For some American Indians, sweetgrass is “the hair of our Mother, Earth,” as the late Indian languages scholar Mary Ritchie Key reports. “Each strand is not as strong as the strands are when braided together.” For the Ojibwe characters in “The Road Back to Sweetgrass,” the plant carries just such a symbolic charge, but its vanilla-scented sweetness also marks a very real place, and very real ties of blood and history to a patch of homeland on the Miskwaa River.

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