Iwigara

All Native Knowledge Is Local

The 80 plant entries in this book reflect knowledge from native tribes across North America. Throughout the book, I apply various modern identifiers to geographically and socially recognized regions of our continent; it should go without saying, however, that plants do not recognize abstract geopolitical boundaries. Many of the plants herein can be found outside of the areas specified in their entry. In addition, as a result of trade and periodic movements, native peoples were often familiar with plants that grew outside of their cultural boundaries. Sometimes knowledge of plants was transmitted in gender-specific channels, or a clan claimed “ownership” of certain plants. Some plants were reserved for use by the recognized healers or medicine people in a community.

In my American Indian studies classes and whenever I am speaking to anyone who seems interested, I remind people that American Indian traditional knowledge is tied to the landscapes they called home. I often joke that it would be difficult to be a traditional Apache in Vermont: the landscape is too different. What’s more, American Indians were never a homogenous culture. Over 500 languages were spoken in North America prior to European contact. Each one of those languages represented a distinct culture. Each of those cultures developed a lifestyle and library of ecological knowledge that fit the ecosystems and landscapes that they had sustainably managed and lived with for centuries. Although the ethnobotanical knowledge expressed in this book will sometimes overlap and be similar among indigenous cultures, in many instances the uses of plants will be representative of a specific culture’s adaptation to an ecosystem and geographical region. Here I will give impressionistic sketches of these geographic and cultural regions, as they might be perceived by the people indigenous to them.

NORTHEAST

Native peoples from the Northeast tell this origin story. A long time ago, when the earth was only water, a certain young woman lived in the sky world, a sort of island of clouds floating high above the wet world below. She lived happily and comfortably with many other sky people, up there among the clouds. This particular woman discovered that she was pregnant with twins. For some reason, this news angered her husband, who flew into a rage. During his tantrum he approached a tree that grew tall in the sky world and tore it up by its roots. This created a hole in the ground of the sky world. The pregnant woman looked down into the hole and marveled at the water covering earth below. While she was peering through the hole, her husband pushed her. She plummeted down toward the waters.

It so happens that many water animals already existed on this wet earth. Luckily for the falling woman, two geese saw her tumbling from the sky. They flew toward the woman and managed to break her fall, capturing her on their soft wings. The geese gently deposited the woman onto the back of a big floating turtle, and from her perch there, the woman was introduced to other water animals, such as Beaver, Muskrat, Swan, and Osprey. The woman was grateful for her rescue but soon began to worry. How was she going to raise her twins on the back of a turtle?

The animals met and decided that, in order to create an island for the woman to live on, mud was going to have to be brought up from underneath the waters. Beaver tried to swim down to gather mud, but it was too deep and he soon ran out of air. Muskrat tried but ran into the same problem. It was just too deep. Other animals tried, without success. Finally little Toad dove into the water. He was gone for a long time, and the other animals became concerned. Then, all of a sudden, Toad floated to the surface. The animals thought he was dead, but when they looked more closely, they could see that not only was Toad still alive, but he had a mouth full of mud. The animals took the mud and spread it over the back of Turtle. The mud began to dry. As it dried, it spread—and continued to spread, until it formed what is now the ancestral lands of American Indians.

The woman moved about this Turtle Island, waiting for her twins to be born. While she waited she took dust from the new land and tossed it into the sky, creating the stars, the moon, and the sun. Eventually her twins were born. One she named Flint and the other Sapling. Flint, an evil twin of sorts, was responsible for bony fish, thorny bushes, and other bad things. Sapling was responsible for creating the rivers that teemed with fish, songbirds, edible and medicinal plants—all the things we love about our land.

The Northeast, from the Canadian Maritimes south to where the Delaware River spills into the Chesapeake Bay and east to the shores of Lake Erie, is a wonderfully lush region of mixed deciduous and conifer forests. The thick woods are interspersed with numerous creeks and rivers and open meadows that support a variety of useful grasses. Herbaceous plants occupy those places where meadows meet the shade of maples, birches, ash, red and white oak, white cedar, black walnut, and so many others. The forest understory includes myriad shrubs, more herbs, berries, fungi, and tubers.

For centuries native communities thrived in this landscape. They hunted the forests, fished the rivers, practiced small-scale agriculture, and gathered the bounty of their homelands. Many of the native communities of this region are Algonquian speakers; this family of languages is spoken by 29 tribal nations, including the Ojibwe, Abenaki, Potawatomi, Narragansett, Mohican, Cree, and Micmac. Other peoples of this region, such as the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Susquehannock, Mohawk, Oneida, and Huron, are Iroquoian speakers. All these peoples shared a version of the story just related regarding how the world began. There were other origin stories as well, but all tell how the animals emerged, and how the first people found their way to Turtle’s back. No matter the version, these cultural histories are encoded with biocultural and ecological lessons that are woven into the daily fabric of indigenous activities. Included in many of the stories are the plants and trees of the Northeast landscape.

SOUTHEAST

Before they were forcibly removed from their homeland, the Cherokee were people of the Southeast, a diverse landscape shaped by hills, mountains, savannahs, marshes, and coastal scrublands. They shared this region with the Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, Powhatan, and too many other tribes to name here. Like the Northeast, theirs was a land of abundance, a place where useful herbaceous plants kept company with pine, red maple, beech, ash, and walnut trees. The Cherokee knew that it was not always like this. In fact, they were latecomers to their lands. Their origin myth tells of how, in a distant past, the world was divided into three levels: the sky world, which is the upper level; the water world, which is the lower level; and the middle world, which is the earth. The animals occupied the sky world. They were curious about what lay below. So they sent little Water Beetle down to investigate. Water Beetle darted this way and that but could find nothing of significance. Finally, Water Beetle dove deep, until it reached the bottom of the water. It pulled some mud back up to the surface, where it began to dry and spread out, creating an island. So that it wouldn’t float away, the island was attached to the upper level, where the animals dwelled, with four cords. The island remained wet and soft for a long time. Finally Buzzard flew down around the island to investigate. Buzzard flew low, and everywhere its wings touched the soft land, a valley or mountain was created, forming the land of the Southeast as we know it. The animals invited corn and other plants useful as food and/or medicine to occupy this new land. A human brother and sister followed the plants and began to multiply. Like so many native peoples’ origin myths, agriculture plays a central role in this one. To native peoples, agricultural endeavors involve much more than knowing when to plow, how to irrigate, and at what depth to sow seed. The responsibility of growing food for one’s community is connected to one’s identity as a member of the community. This identity, this sense of being-ness, is tied to the history of the people on a landscape.

GREAT PLAINS

The Great Plains is buffalo country. Or, at least it used to be. Before the newly minted French and British colonists began to surge west, the Great Plains were shaped largely by the movement of sharp-hooved buffalo that tilled the soil and encouraged a distinct ecosystem, seed by seed on their shaggy coats and through their piles of dung. Over 50 different varieties of grasses once graced the plains. There were edible panic and tripsacum grasses, fescue, long-lived and iconic buffalo grasses, and the tall and flowing bluestem. The grasslands were broken up by swaths of willows, Osage orange, hackberry, and cottonwoods.

To the north were the sacred Black Hills, covered with tall cedars and spruces that, in the minds of many native peoples, acted as protectors of their lands. According to the Lakota, the presence of these guardian conifers is not the only reason the Black Hills are sacred. It is there where “the people” emerged. A water monster had fought a battle with the people. The monster won and proceeded to flood the world. Everywhere there was water, except for a high hill where a lone girl survived. She was visited by a spotted bald eagle, whom she later married. The marriage produced two children, a boy and a girl. All this occurred in the Black Hills, and all Lakota people are descendants of these children. After the waters receded, what was left were the flattened plains and rolling hills of the Great Plains.

Many people of the plains—the Lakota, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Kiowa, Comanche, Pawnee, and so many others—were nomadic. Others, such as the Omaha, Osage, Mandan, and Wichita, stayed in one place or were semi-nomadic; they traded their corn and other foods with those who chose to follow the herds. The nomadic peoples roamed large territories on horseback, becoming familiar not only with the movements and characteristics of the buffalo, antelope, elk, and other animals but also with the growth patterns of the plants that composed the luxurious grasslands. In the eyes of many early American explorers, the nomadic lifestyle of Plains Indian cultures epitomized individuality, freedom, courage, and nobility.

MOUNTAIN WEST

To the west of the Great Plains were the Rocky Mountains. The caretakers of the elevations and valleys of the Rockies and the Intermountain West were the Ute, Arapaho, Crow, Flathead, Shoshone, Jicarilla Apache, and Nez Perce. They indeed perceived themselves as caretakers. Their origin stories include morals that suggest they were chosen to occupy their mountainous environments in order to protect them. The southern Ute believe that curious Coyote was given a bag by Creator. Coyote was supposed to carry the bag—with its unknown contents—over into the mountains and leave it there. Coyote, ever sneaky and curious, traveled a distance and stopped to peek into the bag. As soon as he opened it, little creatures began to swarm out of the bag. They were people. Coyote managed to close the bag before all of the people could escape. The ones that got out of the bag ran away in all four directions. Coyote reached the mountains, where Creator told him to leave the bag. When he opened the bag, there were only a few people left inside. They were the people who became the dwellers and caretakers of the mountainous lands.

The people of the mountains were few in number but developed lifestyles that took advantage of what was offered by the seasons as well as by the different elevations. They knew how to use the different kinds of aspen, piñon, cedar, and dogwood for medicine, food, and for building shelter. They often stayed in the lower elevations in order to take advantage of mountain mahogany, chokecherry, currant, nahavita, and all the Rocky Mountain plants that have adapted to cold winters, short summers, and high elevations. They traveled east onto the plains in order to hunt buffalo and traded for foods with their Pueblo neighbors to the southwest.

SOUTHWEST

The Hopi have occupied stone and adobe villages atop three arid mesas on the Colorado Plateau for more than a millennia. They believe Spider Woman led them up through a hole in the ground and into this world, the Fourth World, in order to act as caretakers of the earth. The previous three worlds were idyllic. The First World was destroyed by fire after the people became too corrupt and forgot to take care of the land. The Second World was destroyed by ice for the same reason. In the Third World, the people built great cities and developed weapons that could kill their enemies from great distances; but again, they did not care for the land, and their world was destroyed by floods. This was when Spider Woman led those who still remembered their caretaker duties into this, the Fourth World. The Navajo have a similar origin story but believe that we are residing in a Fifth World. The Tewa, who live along the Rio Grande River, north of Santa Fe, believe that they originated at the bottom of a shallow lake in southern Colorado; after their emergence, they migrated to where they now are.

No matter the story, native peoples of the Southwest (including the Southern Basin and Range) feel that they were led to their current homelands for a specific reason: to care for the land and to act as models of how to live properly with it. For thousands of years they have fulfilled this charge. Of all native peoples in the contiguous United States, the peoples of these arid regions have remained most admirably resilient, adhering to their lands, their languages, their spirituality, their food ways, and their plant knowledge.

The Southwest is a land of extreme contrast, host to an incredible array of biocultural diversity. These words may sound like a clichéd travel brochure, but they express an absolute truth. Heading south, it is possible to drive, in one day, from the pine forests and upper sagebrush landscape near Durango, Colorado, through the dry, red Colorado Plateau chaparral, through some more pine forest near Chama, New Mexico, to the cacti and yucca of the Chihuahuan Desert near the Mexico–U.S. border. Alternatively, beginning again near Durango but heading in a more southwesterly direction, it’s possible to pass through the arid plateau just south of Monument Valley and make a left near the pine-forested region around Flagstaff, Arizona, to wind up in one of the most biologically diverse regions in the world: the Sonoran Desert. In any direction, you would drive over the ancestral and current homelands of indigenous communities representing five to nine separate linguistic and cultural groups.

Up on the Colorado Plateau the Hopi continue to practice the Hopi Way, a spiritual lifestyle that does not strive for a specific outcome or product but rather is a journey, focused on what is learned along the way about their relationship to place and community. It is a way of resilient persistence; the Hopi have been able to successfully endure shocks to their social and environmental systems. The same can be said of most of the Pueblo peoples; not only the Tewa but also the Acoma, Zia, and Taos originated in other places but, in response to environmental changes, migrated and adapted to a new situation. The Apache came from parts far north but, after continued and sometimes violent movement, ended up in the Southwest and adopted a nomadic lifestyle. Even Hispano peoples who eventually became indigenous to the Southwest mixed traditions that they brought with them from Europe with those of their indigenous neighbors, creating the acequia system of sustainable agricultural practice, for example, which has created new highways of ethnobotanical diversity and a source of useful plants for the people. All these examples are located in specific landscapes across the Southwest. Each location is an example of cultural and ethnobotanical refugia and resilient culture and practice; each multigenerational community maintains a deep sense of connection to the arid landscapes, which reaffirms long-term memory loops concerning traditional land management and identity.

PACIFIC NORTHWEST

Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery stumbled into the Pacific Northwest in 1805; they had already survived a harsh winter, a difficult crossing of the Continental Divide, dysentery, and a descent of the Columbia River. When they finally arrived at the coast, they were faced with unending rain, seemingly impenetrable forests with trees taller than any they had ever seen, and native peoples who were extremely comfortable in this landscape and who were indifferent to the newcomers.

The Pacific Northwest is a lush landscape populated by a similar abundance of peoples. There are the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, and Bella Coola, the Nuu-chah-nulth, Quileute, Coast Salish, and Chinook. A little south along the coast of what is now Oregon lived the Tillamook, Siuslaw, Umpqua, Yurok, and Hupa. These people spoke diverse languages from the Salishan, Wakashan, Chimakuan, Penutian, and Athabaskan linguistic families, but they lived similar lifestyles. They took full advantage of a temperate climate; the Pacific Ocean current, although it did carry lots of moisture, also encouraged seven kinds of salmon that spawned in the many rivers. Dense coniferous forests supported large mammals and a variety of useful food and medicinal plants.

The current landscape and forests are not that different from what they were in 1805. Unfortunately, overfishing and dams have reduced wild salmon populations, and clear cutting and mismanagement have negatively affected plant and animal life. However, Pacific Northwest peoples persist: a number of years ago, while traveling along the shores of Puget Sound, I stopped at a Skokomish community for a rest. I struck up a conversation with a young man—one of a group of several young Skokomish who had had to convince their elders to teach them how to build large ocean-going canoes, so that they could participate in the traditional canoe races held by other native communities. These canoes were central to the traditional livelihoods and cultures of the Skokomish and other coastal natives. What the young people had not counted on was that the process of building a canoe would lead to a resurgence of their language and relationship to home landscape.

Canoe building is more than gathering materials and putting them together properly so that it all results in a vessel that floats. The young Skokomish were first taught the proper cedar trees to harvest, how to harvest them with respect and ritual, when to harvest, and which songs to sing in the process. They had to perform these rituals in their native language. They were told stories that related to canoes and cedar trees. They learned about the ecosystems that the canoes were harvested from and how they, the young canoe builders, were directly related to it. The young man told me that when they began the process of learning how to build a canoe, their language was almost gone and the people no longer felt a strong indigenous identity. By the time I met him, their language was resurgent, rituals and ceremony were again being performed, and they were involved in sustainably managing their local ecosystem.

WEST COAST

Before the arrival of Europeans, the West Coast from British Columbia south into Baja California was the most diverse cultural area in North America. It is estimated that more than a third of all native peoples of North America lived here, in yet another region of abundance. Visitors still flock to the coast and sierras to marvel at the giant sequoias and redwoods; the arid regions and deserts that lie in the shadows of the Sierra Nevada are home to unusual (and frequently endemic) plant life. The Central Valley of California is often referred to as America’s breadbasket, but before the arrival of European agriculture, native peoples of the West Coast were unfamiliar with this concept: they had not had to assume a sedentary agricultural lifestyle in order to secure their sources of plant foods. The numerous species of oaks provided a seasonal crop of acorns, which was supplemented throughout the year by other nut and fruit trees, tubers, chenopods, berries, and herbaceous plants. Rivers and streams teemed with fish, and there was plenty of game for the people to hunt.

A commonality of this region is that the lands and waters were created by hero-beings that battled monsters and other creatures on behalf of the people. Often, it is Coyote who either intentionally or clumsily played a role in forming the lands of the West Coast. And not only that: the Miwok believe that Coyote played a direct role in bringing people into existence and forming how human beings look today. The Yokuts believe that Coyote was helped by Eagle when the first humans were formed from clay. The Salinan think that Eagle made First Man from clay and then created First Woman from one of its feathers.

Over 100 distinct languages, separated into more than 300 dialects, were spoken across this landscape. The languages were derived from several linguistic families, including the Yukian, Maiduan, and Uto-Aztecan groups; Esselen and Karuk are linguistic isolates, with no connection to any other language group. Each language of this region represents a culture with its own worldview and library of ecological knowledge. But all native peoples of the West Coast engaged in some form of complex and sophisticated “gardening” of their homelands, whether grassland, mixed woodland, wetland, chaparral, or conifer forest. Their systems of land management—seasonal pruning, coppicing, and low-intensity fire regimes—not only ensured they had what they needed in terms of food, medicinal, and utilitarian plant materials but also encouraged plant and animal diversity. These repeated cycles of clearing, fire, and careful use, on a scale unimaginable today, may be considered a form of advanced permaculture.

Much of the pre-Columbian landscape of the West Coast has been transformed over the last 500 years, but if one knows where to search and what to look for, most of the native plants can still be found. In addition, despite the near genocide of the native communities of this region, many indigenous peoples have persevered and remain resilient on their ancestral landscapes.

The Plants

ASH

FRAXINUS SPP.

Family: Oleaceae

Parts Used: twigs, bark, wood

Season: year-round

Region: Northeast

“Choose the right tool for the job,” the old maxim has it. Similar thinking can be applied to selecting woods for harvesting and carving into specific objects. Every type of wood has its own characteristics, advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes a wood offers a seemingly unlimited variety of uses; ash is such a one. Ash trees offer a versatility of purposes to American Indians not found in many other plants.

USES