Robin Wall Kimmerer:
The Botanist Who Braids Worlds

As a child growing up in upstate New York, Robin Wall Kimmerer fell in love with the Earth one moss patch at a time. In her family’s backyard and in the wild spaces beyond, she listened not only with her ears but with her spirit. Every stone, leaf, and lichen held a story. Every breeze reminded her that there are many ways to know a world.

CREDIT: Matt Roth

Born in 1953 to Robert and Patricia Wall, Kimmerer is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her journey would eventually take her through degrees in botany, a PhD in plant ecology, and a pioneering career as a scientist and teacher. But before all that, she was simply a child walking through the woods, wondering why her textbooks never spoke of plants as teachers, kin, or gifts. What she couldn’t find in her Western science education, she recovered through memory, tradition, and a commitment to reclaim Indigenous knowledge. For Kimmerer, science and story were never meant to be in opposition.

Kimmerer’s story is rooted in the forest and in the rupture of cultural erasure. Her grandfather attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where Indigenous children were stripped of language, culture, and name. That silence—government-imposed and generational—became a quiet wound, one she would later confront through language reclamation and storytelling.

Decades later, Kimmerer began learning the Potawatomi language herself. “When a language dies,” she wrote, “so much more than words are lost.” Language, for her, is a vessel of worldview and a way of remembering that the land is alive, sacred, and speaking.

Braiding Knowledge, Braiding Sweetgrass

At the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF), where she now teaches, Robin Wall Kimmerer has reimagined what environmental education can be. She founded the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment to create a space where Indigenous students feel seen and supported, and where Western science is enriched, not threatened, by Indigenous knowledge systems.

In her classrooms, students don’t just memorize plant anatomy or ecological theory; they are asked to reflect on their responsibilities to the natural world. Her courses, ranging from Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Ethnobotany to Moss Ecology and Ecology of Spirit, encourage students to view land not as a community and not as a commodity. Through storytelling, ceremony, and science, Kimmerer challenges her students to learn with humility, to ask not just what we know about the Earth, but how we know it and why it matters. She calls this “two-eyed seeing”—a framework that holds Western scientific rigor in one eye and Indigenous ways of knowing in the other. In her teaching, these are not opposing visions, but rather a unified approach.

Her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants became a national phenomenon—passed hand to hand, read aloud in book clubs, classrooms, and gardens. Blending memoir, ecological insight, and spiritual reflection, Kimmerer did something rare: she broke down the walls between science and story. Each chapter braids together Potawatomi teachings, botanical details, and personal experiences in a way that resonates across generations and backgrounds.

A Voice in the Forest of Institutions

Kimmerer’s advocacy transcends the written word. While her prose carries power, it is her presence in classrooms, boardrooms, and global stages that continues to shift paradigms. She has addressed the United Nations in a call to reimagine humanity’s relationship with the Earth. Through her work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and programs like the Higher Education Multicultural Scholars initiative, Kimmerer has championed students from underrepresented communities, ensuring that the future of environmental science is as diverse as the ecosystems it seeks to protect. She is a mentor to aspiring ecologists, and to a new generation of Indigenous scholars reclaiming the right to speak their knowledge in their own languages, on their own terms.

As a founding force behind the Ecological Society of America’s Traditional Ecological Knowledge Section, she has helped reframe TEK as a legitimate, empirical, and deeply ethical science. In classrooms, she teaches it. In community schools like the Onondaga Nation’s, she bridges the gap between academic institutions and ancestral practice. She has sat on advisory boards for national programs like SEEDS (Strategies for Ecology Education, Diversity and Sustainability), weaving equity into the very structure of how science is taught and who gets to teach it.

Whether advocating for Indigenous rights, elevating place-based learning, or restoring Native plants to sacred lands, Kimmerer’s work focuses on uplifting narrative, story, and experience in environmental stewardship.

Continuing Her Success

In 2022, Kimmerer received a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2025, she was named to the TIME 100 list. Yet for all her accolades, Kimmerer remains humble, reminding us that the Earth is not impressed by résumés; it responds to relationships.

Kimmerer’s life and work offer environmental wisdom and a way of being. She leads a path of reciprocity, humility, and kinship. In a world aching for reconnection, she invites us to kneel beside her in the soil, to remember our responsibilities, and to begin again.

Diego Tovar — Director of Campus and Civic Engagement
Diego Tovar, Director of Campus and Civic Engagement, holds his master’s in Global Environmental Policy from American University and an undergraduate degree as a Udall Scholar in Ecosystem Science and Sustainability with a minor in Political Communication from Colorado State University. Diego has worked for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Navajo Nation Washington Office focusing on climate justice and climate adaptation.