The boys may have come home fishless, but they brought back nearly as much protein as if they’d had a stringer of catfish. Nuts are like the pan fish of the forest, full of protein and especially fat—“poor man’s meat,” and they were poor. Today we eat them daintily, shelled and toasted, but in the old times they’d boil them up in a porridge. The fat floated to the top like a chicken soup and they skimmed it and stored it as nut butter: good winter food. High in calories and vitamins—everything you needed to sustain life. After all, that’s the whole point of nuts: to provide the embryo with all that is needed to start a new life.

So much was scattered and left along that trail. Graves of half the people. Language. Knowledge. Names. My great-grandmother Sha-note, “wind blowing through,” was renamed Charlotte. Names the soldiers or the missionaries could not pronounce were not permitted.

a decorated World War I

barefoot boy on the reservation running home in his underwear with his pants stuffed with pecans

ust before it all blew away.

wo pairs of worn-out pants, tied shut with twine at the ankles and bulging with nuts

Looks like nothing but biscuits and redeye gravy for supper tonight. Again. They hate to go home empty-handed and disappoint Mama, but even a dry biscuit fills the belly

The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to listen

the younger brothers of Creation.” 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 guidanc

It was through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land, that the original immigrant became indigenous.

Perhaps the Skywoman story endures because we too are always falling. Our lives, both personal and collective, share her trajectory. Whether we jump or are pushed,

It is good to remember that the original woman was herself an immigrant. She fell a long way from her home in the Skyworld, leav-ing behind all who knew her and who held her dear.

From the very beginning of the world, the other species were a lifeboat for the people. Now, we must be theirs

hese are not “instructions” like command-ments, though, or rules; rather, they are like a compass: they provide an orientation but not a map. The work of living is creating that map for yourself.

One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.

On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her.

These students were not raised on the story of Skywoman

The median response was “none.”I was stunned. How is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment? Perhaps the negative examples they see every day— brownfields, factory farms, suburban sprawl—truncated their ability to see some good between humans and the earth. As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of their vision.

When we braid sweet-grass, we are braiding the hair of Mother Earth, showing her our loving attention, our care for her beauty and well-being, in gratitude for all she has given us. Children hearing the Skywoman story from birth know in their bones the responsibility that flows between humans and the earth.

its fragrance a sweet memory of Skywoman’s hand. Accordingly, it is honored as one of the four sacred plants of my people. Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.

many came to live with her on Turtle Island.

Sunlight streamed through the hole from the Skyworld, allowing the seeds to flourish

Together they formed what we know today as Turtle Island, our home

Some did not return at all.

A great turtle floated in their midst and offered his back for her

he geese nodded at one another and rose together from the water in a wave of goose music. She felt the beat of their wings as they flew beneath to break her fall.

It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth,

but the sweet-est way is to have someone else hold the end so that you pull gently against each other, all the while leaning in, head to head, chatting and