A remarkable story of resilience, heartbreak, and ultimately triumph follows a young woman's international travels after she is deported to Botany Bay in Australia for stealing a woman's bonnet and manages to find her way home again after a long ordeal. On a moonless night in the early 1790s, prisoner Mary Bryant, her husband William, her two small children, and seven other convicts stole a twenty-foot longboat and slipped noiselessly out of Sydney...

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what...