What troubles me most about Braiding Sweetgrass is not its language, nor even its popularity, but the gap between knowledge and context and how that gap is repeatedly used for settler comfort.

My unease began with noticing how this book has become something like a devotional text for white women. It is routinely positioned as a healing curriculum for whiteness on Indigenous lands, circulated through book clubs, classrooms, and institutional programs as a sanctioned window into Indigenous thought. It is rarely engaged critically. Instead, it is consumed as permission.

I have not yet undertaken a full critical reading. My first two encounters were already punctuated by deep misgivings, particularly around the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing, which I find dangerously conciliatory when left unmoored from power, history, and justice.

“I propose that the Indigenous worldview and way of life is the answer. A ‘prettier’ industrial society still relentlessly engages mass extraction of natural resources. No version of that society is an answer. It is the threat.” – Sakej Ward

No form of industrial extraction is valid on Indigenous lands. Western science, at its foundation, is an extractive project epistemologically, materially, and historically.

To understand this, one must look squarely at the origins of Western scientific methodology. Francis Bacon, hailed as its father, explicitly described scientific inquiry using the language of domination, torture, and rape. Nature, feminized and personified, was to be forced, constrained, vexed, and made to confess her secrets. This was not metaphor alone. Bacon was himself a legal inquisitor during the witch trials, a period marked by the torture and execution of women, many of whom were medicine keepers, healers, and practitioners of Euro-Indigenous science.

The language of Western science has never fully shed this origin: inquiry, inquest, inquisition. It exercises force as method, it proposes extraction as knowledge and it makes use of control as understanding.

Despite contemporary attempts to humanize science, its dominant structures remain deeply masculinist, hierarchical, and often interpersonally violent particularly toward women and Indigenous peoples. Even modern critiques tend to address ethics abstractly, without reckoning with the psychosocial and intergenerational impacts of this epistemic violence across species and communities.

I cannot reconcile this worldview as valid.

When Europeans first invaded Indigenous territories, they could not identify or treat their own malnutrition. They burned their own healers. They polluted rivers (who shits upriver from their drinking source? Europeans) for centuries. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples had developed sophisticated, relational, holistic scientific systems rooted in responsibility rather than domination.

Western scientific methodology is not neutral. It is an appropriation of Indigenous ways of knowing, stripped of relationality and repurposed as a tool for extraction and empire.

This is where Braiding Sweetgrass fails me most profoundly. The book continues to validate Western scientific inquiry as salvageable, as something that can be gently braided with Indigenous knowledge without fully confronting its violent foundations or its ongoing role in colonial harm.

What Braiding Sweetgrass also participates in, often subtly, sometimes explicitly, is the romanticization of Indigenous knowledge, which is itself a form of violence. Indigenous science is rendered gentle, poetic, and endlessly generous, severed from the political, territorial, and legal realities that make it possible. Knowledge is aestheticized while the people who hold it are made abstract, distant, or interchangeable. This framing invites consumption without responsibility: settlers are encouraged to admire, borrow, and “learn from” Indigenous knowledge while remaining insulated from Indigenous anger, refusal, and demands for justice. Romanticization flattens Indigenous knowledge into metaphor, stripping it of its specificity, its rigor, and its embedded obligations. It makes our sciences seem spiritually available while our bodies, lands, and sovereignty remain contested or ignored. In this way, reverence becomes another access point. It takes on the look of something that feels respectful while continuing the work of erasure.

Epistemic theft occurs when Indigenous knowledge is taken out of its relational, legal, and territorial context and repurposed for settler use without consent, accountability, or material reciprocity. It is not only the taking of information, but the stripping of obligation. It is divorcing knowledge from the people, lands, laws, and struggles that give it meaning. Romanticization is one of epistemic theft’s most effective tools. By rendering Indigenous knowledge as gentle, poetic, universal, and spiritually generous, it becomes consumable without consequence. It takes complicated systems and renders them into a toothless pablum.

Romanticization transforms living sciences into metaphor, ceremony into aesthetic, and survivance into inspiration. In doing so, it neutralizes Indigenous authority, forecloses refusal, and allows settlers to claim intimacy with Indigenous knowledge while remaining fundamentally disconnected from Indigenous sovereignty, justice, and lived reality. What appears as reverence is often extraction refined. It becomes a knowledge admired, borrowed, and circulated, while Indigenous peoples themselves remain dispossessed, contested, and ignored.

Romanticization as a Mechanism of Settler Power

1. Romanticization preserves settler innocence by allowing admiration to stand in for accountability, positioning Indigenous knowledge as something to appreciate rather than something that demands ethical, legal, and material response.
2. Within liberal multiculturalism, Indigenous knowledge is welcomed only after being neutralized. It is stripped of its capacity to demand land, justice, refusal, or the dismantling of colonial power structures. When Indigenous people in turn demand land, justice, attempt refusal, or work to dismantle colonial power, they are seen as going against this notion of peace and love promoted by the neutralized ideas contained with the romanticization.
3. What is framed as respect is often absorption, as romanticization enables settlers to consume Indigenous knowledge while remaining insulated from guilt, responsibility, and the consequences of ongoing colonization.
4. By converting sovereignty into culture, romanticization celebrates Indigenous knowledge aesthetically while severing it from Indigenous authority, law, and lived political reality.

The idea that settlers can “become Indigenous” through intimacy with land, without justice, without Land Back, without reparations, without dismantling occupation, is not relational. It is consumptive.

The book consistently advances the trope that falling in love with the world is sufficient to produce ecological change. Love, here, is detached from accountability. Justice is optional. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples continue to face dispossession, criminalization, and genocide.

We are not props for settler healing. Our knowledge is not a balm for the moral crisis of industrial societies. Falling in love with berries does not interrupt colonial violence.

Relationship to land without relationship to Indigenous struggle is not reciprocity, it is theft refined into new agism, updated conservation policy, and erasure.

I am exhausted by incomplete and inaccurate knowledge being mobilized for the comfort of whiteness while the material conditions of Indigenous peoples worsen globally. Genocide scholars have long warned that when art, science, or knowledge can be easily mobilized in service of fascism, it is because it already leans in that direction. Indigenous knowledge stripped of its context, its transformative systems of justice, its structures of relationality, its Indigenous governance becomes a tool to undermine Indigenous peoples globally. It is not the knowledge that mobilizes in the service of fascism, it is the appropriation, stripped of context and relationship used as a crutch to prop colonialism failing into fascism, just like it was stripped and used to prop failing Euro hierarchical patriarchal dominances in transitioning colonialism from religious fervour to exploitational and brutal Euro based scientific pursuit. It is the use of Indigenous knowledge as template, reduced to a text that is used as a guide. The absence of Indigenous reality echoes loudly even when it is described in ways that heal whiteness. Once again, Indigenous knowledge on the rack, tortured, exploited…

This is how I have come to understand Kimmerer’s work and its uptake: not as radical, but as dangerously accommodating to Western occupation; propping whiteness, and colonial violence under the guise of care.