Every time I see someone tread off 
a beaten trail, crushing plants in their 
wake, my heart crumples inside. “They’re 
just plants,” is the usual response I’m met 
with, words that cut inside me further. 
Plants may seem insignificant, partly due 
to their size and their position below our 
eye level. Humans are fascinated with 
animals larger than themselves — ele-
phants or killer whales, for example — but 
aren’t thrilled by a small shrub. 
But have we forgotten that plants give 
us life? Plants are the reason we can roam 
this Earth. Or, in the words of Robin Wall 
Kimmerer, plants give us “the privilege of 
breath.”
I wonder how often we think of plants 
and trees in this way, how regularly we 
view the world as animate and directly 
responsible for our own lives. How dif-
ferent would our world look if we saw 
the non-animal lives around us as our 
greatest teachers? In her book “Braid-
ing Sweetgrass,” Robin Wall Kimmerer 
shows us just how beautiful that planet 
could be. 
“Braiding Sweetgrass” focuses on the 
space between indigenous knowledge 
and scientific thought, where both thrive 
and complement each other. Kimmerer 
belongs to the Citizen Potawatomi nation, 
but is also a distinguished botanist. Lend-
ing her voice to both the scientific and 
indigenous perspective, Kimmerer recon-
ciles two worlds drifting apart, and uses 
her knowledge of both to envision a more 
sustainable future.
When I picked up “Braiding Sweet-
grass,” spring was knocking on my door. 

Lime-green shoots were beginning to 
peek out of the earth, the endless win-
ter finally ceasing. I remember walk-
ing through the forest and seeing right 
through it — the towering trees weren’t 
yet filled with leaves, but buds were start-
ing to sparkle in the dim sunlight. I read 
as the world was waking from its slumber, 
and Kimmerer’s words provided the per-
fect commentary. Kimmerer’s intricate 
understanding of the natural world isn’t 
intimidating, but rather comforting and 
gentle. You don’t have to be an ecologist 
to understand her writing and take some-
thing from it. Chapters are told as first 
person narratives, but by the end you’ve 
inadvertently learned enough about pond 
eutrophication or the utility of wetland 
cattails to confidently explain it to some-
one else.
Early on, Kimmerer challenges our pri-
vate, capitalist worldview, and instead 
urges us to think communally. The world 
isn’t rich for individual taking, but instead 
generous with resources that sustain lives 
and communities. As is the tragedy of the 
commons, our species often ends up tak-
ing more than our share, and as a result 
we see whole ecosystems — rainforests, 
wetlands, tundras — disappear. Kim-
merer gives a good reason for why we do 
this: The Western world still fails to rec-
ognize the world as animate. Indigenous 
languages such as Potawatomi are about 
70 percent verbs, while English is only 30 
percent. The verb “to be” applies to much 
more than just humans in Potawatomi, 
and thus many more things are consid-
ered alive. 

7

This week marked four months since San 
Francisco Ballet first cancelled a performance 
due to coronavirus. In early March, the compa-
ny was one of the first in the country to feel the 
effects of stay-at-home orders and their much-
hyped run of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” 
came to a screeching halt. Soon after, SFB 
cancelled four more productions, locked their 
rehearsal spaces and spearheaded a series of 
online programming that, like most other com-
panies, established Instagram as a quasi-home 
base. Over the last four months, SFB’s feed 
shifted from a uniform presentation of profes-
sionally staged photography to a rather endear-
ing hodgepodge of at-home studios, amateur 
lighting and IGTV streams of digital seasons. 
This collage of imagery was no different two 
weeks ago on June 19 when the company took 
part in the #JuneteenthDanceBreak initiative 
started by Theresa Ruth Howard, founder of 
the organization Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet. A 
week and a half prior, Howard had challenged 
the global dance community to join her in “lift-
ing up the legacies, contributions, accomplish-
ments, and stories” of Black artists. The task 
was simple: On June 19, “dedicate your feed to 
the display of the beautiful diversity of Black-
ness” with at least four separate posts through-
out the day. 
Howard’s proposition was one of the many 
initiatives born of a burgeoning awareness for 
the Juneteenth holiday. The date commemo-
rates the day that the last enslaved people finally 
received news of their freedom on June 19, 1865. 
The event took place two and a half years after 
the Emancipation Proclamation and its history, 
like many other facets of Black history, remains 
largely absent from our public awareness. This 
year, ongoing protests against racial injustice 
have emboldened arguments for America to 
recognize the date both as a federal holiday as 
well as a chance to reflect more generally on the 
systemic issues of racism that still exist today.
Juneteenth thus has multiple angles: It cel-
ebrates the freedom of Black Americans while 
also offering somber perspectives on the prog-
ress that we have yet to achieve. Howard dis-
tilled these two meanings in her creation of the 
Juneteenth Dance Break — she wanted to make 
space for Black people’s “beauty, creativity, 
ingenuity, elegance, power, and perseverance.” 
To celebrate, but also to learn. 
SFB was one of many organizations that 
partook in Howard’s project. Their June 19 
feed started with an Instagram Live stream of 
dancer Kimberly Marie Olivier and her father-
in-law, principal bassoon player Rufus Olivier. 
The two Black artists took an hour to talk about 
ballet, bassoons and Black history. The rest of 
the company’s posts were a mixture of shorter 

videos and still photos. All in all, SFB shared 
over an hour and a half of content and multiple 
paragraphs of information about Black danc-
ers, choreographers and musicians who form 
part of SFB’s past and present. The result was 
an impressive use of the dance world’s quaran-
tined predicament — an insightful yet fully dig-
ital combination of education and celebration 
with the timely and timeless lens of redefining 
racial perceptions of ballet. 
The outpouring from other organizations 
was also impressive: The celebration cut divides 
of hierarchical status and spanned the distance 
between institutions like American Ballet The-
atre all the way to smalltown dance studios. 
When the sun rose on June 20, the world sud-
denly had access to a wide-reaching archive 
of information about Black dancers of past 
and present and their profound effect on our 
stages today. In an added bonus, the resources 
were (and still are) easily accessible in one place 
under the #JuneteenthDanceBreak hashtag on 
Instagram.
Howard quickly took to her own account to 
thank everyone for their “enthusiastic and cre-
ative participation.” Indeed, the celebration had 
uncovered something rather unprecedented: 
Dance history, let alone Black dance history, is 
a dwindling field. The Juneteenth Dance Break 
gave a voice to marginalized stories within an 
oft-forgotten domain. “This is history,” Howard 
said, “this is world history. This is dance histo-
ry. This is not just Black history, it’s history. It’s 
American history, and it’s all of ours. It belongs 
to all of us.” 
But Howard was also clear: “It’s just a start. 
And I hope that this is the beginning.” 
June of 2020 operated almost as a highlight 
reel of dance companies dedicating and re-
dedicating themselves to racial justice in the 
performing arts industry. The process started 
with messages of #TheShowMustBePaused 
on Blackout Tuesday, moving to initiatives 
like #BalletRelevesForBlackLives or #NoJus-
ticeNoDance and most recently the #June-
teenthDanceBreak. These are, of course, only 
hashtags — they do not replace updated poli-
cies and real change, but they do seem to have 
provided a start for some. The even murkier 
side of this movement, however, lies in what 
hasn’t even made it to Instagram at all: the 
companies that waited until their only Black 
dancer complained of racist policies to release a 
solidarity statement, the companies that didn’t 
acknowledge Juneteenth or the ones that only 
posted one haphazard photograph to jump on 
the bandwagon. Actions speak louder than 
words, even though words are much better 
than silence. 

Thursday, July 2, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

SUMMER SERIES
SUMMER SERIES

TRINA PAL
Daily Arts Writer

SUMMER SERIES
SUMMER SERIES

ZOE PHILLIPS 
Daily Arts Writer

Reflective moment for 
ballet on Juneteenth

Read more at michigandaily.com

‘Braiding Sweetgrass’: 
connect with nature

Read more at michigandaily.com

