Books

Recommended books.

What’s wrong with a little anthropomorphism?

When I walked my daughter to school today, it was cold, there was a hard wind and a number of things to grumble about. She needed some distracting. Luckily, we saw some hawks who have been circling over an area of our Village near the elementary school and an adjacent church. I drew her eye…

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On Apples and Animacy

In Potawatomi, an Anishnaabe language, nouns and verbs are separated into two different classes: animate and inanimate. You speak one way of a living being and a different way of a non-living thing.  Moreover, such beingness is attributed not only to humans but also to plants and animals, even to rocks, mountains, water, fire and…

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Radical Corridors

Lately, I’ve been captivated by this idea of living corridors – paths for wildlife as they spread out from generation to generation – that forms Sara Stein’s departing vision in her wonderful book Noah’s Garden. Her point is this:  if we want to invite wildlife back into our neighborhoods, we cannot go at it alone….

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Becoming Indigenous to Place

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s deeply moving book, Braiding Sweetgrass, there is one chapter that speaks to a longing at once personal and endemic to our culture at large. In this chapter – entitled “In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place” – she uses the Anishibaabe story of the First Man, Nanabozho, to explore…

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