BRAIDING AGAINST THE GRAIN: INDIGENOUS EPISTEMOLOGY, POSTHUMAN SUBJECTIVITY AND THE DECOLONISATION OF ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN BRAIDING SWEETGRASS

Abstract

This article argues that the Indigenous philosophical ideas presented in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) should not be viewed as an adjunct to Western posthumanist thought, since they emerge from a distinct intellectual tradition that predates and, in many respects, extends beyond it. Building on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of epistemic violence, Walter Mignolo’s work on the coloniality of knowledge, Glen Coulthard’s critique of the colonial marginalisation of Indigenous philosophies, Enrique Salmón’s notion of kincentric ecology, and critical perspectives on the ontological turn offered by Sarah Hunt, Zoe Todd, and Kyle Whyte, the article examines Kimmerer’s Potawatomi worldview as an autonomous system of knowledge capable of assessing Western posthumanist theory on its own terms. The discussion develops through three central arguments. First, Kimmerer’s use of the animate pronoun “ki” represents an ontological perspective that cannot be adequately expressed within the structural limits of English grammar. Second, the ethical principles embodied in the Honorable Harvest, together with Salmón’s kincentric ecology, describe a shared distribution of agency across human and non-human life that Western new materialism often seeks to explain theoretically but struggles to realise in practice. Finally, the article argues that storytelling in Braiding Sweetgrass is far more than a method for communicating ecological knowledge; it is the very process through which that knowledge is created, maintained, and passed from one generation to the next through lived relationships. The article concludes that posthumanism’s failure to acknowledge Indigenous intellectual antecedents reproduces the very systemic injustice it claims to diagnose.