In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer using her own scientific field as an example, Kimmerer notes that a traditional scientist studies a plant to see how it works. Yet, for Kimmerer, as fonts of wisdom and as educators, the main inquiry in studying plants is "the thing that would you be able to advise us?" Kimmerer tends to plants as insightful creatures, individual natives of the world deserving of our regard, subjects as opposed to objects. The book obviously expresses the significance of the land, for such countless reasons: food, recuperating, and so on.
As she investigates these topics, she circles toward a focal argument: The awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the world. Once we begin to listen for the languages of other beings, we can begin to understand the innumerable life-giving gifts the world provides us and learn to offer our thanks, our care, and our own gifts in return."
Kimmerer stretches out the information from plants to that of human culture, contending that individuals should accept a gift economy, one in which we get the endowments from nature and afterward return our own endowments back into the world in manners that support and sustain. She declares we should promise our first devotion to the land and not the State, and that we should see private property not as a pack or rights but rather as a heap of obligations.