and there’s no filter. If it boils too hard, the grounds foam up and get stuck in the spout. The first cup you pour would get that plug of grounds and be spoiled, I think we first did it to clear the spout.” The whole web of gratitude and the whole story of remembrance was nothing more than the dumping of the grounds?
““But, you know,” he continued, “there weren’t always grounds to clear. It started out that way, but it became something else. A thought. A kind of respect. A form of thanks. On a beautiful morning, I supposed you could call it joy.”
“That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The coffee to a prayer. What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home.
Credit Line: From Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Text © 2022 by Lerner Publishing Group. Illustrations © 2022 by Nicole Neidhardt.
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