Guin Library: Guin Reads Book Club

Dive into great books with Guin Reads!
The book club of the Marilyn Potts Guin Library (at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, OR). Everyone’s welcome, email us to join the club! hmsc.library@oregonstate.edu

Link to this guide: beav.es/guin-reads

• Topic: Part 2: "Tending Sweetgrass"

• When: 2:00pm, Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025

• Hybrid location: Guin Library's Seminar Room and via Zoom (email hmsc.library@oregonstate.edu for link).

“Everybody lives downstream" 

With this simple truth at the end of the chapter "A Mother's Work," Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks to our interconnectedness, mutual dependence, and our responsibility to nurture each other and nature. 
 
As we move toward the next Guin Reads meetup, let's consider the themes of interconnectedness and community found in Section 2: Tending Sweetgrass.
 
This section begins with the words, "Wild meadow sweetgrass grows long and fragrant when it is looked after by humans. Weeding and care for the habitat and neighboring plants strengthens its growth."
 
Our Guin Reads member, Desiree, reminds us that we can think of ourselves in these terms, "We grow, individually and together, when we care for one another. Stewardship for our community drives transformative change through working relationships and shared responsibility for well-being."
-Guin Library Director, David Irvin 

Braiding sweetgrass : indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

"As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return." - https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass (publisher)