Sean Crysler

Close Reading – “An Offering”

Traditions are a staple of all forms of groups, cultures, and societies that can manifest in a myriad of ways and change in meaning or significance as the time passes. This phenomenon is explored and dissected thoroughly in  the chapter “An Offering” from the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a work in which Kimmerer describes numerous separate events in her life ranging from helping out an aging neighbor to cultivating a pond then relates it to facets of nature of which she is an expert in or to aspects of Potawatomi culture. 

All chapters in Braiding Sweetgrass commence with an italicized passage covering an aspect of Potawatomi teachings, stories, or traditions that proceed to relate to the main body of the chapter, and “An Offering” is no exception. The italicized passage in this excerpt starts by describing how the Potawatomi were “canoe people. Until they made us walk. Until our lakeshore lodges were signed away for shanties and dust” (Kimmerer 51). In this line, two points of significance can be spotted: the repetition of word use and broken sentence formatting and the vague use of “they” tied with the allusion to Potawatomi land being signed away. The first of these points can be seen as Kimmerer adding impact through repetition to color the significance of the statements presented while also connecting both statements directly to the first line of “Our people were canoe people” (Kimmerer 51), as the two sentences following that line would grammatically connect to it if they weren’t intentionally broken off. Additionally, by doing this, Kimmerer separates the voice used for italicized passages from the voice of the narrator in the main body of the chapter through these literary devices as well as a difference in focalization, with the main narrator being strongly internally focalized while the narrator of the italicized passage describes actions being committed against the Potawatomi, connoting external focalization.

The second of these points, the use of they and the allusion, rely on the reader’s prior knowledge, whether from previous chapters of Braiding Sweetgrass or through general self-education, to fully understand. In order to facilitate this allusion, the italicized passages follow with “Our people shared a language with which to thank the day, until they made us forget” (Kimmerer 51). The reader now has three pieces of information to make an inference as to what the allusion entails: the Potawatomi were forced to walk, sign away their land, and forget their language. With a basic understanding of the history of the United States, it can be deduced that this refers to the forced removal of natives from their land by the U.S. government and the subsequent erasure of their cultures. This theme holds a major presence throughout the chapter, as do the last six words of the quote, “But we didn’t forget. Not Quite” (Kimmerer 51).

Following the italicized passage, the main body of the chapter starts by describing a ritual in which the narrator’s father pours a cup of coffee to the ground and thanks the gods of Tahawus. When describing her reaction to this, the narrator shows her internally focalized point of view as mentioned previously by stating “I was pretty sure that no other family I knew began their day like this, but I never questioned the source of those words and my father never explained” (Kimmerer 52). This demonstrates her emphasis on thoughts over actions, hence the internal part of the focalization, as well as showing that despite the narrator recounting past events, only the facts known to her at the time she thought this are presented to the reader, which is a tool that is fully utilized as the chapter continues.

In the explanatory segment regarding Tahawus directly after, the theme regarding the U.S. takeover of native land presents itself again when the narrator describes how “It’s called Mount Marcy to commemorate a governor who never set foot on those wild slopes. Tahawus, ‘the cloud splitter,’ is its true name, invoking its essential nature” (Kimmerer 52). In this segment, the narrator beguiles the governor that the mountain is officially named after and establishes Tahawus, the Potawatomi name for the mountain as established before the arrival of U.S. forces, as its true name, showcasing how the U.S. takeover has both overwritten Potawatomi land deeds and culture.

This theme is further addressed several paragraphs later when the narrator describes the Potawatomi tradition of passing around the sacred tobacco and singing Potawatomi songs, both of which were lost in time to her family once her grandfather was sent to a boarding school, another allusion referring to the re-education schools that forced native children to forgo their language for English and their faith with Christianity, thereby providing another example of the erasure of culture. However, the narrator then proceeds to point out how her family, the next generation, was back at the places of the Potawatomi’s old home despite it all, highlighting the second established theme that all has not quite been forgotten about the culture. This is further backed by the father’s coffee ritual, which refers to Potawatomi gods.

These themes are further reinforced by a passage where the narrator is saddened by the fact that she would never know the true rituals performed by the Potawatomi as they had once done before U.S. interference, but then comes to term with the rites they currently had, musing that “It may have been a secondhand ceremony, but even through my confusion I recognized that the Earth drank it as if it were right” (Kimmerer 54). Through this passage, the narrator establishes that even while their culture had been effectively erased, the new rite still held cultural significance as the old rites had, as demonstrated by the personification of the Earth itself, effectively showing it as an entity consistent with their culture.

The subjective view of the narrator and her decision to give information only according to the amount of information she had at the time comes into effect at the end of the chapter, where it is revealed that a sort of red herring was employed as a result of this literary choice. The narrator spends the entire chapter believing the coffee dumping rite to be of spiritual significance only to find out, upon finally asking her father about the rite’s origin, that it started as a purely functional action. Despite the narrator’s disappointment, this twist ultimately serves to lead into a closing commentary on how a custom “marries the mundane to the sacred” (Kimmerer 56).