Radical Botany

Oregon Grape

This is the first of 14 essays that I wrote on plant knowledge that appeared on the Portland Indymedia Website from January 12, 2008 until May 8, 2010.  They appeared as skill shares. People were encouraged to comment and share their own level of plant knowledge. I am reposting the 14 essays with updates and changes. I will also be archiving them on this website so they can be easily accessed. Please feel free to comment on each weekly essay.  There is a link to the original essay that appeared on Portland Indymedia.  The posts include interesting comments.

Let us begin this important discussion.

I must start by explaining that I call this land, this ecosystem and nexus of ecosystems stretching from British Columbia to northern California, Cascadia.  I will reference Cascadia throughout my writing and will sometimes, when necessary, identify a place more specifically by state, valley, or mountain range.  Much of what I will say about plants in Cascadia is true for plants across the Earth.  The Earth is made up of a connected series of ecosystems that support plants, humans, and all other creatures.  I believe in the Gaia hypothesis put forth by James Lovelock and others, which proposes that the living and nonliving parts of the earth interact in a complex system that can be thought of as a single organism. And we are a part of that organism – not apart from it.

I am a longtime Cascadian. I was born here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and grew up with the ways of a true wild child. I attended school and was part of a very large family, but every other moment of my life outside those realms I spent close to the earth and the plants.  I lived close to a white oak forest and learned about the plants from the plants themselves.  I loved the crawling animals, the birds and all creatures I found in that amazing forest. In that forest I found the divine. I lived close to the foot of Mary’s Peak in the Coast Range, a mountain that the native Kalapuya called Tamanawis, “place where the spirit dwells.”  When I was an older child in my teens, I ran wild on the slopes of the mountain – especially on the North Trail.  This trail was where Kalapuyan children were sent for their vision quests.  I had a father who loved the Earth and helped me to understand its plants and learn how to identify them.  He encouraged me to draw and paint pictures of the plants as a way of understanding them.  He did not know about their healing abilities, but  he sensed that some knowledge had been lost about these plants.  My father was a longtime organic gardener, and for a time our family raised about 50 percent of our food from the earth.  I learned a great deal about growing,drying, preserving, and harvesting plants from my parents.

In my early teens I was able to attract another great plant teacher: a woman simply called “Grandma,“ who lived not far from me. She lived across a couple of fields from my home..  Grandma taught me to harvest the tiny purple center of Queen Anne’s lace for use as a natural dye.  She was my most important human plant teacher. She told me about the spirit of each plant.  I was taught that specific plant families do not always react in the same ways in each human dose,  that we all attract plant healing in different ways.  This is the inverse of what corporate medicine teaches today.  Teachings such as homeopathy and the use of flower essence (Bach Flower Remedies) also teach that the healing must start with the human spirit and that all healing starts with emotions and energy.  I was also taught that to achieve proper healing,  a healer must be able to observe the progress and changes in a human or animal over time.  My most important teacher was the plants themselves. Through observation and use of the plants to heal myself and the animals on our farm, I was able to learn essential techniques used in plant healing.

To understand fully my relationship with the plants of Cascadia, I sought out stories about how native peoples used local plants. And I discovered an attraction to several plants.  I will start by teaching what I know about some essential plant species found in Cascadia.  These species are important to me, and you may find that  you are drawn to other plants in the region.

As I teach you about the important healing plants of Cascadia, I will also encourage you to observe yourself and note what plants you are attracted to. Understand that many times the attraction is mutual, and that the plant  that draws you in may be trying to heal you or bring you back to a state of balance with the natural world.

I will be covering how to identify and harvest the plants that I think we should all know about.  I also plan to discuss how to use these plants for nutrition and for emotional, physical, and spiritual healing.  I will provide resources for additional learning about each plant and share some ideas on how to use plants (not trees) for shelter and other necessities such as clothing and fiber…

 Before you can learn about healing and nutritional plants, you need to learn the lay of the land, and you must grow aware of the spirit force that the Earth gives us through plants.  Plants are more than inanimate objects put on the Earth for our enjoyment – they are part of us and we are part of them.  We need to have an understanding that everything in heaven and earth is connected as one big system and that plants are as much a part of our bodies, minds, and spirits as anything else in the ecosystem that we live in.  For too long humankind has been immersed in the idea of a mechanized world.  Many humans mistakenly believe they can treat the Earth and our bodies like machines with exchangeable parts.  Many believe they can remove or abuse a body part without harming the whole of the body.  A similar attitude perseveres about plants.  Yet as with human bodies, when you remove or abuse a plant community, you bring imbalance and dis-ease to the whole.

Plants are amazing Earth entities.  Yet we have lost so much knowledge about how to interact with them and gain health and wellness through their use.  There is a movement amongst permaculturists and plant healers to collect the stories of how native peoples interacted with plants – the Ethnobotany of plant knowledge.  The following is information that I gathered during a talk that I attended at the 2008 gathering of permaculturists in Eugene, Oregon put on by the Eugene Permaculture Guild.

The speakers were from Bill Burwell, a Kalapuya researcher, and Jerry Hall, an ethnobotanist who teaches at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon.

Bill Burwell spoke at length about the relationship between the Kalapuyans who lived in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.  He said that at the start of each harvest season they first had a gathering ceremony.  Great respect was given to the earth and the process of harvesting.  The Kalapuyans expressed gratitude for the harvest.  „The spiritual leader of each winter village site would harvest a few articles of each resource, bring it back, prepare it in a ceremonial way, bless the plants or animals that were responsible, and then the regular harvest could begin.“

Burwell reported that there was a belief that all plants and animals, including humans, were part of the same lifeforce, family and community. „As above, so below“.

Burwell spoke of a word that was used up and down the Willamette Valley, the lower Columbia, and into the Salish area of Washington and British Columbia.that expressed this reverence for life: Tamanawas. Burwell said it’s been translated as spirit power. People on a vision quest would look for thier Tamanawas. Burwell said that what  Tamanawas really related to was a person’s ability to interconnect with all the rest of nature. Burwell reported that often a persons ability to find a certain plant for healing happened because they were able to connect with nature on a energetic level. „The plant actually was the teacher of the person who was going out on the search“, Burwell said.

Jerry Hall spoke about language and songs that were used to connect with nature.  Hall spoke about first people gather songs that would connect them to a plant. The songs were located in the ether world and if one was accepting, the song would come to them and then they would find the plant. „ My experience is that singing evokes something from us that is beyond talking and gives expression to prayer“, Hall said

Both Burwell and Hall agreed that people 500 years ago knew where everything was in nature and the people took care of it and respected it.

Original Essay with comments found at http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/01/370936.shtml?discuss

Other resources:

Eugene Permaculture guild:  http://www.eugenepermacultureguild.org

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