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2023-2024 Common Read - Braiding Sweetgrass: Wisgaak Gokpengagen: A Black Ash Basket

"Black ash and basket makers are partners in a symbiosis between harvesters and harvested: ash relies on people as the people rely on ash. Their fates are linked." p. 149

Black ash baby basket with sweetgrass turtle, made by Odawa-Ojibwe artist Kelly Church of Michigan

Uyvsdi, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Black ash tree

Katja Schulz from Washington, D. C., USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Objibwe Weaver April Stone pounding a black ash log into splints to use for basket weaving. Taken at North House Folk School in 2019.

Terasaface, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Emerald Ash Borer

U.S. Department of Agriculture, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Keywords

Adamant: unshakable or insistent especially in maintaining a position or opinion. (MW)

Bole: trunk. (MW)

Component:  a constituent part: ingredient. (MW)

Floodplain: an area of flat land next to a river that regularly floods when there is too much water in the river. (OL)

Four directions: honors the East, West, and North areas. Each Indigenous nation will have teachings regarding the gifts each direction brings. The number four is also significant; for example, four seasons, four elements on earth, four races of humans. (YA)

Girth: a measure around a body. (MW)

Gouge: a groove or cavity scooped out. (MW

Ineffable: incapable of being expressed in words. (MW)

Sapling: a young tree. (MW)

Strata: a sheetlike mass of sedimentary rock or earth of one kind lying between beds of other kinds (MW)

Vireo: any of about 50 species (family Vireonidae) of New World songbirds with a stout, slightly notched, hook-tipped bill that has fine bristles at the base.  (Britannice Concise Encyclopedia)

Whetstone: a stone for whetting [sharpening] edge tools (MW)

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