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Photo: Robin Wall Kimmerer, by Dale Kakkak; James Yeh.

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Thoreau views nature and human life as separate spheres, while Kimmerer views nature and humans as a kinship structure. We know this because Thoreau described the western wilderness as an entirely different place from civilization, where one could go to lose the influence of society, while Kimmerer focused on how nature impacts human culture, specifically using Indigenous cultures as a lens to view that relationship. 

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Thoreau views nature and human life as separate spheres, while Kimmerer views nature and humans as a kinship structure. We know this because Thoreau described the western wilderness as an entirely different place from civilization, where one could go to lose the influence of society, while Kimmerer focused on how nature impacts human culture, specifically using Indigenous cultures as a lens to view that relationship. 

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Photo: "Mother Nature" by Bill Bell; Fine Art America.

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Photo: "Aldo Leopold on a Trip to the Rio Gavilan, CA" (1936), from U.S. Forest Service; Lance Richardson.

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Photo: by S.B. Walker, from his book “Walden” (2017); Brinkley, Douglas.

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In “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” Kimmerer wrote, “In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it…. In Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family” (Kimmerer 55). Our language impacts whether or not we think of something as living. Calling something “it” renders it to the status of being an object, whereas calling it “he” or “she” puts it on the same level as us. This distinction makes clear the way Potawatami people think about nature: they believe it is alive, and that nonhuman life is just as important as human life. This recognition of the natural world as living is significant, because humans prioritize the living. Life is something that we respect and tend to want to protect. In Kimmerer's view, humans have a kinship with nature because nature and humans are all equally alive, and their relationship can be mutually beneficial and beautiful.

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Photo: "Henry David Thoreau" Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Biography.com Editors.

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Photo: "Birth Story of Creation" (2001); J.B. Thomas.

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In Walking, Thoreau wrote, “Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children… we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture… which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization.” (Thoreau 40). It is evident that Thoreau views nature and humans as separate spheres because he makes a distinction between life in nature and life as a part of society; he describes socialization as being “weaned from [Nature’s] breast.” Thoreau thinks of nature as this beautiful, pure, separate thing. He sends the message that in order for man to become as he was created to be, he must be removed from civilization and become a part of this “savage,” separate nature.

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In Walking, Thoreau refers to the femininity of nature when he refers to it as this “howling mother of ours,” and when he describes socialization as being “weaned from her breast” (Thoreau 40). The language he uses paints a picture of a wilderness that is pure and virginal. In lecture on Wednesday September 13th, we discussed the idea that the way we talk about wilderness is impacted by the way we talk about gender, and vice versa. Thoreau reinforces this idea with the image of a masculine man encountering a feminine wilderness and being nurtured to become more masculine. It further separates the idea of the wilderness from that of man.

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In Walking, Thoreau wrote, “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild…. In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” (Thoreau 37) When Thoreau says the “West,” he means North America. Thoreau thinks of the wilderness as that which is separate from English civilization. That is to say, it is a place separate from what he thinks of as civilized human culture. He sees this wilderness as uncultivated land, which, if harnessed to its fullest extent, could help the “World” (i.e. the English) start anew. Thoreau wants to commune with nature because he wants to be freed from civilization through what he thinks of as a land of savagery, or civilization’s antithesis.

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The Complications of Thoreau's "Wild" West

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The Complications of Thoreau's "Wild" West

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Thoreau’s idea of the Wild has some complications, the most glaring of which is that he completely ignores the existence of Indigenous peoples. In class on Wednesday, September 13th, we learned that this westward expansion Thoreau was so in favor of included quite a lot of genocide. Indigenous people have been forced off their land, and those who did not comply were murdered. There were many attempts to force Western culture on them as well, to the point where many aspects of Native American cultures have been lost. The Potawatami language, for example, is spoken by only nine people, as Kimmerer said in “Learning the Grammar of Animacy” (Kimmerer 53). People like Thoreau spread a rhetoric that prioritized the thriving of the colonizers, and in doing so, ruined the lives of those who already thrived there.

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In Walking, Thoreau wrote, “Living much out of doors… will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character,--will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands…. So staying in the house... may produce a softness and a smoothness” (Thoreau 31). Thoreau believes that human life as it was for the English was too comfortable; in his eyes, one could easily lose a sort of strength of character, and a physical strength in English life. He believed that in order for humanity to be strong enough to survive, it would have to go outside, into nature and away from civilization.

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The idea of the wilderness as nurturing and strengthening is interesting when one looks at the history of the word’s connotation. In the lecture on Wednesday, September 13th, we covered this history, here referred to as the “Wilderness in Five Acts.”. An important part of this history was Act 1, or “Biblical Fear.” According to Cronon in “The Trouble With Wilderness,” at the time of Act 1, “To be a wilderness was to be ‘deserted,’ ‘savage,’ ‘desolate,’ ‘barren’... Its connotations were anything but positive” (Cronon 8).The fact that Thoreau describes wilderness in such a positive light is substantial; he seems to see it still as a “desolate” and “savage” place, but he sees this as a means of making those who come into contact with it stronger. Through Walking, Thoreau contributed to a new view of wilderness, which characterizes Act 2, the “Romantic Reversal.” Thoreau believed that access to wilderness would lead to a life of authenticity, which was, in his view, lacking in Europe.

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Bell, Bill. “Mother Nature.” Fineartamerica.Com, Fine Art America, fineartamerica.com/featured/mother-nature-bill-bell.html. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.

Brinkley, Douglas. “Thoreau’s Wilderness Legacy, Beyond the Shores of Walden Pond.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 7 July 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/books/review/douglas-brinkley-thoreaus-wilderness-legacy-walden-pond.html.

Biography.com Editors. “Henry David Thoreau Biography.” Biography.Com, A&E; Television Networks, 2 Apr. 2014, www.biography.com/authors-writers/henry-david-thoreau.

Cronon, William. “The Trouble With Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History, edited by Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History, vol. 1, 1996, pp. 7–28. 1.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall "Learning the Grammar of Animacy." Braiding Sweetgrass, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, MN, 2013, pp. 48–59.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall "Skywoman Falling." Braiding Sweetgrass, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, MN, 2013, pp. 3-10.

Leopold, Aldo. “Thinking Like a Mountain.” Eco-Action.Org, www.eco-action.org/dt/thinking.html. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.

Menrisky, Alexander. ENGL 2635E Lecture, 6 September 2023.

Menrisky, Alexander. ENGL 2635E Lecture, 13 September 2023.

Menrisky, Alexander. ENGL 2635E Lecture, 18 September 2023.

Momaday, Navarre Scott. "An American Land Ethic." The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages. St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Richardson, Lance. “Thinking like a Mountain.” The Paris Review, 30 July 2015, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/30/thinking-like-a-mountain/.

Thomas, J.B. “Libguides: 2023-2024 Common Read - Braiding Sweetgrass: Skywoman Falling.” Skywoman Falling - 2023-2024 Common Read - Braiding Sweetgrass - LibGuides at Marist College, 2001, libguides.marist.edu/c.php?g=1314310&p=9677364.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walking, The Atlantic, June 1862. Pp. 31-41

Yeh, James. “Robin Wall Kimmerer: ‘People Can’t Understand the World as a Gift Unless Someone Shows Them How.’” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 23 May 2020, www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/23/robin-wall-kimmerer-people-cant-understand-the-world-as-a-gift-unless-someone-shows-them-how.

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In “Skywoman Falling,” Kimmerer wrote, “... [There was] Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree…In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast” (Kimmerer 6-7). Kimmerer here paints the picture of the Garden of Eden, where, in the bible, Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which caused them to be banished from the paradise of the garden. Kimmerer contrasts these figures with Skywoman, a figure from an Indigenous people’s culture who coexisted with the various beings that lived in nature. The different relationships between these two figures and nature serves as a juxtaposition between how Western culture views nature and how Native peoples look at nature. Western society expands over and destroys natural areas, while Indigenous culture emphasizes working within the bounds of nature.

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In “Skywoman Falling,” Kimmerer wrote, “We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn–we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance” (Kimmerer 9). Comparatively speaking, humans have not been around for very long at all; the environments in which we live, however, have been around for a very long time, evolving and surviving. Kimmerer believes that this ability of nature to prevail means humanity should look at nature through the eyes of a student, so that we, too, can be long-lived. It emphasizes nature’s ability to sustain us, and our potential to work alongside it. In particular, it shows an interconnectedness between humans and nature, a relationship which she believed should not be abused but respected.

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Native American peoples tend to have a certain respect for nature, because of the importance placed on this respect in their cultures. In a lecture on Monday September 18th, we discussed the myth of the Ecological Indian stereotype. Native American people are seen as having an inherent connection to nature, and so are treated as a part of nature, rather than as people. That is to say, this ignorance dehumanizes Native American peoples. When Thoreau referred to the West as “Wild” land, he was, like this stereotype, negating the humanity of Indigenous peoples. He saw them as a part of that land, and as inconsequential. This kind of attitude completely disregards the fact that Native Americans are not inherently connected to nature, but choose to be respectful toward for its own sake. This kind of active decision would not have been understandable to much of Europe, and so they assumed Indigenous people were just inherently different from them.

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Another writer, N. Scott Momaday, knew that the way one learns to think of their environment impacts the way they treat it. In “An American Land Ethic” he talked about the importance of the passing down of information, and in particular, the remembrance of what came before. The avenue through which Momaday learned about what came before was through oral storytelling from his elder. Like Kimmerer, he viewed the relationship between nature and humans as a kinship structure because of what his elder said when he was young. In his culture, the land is a greatly important part of life. Momaday described the indifference with which Americans tend to look at land, and he recognized that the way that the mass culture views nature will impact how an individual views nature (Momaday 48). His work “An American Land Ethic” served as a sort of call to action for readers (specifically readers from Europe and Western society) to value life in nature as we would value human life, and to see the connections between nature and humanity. Like Kimmerer, he wanted the coming generations to not take nature for granted like those in Western culture are taught to through their traditions and language.

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The Benefits of "Thinking Like a Mountain"

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The Benefits of "Thinking Like a Mountain"

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Native American cultures place a great importance on the holistic lens; they look at their existence on a land as an opportunity to thrive with the other nonhuman inhabitants of that land. This idea is reminiscent of Aldo Leopold’s “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which we discussed in lecture on Wednesday, September 6th. Leopold tended to think holistically, and urged his readers to “think like a mountain.” He said “The cowman who cleans his range of wolves has not learned to think like a mountain” (Leopold 2). A cowman might hunt wolves, hoping to protect his animals, and then, when not preyed on by wolves, the deer population might increase and deplete the mountain’s resources. That is to say, one who exacts their power to attain their immediate goals may not predict the ends they cause. The cowman, like the majority of the American public, does not think like a mountain, or like Skywoman; they think like individuals. In doing so, they’ll likely cause the end of the mountain.