Dandelions
Here’s a passage from the book I’m reading just now.
The perfectly formed, little golden flowers soon give way to an equally beautiful, delicate white seed head that when blown upon by wind or child explodes into a cloud of tiny, fairy-winged parachutes (199).
Mary Siisip Geniusz, Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
I like books that resist classification, and this is certainly one of them. It is a work on botany, but also an ethnography, history and memoir. It features a wonderful fictional dimension as well. To speak about plants as family and friends, to speak in a language in which “gender” does not refer to male and female, but rather to animate and inanimate, to credit rocks and waters and trees with personalities and relationships, can bring a reader up short, make her appreciate dandelions, and not dismiss them as annoying weeds. It can make her appear to herself at best ungrateful, but worse, an ignorant, stubborn oppressor.
This book is a collaboration among three generations of Ojibwe women: the grandmother, Keewaydinoquay, who had absorbed both her tribe’s understanding of plants and their relationships to people to the point of becoming a lecturer on the subject at the University of Wisconsin; her daughter, Mary Siisip Geniusz, who wrote this text in an effort to get Keewaydinoquay’s teaching down on paper, and Wendy Makoons Geniusz, Mary’s daughter, who edited her mother’s manuscript, added notes and bibliography, and saw it through it’s fairly recent publication.
The Ojibwe are Anishinaabe, a cluster of tribes living mainly in the Great Lakes Area of North America, speaking related languages and largely sharing an understanding of the way human beings best grasp their position, obligations and possibilities — including understandings of the way the world came to be. This book is profoundly wise in specific ways, including quite detailed recipes for turning plants into medicines to relieve pain and disease, using them for food and also enjoying them, alert to their appearance, smell, sound and taste. This should of course always happen after having given thanks for the opportunity to do so.
Beyond the very concrete, immediate clarity, the book is also a subtle, firm assertion of an aesthetic position, a way of being in the world that addresses all human sense perception with understanding and humility. Written in graceful, engaging English, inclusive of both European and Latin as well as Anishinaabe names, it s enormously generous, setting out to acknowledge, consider, and ultimately get beyond conflicts that persist among humans ultimately dependent on their natural environment.
