Sweetgrass medicine is used to heal the grief of Carlisle’s child deaths.

Evidence

Not all of the kids who came to Carlisle left. There lay the dust that was born a child in Oklahoma, in Arizona, at Akwesasne. Drums sounded in the rain-washed air. The scent of burning sage and sweetgrass wrapped the small crowd in prayer. Sweetgrass is a healing medicine, a smudge that invokes kindness and compassion, coming as it does from our first Mother. The sacred words of healing rose up around us. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 973

Categorization

• XREF: Sweetgrass as healing medicine returns to the book’s opening promise of sweetgrass as ‘medicine’ plant — ch1’s ‘plant relative’ made literal in ceremony.