What Stories, Like Water, Hold: A Response to Fikile Nxumalo

The stories we tell carry our beliefs, our histories, and our relationships. They orient us toward particular ways of living and being, both with each other and with the natural world, and guide us into our sense of self and our encounters with difference. They describe what is made alive and what is rendered in service.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, welcomes us into the story of Skywoman, who falls downward on a stream of light and looks into the dark waters below to see not emptiness, but the glimmers of many eyes gazing up at her. Carried by a council of animals, she is grounded, and upon the back of Turtle, she spreads the mud found in the clenched paw of Muskrat. As the land grows from the mud, she sings and dances her gratitude for the extraordinary gifts of the animals, forming together with them what the original peoples of the Great Lakes call Turtle Island. From the hands of Skywoman are scattered the branches and seeds of the many grasses, flowers, and medicines that abundantly flourish there.