Pacific Northwest Traditional Foods and Medicines with Lindsey Crofoot

there my name is Elon ekc I'm an enrolled tribal member of the Klingon nation Raven frog clan born and raised in Seattle I'm the board chair of the New Canaan native program and the Connie is a Klingon word that means go-between and we are a 501c3 we've been around between three and four years and we're very happy to have the stand up to oil grant to do this work and I will do a very brief welcoming song prestige Thank You agura sheesh and now we have slim Z hopefully thank you hi thank you for having me here today I'm really excited like I said my name is Lindsay crowfoot I am a Cleveland Road tribal member I'm quits new Hawk wand a sheet on which is fortress of the brown bear tribe and beaver clan I'm also a col male descendant and I am a native environment a scientist and indigenous educator who currently works at Northwest Indian college on the Tulalip reservation and one of their small satellite campuses I graduated from there with my Bachelors of Science in native environmental science in 2016 and then I was invited back to teach there in 2017 I teach cultural sovereignty and Natural Sciences there and have been doing that since then I'm also a full-time graduate student at the University of Idaho and pursuing my master's degree in natural resources I'm about halfway through now actually just finished my half what got to my halfway mark so one year left and I'll have that degree I'm also a mom of three I have a 22 year old daughter I have a 16 year-old son and then I have a little four-year-old also so I'm a pretty busy mom working and and teaching and all of that so what you're gonna be learning today is what is tribal sovereignty or more specifically what is food sovereignty what what was the traditional diet pre-contact and then what are some historic and current barriers to accessing our traditional foods and and our ability to revitalize our food culture i will also be kind of looking more specifically at a few plants just doing a highlight of like three or four native plants how they were harvested when and how to identify them and what they were used for and then we'll take a short break in transition over into doing a quick demonstration on how to use some of the medicines that are gathered and and we'll do a mix themselves as a little demonstration so i'm gonna share my screen with you guys so you guys can see my presentation if you guys will give me the thumbs up that everybody can see that would be great awesome alright so here today my presentation is on Pacific Northwest traditional foods and medicines like I said cultural sovereignty and barriers to revitalization and this is more than a Cana native program today okay so what is tribal food sovereignty so type of food sovereignty is there right for indigenous nations to define their own diets and shape what food systems are congruent with their spiritual and cultural values so food sovereignty it really is cultural sovereignty because all of the way that we used to live was wrapped around our foods and our access to those foods communities that exhibit tribal food sovereignty are those that have access to healthy food have foods that are culturally appropriate they grow gather hunt and fish in ways that are maintainable over the long term they're able distribute foods in a way so that people get what they need to stay healthy they adequately compensate the people who provide those foods and they utilize tribal treaties and uphold policies to ensure continued access to traditional foods so what what it used to be like what was our diet and how did we live pre-contact so native people have lived in reciprocity with this land since time immemorial we live through subsistence we were living with and off the land to survive and we did this with hunting fishing gathering and agriculture so for native tribes life and time was about the food everything that we did around the year was around what was available for harvest when it was the most nutritious so much so that in the Lucy calendar about the moons of the year seven months are describing food availability so here's an example there are several there's northern wish you see there's several dialects and so there are a little bit of variations of this calendar but here's one of the Lycians seed calendars of them of the months of the year and this is listed in twelve months but really there's 13 moons so there's a little bit of a discrepancy but generally these seasons were around these times so in January it was known as when your stomach sticks to your backbone and that's indicating that there really wasn't a lot of food available during that time so February is the windy time March is when the frogs sing April is when you hear the voices of the migrating cranes and swans May is the time to dig roots June was sea is salmon berry season July is blackberry season August is slow berry season September is the return of the coho November many is when there's many leaves like falling and then November is when the chum returned and December that winter time is time to sheath the paddles shorelines rivers prairies forests and mountain slopes were rich with resources provided by the spirits so that people might live movement of the people was based on the food supplies in those ecosystems the winter was the end of the fishing cycle and kind of when everything began again in spring canoe carving was done like I mentioned route digging was done in the calendar and fishing was starting up during this time again in the summer there was berry gathering and fishing and in the fall there was fishing and routing you guys there we go okay so people connected their culture was connected to food and place tribes travel between temporary and established camps these camps were considered sacred places so in the wintertime most people went to established long houses and in the summer they had temporary camps spring summer and fall they had temporary camps that followed the fish and the harvest some of the camps that have been I permanent camps that have been identified in the area are hippo which is a Snohomish village that's now where that is where Legion Park and Everett is today there's dusts kokum which is Suquamish where port madison is today cocoa was a slalom and aquino village at the mouth of the okie whole river on the Strait of Juan de Fuca and hops which this it was a Lummi village on the south east end of orcas island each camp provided different resources and these resources were vital to keeping people healthy both physically and spiritually routes between camps provided food and access to water resources and it was a way of life that will sustain the people and created rich culture here I brought up a map of all of the documented permanent winter long houses around Puget Sound you can see there's hundreds of them I I haven't actually counted them but I would guess it looks like there's close to hundreds of them so they were all around Puget Sound area and these are just the permanent villages this does not is not documenting the temporary camps that were all throughout Indian country and Puget Sound and then here I just have a picture of what a traditional longhouse might look like this is the classic longhouse it's down on the Columbia River so natives honored the land the water the animals and the plants as gifts from the Creator these gifts were respected and treasured and we were never wasteful of the gifts that were provided respect and honor of the reciprocal relationship was shown in many ways through ceremonies and developed protocols songs and prayers dances stories and the arts some of the ceremonies that people have heard of or most people have heard of the first salmon ceremony but we also had sunflower ceremonies and Huckleberry's ceremonies and many of them are still being practiced today archaeology shows us that our ancestors had a diverse traditional diet along with oral history our ancestors wood healthy people that harvested and processed it a great diversity of food the Puget Sound traditional foods and diabetes project did a study and did research of what foods were eaten by our ancestors this was headed up by hey token of the Tulalip tribes but did include some other organizations what they did is they evaluated thirty-one dig sites and studied all of the more organic material in bones in the layers and they were able to identify 170 species of plants and animals on the left you see a picture here these are show mittens and what a show mitten is if you aren't aware is at a an encampment where food was either being eaten regularly or process regularly the shells would be discarded into piles and over time there would be these layers of piles that actually give us a history of what the diet was what was being eaten during what season or what years something was harvested more than the other maybe indicating availability and so these shell middens are used through archaeological study to identify what foods are eaten one particular dig was done on Vashon Island at quartermaster Harbor if you look down here in the map on the right hand this is Vashon Island and quartermaster Harbor is right here kind of in this point area that cooks into the little neck of the bay there and so in 1996 they did this dig it was a collaborative effort by the Puyallup tribe the Burke Museum of Natural History and culture King County and McMurray middle school it was the study of shell middens in a 14-day xq2 excavation and there they found 9,000 fish bones from 20 different kinds of fish but most of them were herring bones they also found flounder perch cod sculpin skate and other fishes the site was actually interpreted as a fish and shellfish processing camp where people once took advantage of the windy spot on the quartermaster Harbor to dry herring this was a fish processing area so oral tradition tells us what plants we ate Northwest Coast Indians ate a great diversity of foods including a great diversity of plants but these studies don't accurately represent what plant foods are eaten because plant remains deteriorate much more quickly than animal bones so stories passed down through the generations or alter or our oral traditions tell us that berries roots bulbs nuts and seeds were really important parts of the traditional diet archaeological sites around Puget Sound have found more than 280 plants birds mammals fish reptiles shellfish and other marine life as our traditional foods and then testimony and knowledge from Coe Salish elders hunt fishermen and gatherers has confirmed those and added many more to the list so on this slide you'll see that compiled list that was done of all the traditional foods those both identified through archaeological dance and then those from oral tradition from our elders and our hunters and gatherers and so this is three hundred nearly three hundred native plants birds mammals reptiles and shellfish that that we eat here ate here in the Pacific Northwest you can find this list if you want to look at it a little more closely on the Burke Museum website in there cultural sovereignty and food sovereignty section all right so now we've kind of got into the background of what it was like before what we ate before and now we're gonna start getting into kind of the barriers to accessing and how we lost the ability to access our traditional foods so one the treatment excuse me the Stephens treaties were done in between 1854 and 1856 and during this time five treaties done by Governor Isaac Stephens removed most of the Washington tribes onto reservations there were some tribes who did not treaty and then were then removed by executive order and these tribes do have some fishing gathering and hunting rights guaranteed to them through their executive orders during the treaty process tribal leaders fought to maintain certain rights on lands outside of the reservations specifically they fought to retain the sovereign right to fish hunt and gather at usual and accustomed stations in exchange for their lands outside of the reservation well that was guaranteed in the treaties those promises were quickly broken in the decades that followed and tribes were systematically denied their treaty protected rights by the federal and state governments so here we have a map of Washington Territory in 1854 on the top and the land holdings of the Salish people here in Washington and you can see kind of the boundaries the rough boundaries that were in place at the time and then the second map is 1890 and that is where the reservation borders and so that's where the Indians became we became confined to here in Washington State well this map actually expands Washington State but you can see Washington here so here's what we have currently if we were able to view these side-by-side the two slides what you would see is we actually have a higher number of reservations now than we did then they some people have been able to get their own land and have their own reservation when they were kind of lumped together with other tribes before and then also one kind of glaring one I guess for me because I'm called a descendant is that Colville reservation is half the size currently than it was in the 1890 map so what were the consequences of these unkept promises life on the reservation changed everything for Native American people there was competition for natural resources and these led to infringement on Indian rights as resources diminished access to traditional foods declined drastically there were less fish and native foods available to Indian people and despite the promises Indians were confined to the reservation in the early years they could be shot out for leaving the reservation and then the later years they could be arrested if they didn't have permission to leave without if they didn't have permission from the Indian agent to leave the reservation that's completely disrupted the traditional way of life no longer were they able to travel where the food was and move with this season's access these temporary camps or the paths that they use to travel between them that had all their food sources and Water Resources so there was not enough food on the reservation the tribes were traveling great distances to gather the food that they needed and being confined to the reservation limited that the resources were not available on the reservation because oftentimes the places that the Indians were given to stay were inhospitable they were and they needed to be cleared to create food so what happened is a lot of natives transition to being wage workers they became hops pickers of berry pickers things like that the men became loggers worked in logging camps so there was a transition from being a subsist living a subsistence lifestyle and traveling with the seasons and with your foods to being wage workers oppression and assimilation just reached completely reshaped the Indian diet traditional life ways were quickly banned on reservations to assimilate people to the western lifestyle children were taken away from reservations to attend boarding schools to civilize them and generations suffered as their traditional way of life almost vanished children were not able to learn their traditional ways from their elders their parents their auntie's and their uncle uncles they weren't learning the routes that these foods were on they weren't learning the traditional names or the traditional uses of these foods and they were being fed a Western diet in the boarding schools in that during the school year and then when they came home during the summer they were feed eating commodity foods the health ramifications of being separated from traditional foods and life ways could be seen almost immediately the Western diet is high in starches refined sugars unhealthy fats and is not fit for Native people obesity diabetes and heart disease increased rapidly in intimate Indian communities and mental health issues increased as well we saw an increase in substance abuse disorder and we've seen increases increased rates and suicide pictured here on this slide you'll see the vast difference between the traditional diet and the modern diet I'd love to show this example because really what we're seeing on the right-hand side here is just kind of what your average person like me eat it like a lunch and so you're taking about one hour maybe even a half an hour break at lunch for work and you got to just run out and get something unless you're somebody was really diligent about packing or lunch every day and making sure it's healthy there are people out there doing that for sure but that's not the vast majority of America or Native America because of access and so we run out and we get meat my four year old sorry about that um so you run out and you go and you get your lunch and you grab a burger or you get a slice of pizza so duh maybe your Bravo brought some leftover macaroni and cheese from lunch the other day or you think you make this healthy choice this sandwich should but really what we're looking at here is you know refined sugars and starches and it really isn't that healthy and we see the traditional diet on the left and we've got all of these colors we've got you know our purples which have our like riboflavin we have our protein and iron metal we have our good fats in our in our salmon and so we have this diversity of color and diversity of vitamins and minerals of proteins that are just in that built into that traditional way of life we are the salmon people being separated from those salmon had detrimental effects and as state fishing departments began to regulate fishing Native American sovereign rights to fish for denied many natives were assaulted arrested and fined for fishing within their usual net custom fishing areas fishing is not a right that was given to us by the treaties it's important to recognize that fishing and gathering and our relationship with the land and the animal people this is an inalienable right that was given to us by the Creator now it's guaranteed in the treaty but this is not something that was bestowed upon us this was something that our ancestors our elders worked really hard to retain a right that would have been given to us by the Creator despite this conflicts between white fishermen and Native American fishermen have persisted it have persisted into today but really persisted for over a century over access to fishing grounds off of the reservation and catch allocations so this can culminated in the Pacific Northwest fish wars of the 1960s and the 1970s so in 1974 well the finding was in 1974 but the United States sued the state of Washington over their mistreatment of natives and their ability to access their fish because they were not honoring the treaties the state had tried to limit Native American fishing John George Hugo goal upheld the treaties he ruled that based on the language of the treaty and how it would have been interpreted at the time by the people who signed it that there had been this guarantee of 50% of the catch the terminology that's used in the treaty is that it was in common that the fish should be held in common common being 50/50 is how Judge George will interpreted it this opened a pathway to restoring food sovereignty salmon was the traditional fight that the food was framed around but the right the right to access usual to custom areas and practice cultural sovereignty was at the heart of the issue the both decision not only affirmed many tribes treaty rights to fish it also guaranteed access to those usual accustomed grounds outside of their reservations [Music] access to natural resources provides opportunities to protect sovereign rights for cultural revitalization tribal members can exercise their rights and practice traditional food sovereignty through hunting fishing and gathering now that they are not confined to the reservation the judge tortoise George both decision also spurred natural resource departments being funded within tribal governments and these resources they manage commercial fishing aquaculture fish hatcheries forestry engage game management they manage and oversee the natural resources and these natural resources feed their people and provide Economic Security for the tribes and for their members so these tribes with their natural resource departments they operate as Co managers of the hunting fishing and gathering areas along with state and federal natural resource and or Fish and Game departments they work to protect their 50% of allowable K take they protect and enhance tribal natural resources through land access issues ecosystem protection and restoration projects they help set and regulate both commercial and recreational harvests and they help create guidelines for lowest impact techniques and incorporate traditional economic illogical knowledge into land management practices the pictures on the right you'll see are two restoration projects by local tribes the top one is the Quileute estuary restoration project done with it by the Tulalip tribes natural resource department in partnership with Snohomish County in a couple of other organizations I had the opportunity in my undergraduate work to intern in the restoration department and work on this particular project which restored over 300 acres of estuary to the lower Snohomish to the lower Snohomish estuary by doing some levee removal that had been put in the early 1900s to drain out the estuary in order to bring in farming and on the bottom we have the Elwha River Dam removal another example of a restoration project that was done by a local tribe using their treaty rights to protect their natural resources so we've talked about the historical barriers traditional foods removal from Majerle ends assimilation and oppression and then finally we kind of have gotten to this point where we're revitalizing you've got these not to resource departments that are working to secure our access but we're still finding today that there are barriers to our traditional foods and medicines native people continue to fight for their right to access their traditional foods in their usual and accustomed areas there are many barriers remaining those include colonization which is ongoing loss of land destruction of ecosystems and toxins in the environment so colonization has been detrimental to our ability to access our traditional foods because it has removed us from our traditional life ways it's disrupted the seasonal travel and gathering and it's removed us from the ecosystem structure and function we're disconnected from our place and the traditional natural resources through colonization we transitioned from sustaining is from living a sustainable lifestyle hunter-gatherers to wage workers and that separation over time has resulted in a huge loss of traditional economic ecological knowledge like I mentioned before the boarding school era was especially detrimental to our ability to revitalize even today our cultural food practices because the children were taken to these boarding schools and they didn't learn and they were not able to pass that on to their children they were fed that colonized diet and became accustomed and they fed that colonized diet to their children who were then accustomed the new colonized norm were passed down to subsequent generations and reinforced urbanization is another colonizing aspect of the barriers many Indians are living in cities now away from their lands away from the reservations and away from natural resources that they have access to as resources on tribal lands dwindle many natives saw employment and city's policies meant to further further separate native people from their culture and lands encouraged and funded relocation to cities by mm mm and in 10 census the percentage of urban native people had grown to 71 percent separated from their people in their lands separated excuse me from their people in their lands where their rights are legally established they have few opportunities to practice food sovereignty outside of state regulations so this one actually hits home really for me because I'm a clink at tribal member and I'm a Colleville descendant I do not have any hunting gathering or fishing rights any of my traditional hunting fishing and gathering rights down here in Washington State I'm removed from my native lands these are other people's usual in accustomed areas and so I am limited to harvesting only based on state regulation loss of land has been detrimental as well treaties drastically reduced Indian land access like you saw in those maps ongoing widget legislation in Indian policy after the treaties continued to decrease access on and off the reservation in particular the general allotment Act of 1887 was extremely detrimental because it broke the integrity of the reservation prior to 1887 all of the land with the reservations order belongs to the tribe after 1887 the reservations were broken up into Lots those Lots were assigned to tribal members or they were able to pick it kind of dependent how it worked out with your Indian agent and the land that was left over was sold to white settlers so this resulted in checkerboarding of the reservations and this has happened all over North America there's checkerboarding of all of the reservations and so what we have here on the left on the bottom is a map of the 1885 or excuse me where does it say there 1883 when there's lots allotments were done on on to Leila you can see all of those allotments are Indian land holdings and then on the right hand side we have 2004 and that is pretty much the most current on land ownership by tribal members or the tribe on the Tulalip reservation so the green is what the tribe were tribal members owned and the tan color are non tribal community members that owned land on the Tulalip reservation so this checkerboarding means that you have no access and and even if you do have two points of access that you own you may not be able to travel between them effectively because somebody else owns that land in between ecosystem destruction so ecosystem destruction has just really increased in the last few centuries and it has been detrimental to our ability to revitalize our food culture and access our traditional foods and medicines removal of the indigenous people of the land that they have lived in reciprocity within is ecosystem destruction because we are a living breathing part of the whole ecosystem our removal from the land is ecosystem destruction disruption and destruction we played an important role in the structure and function of the natural Pacific Northwest ecosystem we propagated plants we pruned plants we send them we kept healthy deer population by hunting them we kept healthy fish populations by treating them with our with respect with our protocols and never taking any more than what we need we were an integrated and integral part of that system and our removal in itself is ecosystem destruction aside from our removal from the system urban and agricultural development has resulted in widespread ecosystem destruction in the Pacific Northwest Western practices are much different from native practices and when settlers came into the area they cleared forests they drained wetlands they dived estuaries they straightened streams and rivers and install bulkheads on our shorelines urban developed as in urban development has increased toxins in the environment and toxins are probably and have been identified by many indigenous groups that have spoke on this maybe the biggest barrier that we have to accessing all of our traditional foods and medicine specifically urban development has increased runoff into our waterways this is increasing nutrients we find pharmaceuticals in our waterways and we have increased sediments in the stream so what does this do increased nutrients throw off the balance of our water we could have toxic algal blooms some of these those toxic algal algal blooms can that's Rob the oxygen of the water and without any oxygen in that water oh the fish can die all the benthic invertebrates that are kind of on the floor of that area can die so increased nutrients is a huge issue from urban runoff and that could be from fertilizers that in in people's lawns and all sorts of different things pharmaceuticals that I had read a study that some the pharmaceuticals were really doing some damage to some of our frogs and pians are especially sensitive to some of the pharmaceuticals that are making their way into the Salish Sea Puget Sound area and increased sediments into this stream we have impervious surfaces now and so when it rains like all the grit and the grime just can run off into the stream and that grit and grime in those sediments can actually like be like sandpaper on our baby Salmons skin and it can cause some real problems with our salmon populations so agriculture and industrial chemicals are a real big problem as well they introduce heavy metals into the environment which can be taken up by plants we can find those in the water there in a lot of our shellfish because our shellfish are bottom feeders and those things kind of tend to settle in that benthic layer right at the bottom of at the top layer of the ocean floor and they filter that in and they accumulate it in their bodies and then we can ingest that and become sick an example of this happening actually is up in Bellingham Bay there was a paper mill that was in I think I want to say early 1900s to the 50s that had dumped a bunch of mercury into Bellingham Bay and it took years and years and years to clean it up but I believe it's still an ongoing process they also introduced pesticides and herbicides and those are again detrimental to life whether that be plants or animals ourselves else and it's these are all unhealthy for plants animals and people and these heavy metals pesticides herbicides pharmaceuticals nutrients all of these things can increase in concentration the higher up the food chain so that means if a plant takes it in and then a small animal eats it and then a bigger animal eats it as we move up the chain those toxins become more concentrated and since we are kind of high up on that food chain we actually can be will be eating things could have very high concentrations of these toxins some toxins encompasses the fossil fuel economy and climate change fossil fuels introduced toxins into our atmosphere yes these are some of these toxins are already present and it's really about the level but they are toxins because of the way that they affect us so the fossil fuel economy has induced climate change and this may be the strongest barrier global carbon emissions from fossil fuels have significantly increased since 1900 I think most people know that by now but since 1970 in particular carbon dioxide emissions have increased by about 90 percent with the missions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes alone contributing about 78 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions between 1970 and 2011 agriculture deforestation and other land-use changes have also been large contributors to our increase in carbon dioxide because trees sequestered to carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere the less trees that we have of the list natural filtration system we have so deforestation decreases nature's ability to keep the atmosphere imbalance and this is why we one of the reasons why we see the rising levels carbon dioxide I did methane and some of the other heat-trapping greenhouse gases that are put out through the combustion of fossil fuels for industry and transportation always these chemicals have always been present in our atmosphere but human influences have increased the amount drastically like I said over the last century and that's because we are reliant on a fossil fuel economy for our transportation our industry and our electricity generation now here in the Pacific Northwest the electricity generation may not be as big of the problem as far as the fossil fuel goes but if we look on the other side of that our clean hydro energy has been detrimental to native people and their access to salmon specifically along the big rivers such as the Columbia so these fossil fuels create the greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere and this has led to rising temperatures loss of Oh loss of glaciers sea level rise and shortened rainy seasons we've seen acid rain events and acidification of our oceans on earth and our weather is getting more severe in some areas climate change threatens the stability of the health that the stability of the health of natural resources that supply a support or food sovereignty plants and animal species of the Pacific Northwest evolved over time with our regional climate many species will not be able to adapt to the rapid changes in temperature and precipitation patterns rising sea levels will displace native people from more of their traditional lands and displace important shoreline species acid rain and acid acidification of the ocean waters damages traditional plants and foods and creates unhealthy conditions for our sea life that we've been reliant on since time immemorial one of the biggest barriers that we have faced is also the colonization of our plant and animal relatives themselves our animal plant relatives have faced colonization by being tamed the taming of the wild lands for selection for human use today when we look out at the forest what we see is Douglas fir a beautiful monocrop of Douglas fir but we had this beautiful diverse forest canopy pre-contact selection for human use has changed the entire ecosystem and landscape the introduction of exotic species have been destructive and they out compete for resources with our native plants a lot of the time the introduction of pathogens that native species have no defense to but also something our plant relatives have faced the extinction of family groups reduced ranges due to land loss ecosystem destruction and toxins in the environment one of my favorite quotes from an indigenous educator Michael shoot indigenous educator that I believe is doing a presentation for the nikana native program on Friday Valerie Siegrist in her TED talk she mentions that food upholding its right to practice culture and that little quote was just really profound to me and it really made me want to highlight that our plant people have been really also hurt by history so how do we take it back so now we have this access and we have some barriers but what can we do the first thing we need to do is use our rights we need to go to the places we do have access to and we need to hunt and we need to fish and we need to gather and we need to garden as tribal people we need to reinforce our own in our tribes connection to culture to our place and to our foods we need to teach our children to not just appreciate nature from far we need to make them heart of nature by spending time with it we need to let them develop intimate relationships with the plant people and animal people you need to participate in education programs educate yourself and then how to honor traditional foods and medicines as guests on this land honor foods of the original people who land by treating the land and all its inhabitants as gifts only harvest during of the appropriate season and never take more than you will use harvest in a sustainable and ethical way okay so there's the I'm a college professor portion of my presentation okay this slide here is really just a shot of the things that I harvest with my students with my family just by myself you guys get in my way here so some of the things that are here I also have on a table behind me I'm gonna kind of go through some of the things I harvested during the season of them so here I have just kind of some jars of some things I just wanted to highlight a couple of different plants that I harvest throughout this season and I'm gonna start with spring just because we're in the spring kind of what's going right now one thing that I'm gonna bring out here is this one here is our native Orange honeysuckle this makes an amazing tea I'm not gonna go into the uses on this stuff because I have some other plants but this one's just coming into season right now and this is a nice spring harvest I'm gonna try and show a diversity so this one is a sea weed this is another one that's kind of coming up into season here and this one is called splendid iridescent sea weed and this would have been used in like soups and stews it's a good thickener so you don't have you don't have potatoes well we did have potatoes but not the real real starchy potatoes like we get today that can like thicken a soup up so we would use some seed needs to do that one of my kids favorites and one of the ones that I actually like get them just snack on pretty regularly is another seaweed called bladderwrack this one is the call ones that you see I'll cling into the rocks when you go to the beach it has like a little V shape to it if you can see that I season those up and we dry them my kids just munch on them like they're popcorn it's one of the things that the few ones I've been able to kind of regularly get into their diet another good one this one is called sumac and this absolutely yeah please that's really a popular in Middle Eastern cuisine they have a similar it is a sumac we have a native one here and what you like they do in the Middle East it's a beautiful spice it's very lemony I make an Indian lemonade out of it and another one of my favorites are really good sun tea well I think you guys are seeing me oh I don't have a lot here on the table because it's about that time we have berry season coming so these are elderberries these are actually at the very end of summer but I can't wait very season if that'll be it for the table right now I'll probably come back to that at the end I'm going to move forward with some of the traditional plants that that I said I would highlight how they were harvested what they looked like what we use them for so I'm gonna move forward with that okay so the very first plant that I am going to be discussing is called Devil's club I'm not going to try and pronounce the Latin name but there it is for you so Devil's club is found in Oregon Washington all along the Pacific Northwest Coast here and then there's also this little kind of population that's over by the Great Lakes in Canada Michigan area and you can see that on the map here and this map is from the USDA USDA plant database this is a really great resource to go to to kind of see where plants are growing and how to identify them and they usually have some good pictures for you to use for comparison so doubles Club as you can see here is a spiked shrub they're spikes on this stock here it's got a big huge leaf that's like a maple leaf that has about seven to nine points on it the spines run along the back of those leaves too they have a spike on the stock and ribs on the back of the leaves and the flowers are right and then they turn into this beautiful red berry and when you're walking through the forest and you see this pop of red it is just beautiful good road 12 to 15 feet high and they're found in moist woods deep wet drit well-drained soil you will if you see doubles Club you know there's water in your body it's in close by so some of the traditional uses and there's many of them one of the most powerful medicines for me it was one of the most powerful medicines for native people though spiritually what are the most powerful medicines spiritually and physically it was burned for the ashes and used in ceremonies for paint it was mixed with a grease like you the can grease or bare fat and used as paint for ceremonies the ashes were also ye use for artwork they were used in woodworking staining and they were for traditional tattoos that was the ink the walking sticks or the sticks were hardened and made into fishing lures and hooks and then the sticks could be cut down and there's a little soft piece in the middle that could be pushed out and it would make a bead and those beads were used for decoration in regalia and ceremonial dresses so some of the traditional method medicinal uses of Devil's club it was used for rheumatism arthritis tuberculosis to treat diabetes burns skin infection sore throat swollen glands stomach pain as you can see it really treated a lot of different things constipation nausea it was used as a purgative so it wasn't used to treat nausea it was used to induce nausea it was used as an appetite suppressant and like I said it was mixed with the grease and the ashes and not just for the pain it was also applied that way as a self was used in steam baths to reduce muscle and nerve pain and it was also used as a deodorant so here I have a couple of slides that show you some of the uses so Nancy Turner is an ethno botanist that travels around the area talking to tribes about all of the different uses of not just Devil's club but she did do a really extensive research on this particular plant and this is just a sampling of what she found in Salish Country for the uses for Devil's club so here you can see the Bella Coola were using it the Hadassah the quatl the schultz were using it and all of them had slightly different uses some most of them included the arthritis and the rheumatism and the diabetes but there was a diversity that was in there and so here you can see there's like one two three and like three page juice of just and this is not comprehensive of what she included in the paper so the uses for Devil's club were far and wide it's also powerful medicine for the modern world it's an adaptogen which helps mitigate the effects of stress on the body it helps treat insulin resistant type 2 diabetes which I mentioned before has really drastically risen in Indian country because of the shift in our diet due to its hypoglycemic effect some people report a significant reduction in the need for injecting insulin when they use Devil's club regularly so how to harvest it first we need to know how it propagates so that we can properly approach the plant make sure that we're harvesting it in an ethical and sustainable way so Devil's club actually has two ways to propagate it sends roots out that shoot up from the base so it goes from a root to a shoot and route to a shoot and it spreads out that way and then also those bright red berries that I showed you those bright red berries produce a seed so animals and birds eat the seed they digest it they germinate it through their digestive tract and then they discard it away from the original colony so Devil's club is typically harvested spring to fall on although I limit myself to doing it in the spring and then the fall on so once it has buried I leave it and let the birds have everything that they need and then once those berries are going I'll start harvesting it again so I'll do a early spring harvest and then a fall harvest when you approach the plant how to identify and how to know what to pick you're going to notice that there's a one large or a couple of larger plants in the middle that one large plant is known as the grandfather and his father's her sons are outside of him and then his grandsons are outside of him so when you look at the patch you want to establish what generation is what before you even go in to start cutting now its proper to always give an offering when we do that what we're going to do is look at that generation and we're going to take just a little bit from each generation and then move to a new group we don't over harvest from one group because it's a very slow growing plant and it is how to enormous loss of habitat so there really isn't any place for it to go once we cut those spiky sticks down what we do is we scrape those spikes off with a blunt edged I use the back of a butter knife the back of a butter knife we scrape those off and then there's a really thin paper II less bark that lays over the green bark that you're seeing here in the picture and we scrape that paper II bark off once that paper II bark the outer bark is removed we can peel the inner bark off of the stick once we've done that it actually peels off really really well like almost like just peeling a banana it's really nice enough fulfilling like oh here it comes off so once we get that off and you can see that picture here that's the green peeled inner bark that's what we use for the medicine so first we have to remove the spikes then we have to remove the outer bark and then we remove the inner bark and then that inner bark is what we can use for our medicine we cut those or break them up into little one-inch pieces roughly and we let it dry out just dries in the air in 3-5 days a pretty quick drying plant which is amazing and then that's the dried medicine for roots you can do the same thing the root medicine is the more powerful of Medicine and some people use the root exclusively some people use a combination of here we go so I went back so you can see this is a picture of the root Underground and when I said that they grow up and they go out and they go up it's that sectioning but tweet you just cut that little piece of root out and you actually able to allow both generations to still live we just cut out the little connector piece because they've root it down on their own so once we have that dried material we can make it into anything it could be a tea it could be a tincture it could be a sob it could be really those are the main ones a water water infusion and I will briefly talk about the different ways to infuse alright so the next thing I'm going to talk about is stinging nettle so stay nettle is a like a superfood it's it's it surpasses kale and it's superfood ness it's a member of the mint family it's identified by how it has a square stem like all of the mint family and it has opposite situated sharply serrated leaves and you could see in this picture they're very sharply serrated and they have stinging hairs on the leaves and on the stems stinging nettle likes to grow in Meadows thickets stream banks and open forests in low to mid elevations and it really likes disturbed areas so when an area gets kind of tore up it'll be one of the first things that likes to come in so the medicinal uses for nettle it's an abundant source of minerals and huh spider-man see silica calcium potassium iron and it contains just about more more protein than any other plant internally it's a blood builder it strengthens the lungs it increases breast milk production it nourishes the kidneys it helps regulate fluid balance and muscle contractions and nerve signals externally you can eat excuse me you can use it for pain and inflammation for nerves and it strengthens your hair and your nails because of that silica for internal use nettle is harvested in the spring before the plant flowers plants cut in an angle and it's cut just above the first set of leaves so you can see at least above the first set I usually use a cup of leave a couple sets so here on the picture you can see there are these little nodules and in this these sections you cut it at a angle now can be harvest throughout the summer for external use the next thing I'm going to talk about is solo so all I say is the unsung hero berry of the Pacific Northwest it was one of our most abundant traditional foods in the summer of berries it's distributed all along the Pacific coast you can see from California all the way up in and through Alaska and the Aleutian chain is characterized by its leathery leaves and it's bright purple berries it's an evergreen shrub and one of the most common understory shrubs in the Pacific Northwest it prefers to grow in the conifer forests on rocky Bluffs we also find it along the seashore in low to mid elevations it can grow up to six feet tall when it's in the shade and having to compete reach for the Sun but usually grows to about three foot tall when it's in the Sun in the sunlight it produces edible berries and leaves that were a staple of the native diet along the coast it was one of it is one of the most plentiful and important berries for coastal people the berries contain two key components tannins and anthocyanins both are correlated with the reduced risk of stroke heart attack neurodegenerative disease and metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes again so higher concentrations of both compounds are in salal berries than in blueberries which that's one of the these are with some of the things that blueberries tout for being [Music] healthy but they're much more concentrated in our native so albury so the Salah weeps are made into teas to soothe intestinal and urinary tract infections they relieve diarrhea and you can do a gargle at tea garble to soothe sore throats and treat mouth sores the leaves were used for their astringent properties to stop bleeding and dry wounds and they were chewed as an appetite suppressant and the branches and leaves were lined in our fire cooking pits so the astringent properties I have a little bit of a personal story on this one with the astringent properties I have a special needs sign a cool it's a little slobbery he just he kind of drools a little bit and when we're out in the forest he loves to chew those Salah leaves and it just kind of I think dries everything up for him and he feels really good and so he kind of on his own I'm started using the Salah leaf - how can I dry that wet mouth out that he gets sometimes so salal berries strawberries were consumed in many ways the most common way was to be added with other berries nuts fats and dried meats and then pressed in to cakes that were then dried or smoked those are often called panicking cakes there's lots of different names for them out there though so the berries were actually also dried just four whole berry tea but today they're most commonly made into syrups jams jellies and fruit leathers so Saul has faced the modern threats it's used in the floral industry as an ornamental for bouquets and so we have had people coming in commercial Pickers that come into our forest and harvest our soul all for the floral industry now is starting to have been begun to be regulated by by the state but there was a period of time where it wasn't and we were seeing some big losses in this law because of the floral industry now they're really starting to their own and relying less and less on the natural resource of slaw but there still are people out there that are harvesting it for bouquets for the floral industry so over harvesting is a threat to this iconic Pacific Northwest plant another threat that's really really happening now a current one with the salal is that in 2019 there were huge salal die offs in the Pacific Northwest specifically a lot of southern Vancouver Island they really still don't know why this wall is dying but they think it's possible that an unusually dry preceding summer and then a polar vortex the next winter was just too much for the slaw to handle and that was what caused the die-off and so they are doing a study now and there's an early indication that the die-off is potentially from climate induced change climate change induced changes so I'm not going to go into as much detail about this one but I did want to give an honorable mention to willow it was a staple medicine in the traditional culture because it is a pain reliever and a fever reducer and that's a really beneficial thing to have in your medicine cabinet so it acts a lot like aspirin it's used for pain including headaches muscle cramps menstrual cramps rheumatoid arthritis again osteoarthritis mouth sores cow and much much much more but I think the best thing are the most critical important thing about it is that it's a fever reducer we having a fever reducer when you have viruses and infections and things like that it's critical so this is our fever reducer this plant has been used in traditional medicine all over the world willows are globally distributed species of plant and they've been used in turn additional medicine all over the world for centuries and centuries all right so we are at the I'm going to stop share we are at a little bit of a breaking point oh where we at 5:40 well we have got to switch over to self making so I'm going to take like five three minutes to switch over my space here and I'm gonna pull my selves in and get going on it so I'm going to turn off my camera so I could do like room change really quick and I'll be back in just a few minutes if I Lonnie or Jonathon want to like jump in and maybe start getting questions ready we can start doing that kind of as I'm talking through okay so this is Jonathan from the Connie program like to ask questions you're welcome to do so in the chat if you don't know where the chat is it's right at the bottom the middle of your screen if you click on the little balloon that looks like a chat that will open up the chat window either blower at the side of your screen and you are welcome to to just send everyone your question we will and Lindsay will address them when she gets done also while she's getting prepared we Anna Connie would like to offer you the opportunity to hear about more of our the activities that we're going to be planning as Lindsay mentioned we are going to have a another lecture this Friday at one o'clock there's a 130 130 now one o'clock sorry and we will certainly welcome your presence there it'll be a some of the same material a little different focus of it but to receive to get out to our mailing list and receive notice of other events I'm gonna screen share you three questions that we look we also like you to ask to respond to in the chat so let me quick share my screen there it is okay so if you would give us your name your email address and any illy Asian you might have with the tribe agency or organization we will be glad to put you on our mail email list and you will then hear about other events in the future you hi and this is Ilan E Casey again and I just want to remind you that our email address is no Connie n AKA ni i n fo no connie info at gmail.com and we also have a website which is WWE na ka ni org so make sure and check out our website and also take note of our email so that you can send this information or if you have questions additional questions after this session thank and another activity that Connie is carrying out right now is some meditation sessions every weekday morning from 9 to 9:45 if you go to our Facebook page you will see a link to it it is called loving-kindness meditation and I've really enjoyed it a lot so I invite you to join us for that too you and on the screen you can see the how to make the medicine so it has the instructions and Lindsay will be back to show you step-by-step how to make it thank you you [Music] okay table that I put together so what we start with is once we've harvested so I'm going to show you some metal here I've got the metal in the jar this is just dried metal I showed you guys the recipe that it was up on the screen but the truth is I don't actually use a recipe I have learned over the years to kind of just eyeball what I like and so I put the recipe up there for your benefit but I'm not actually going to probably weigh things out or be that technical about it what I usually do is just kind of add what I think is about is right I've got enough experience now and just kind of let it go from there but you can see what the measurements are or you could have seen and I will share that with the Loney if it people want to request a copy of the presentation or the recipes that they can use so what we do is we take our dried herb really this could be any of those traditional medicines that I've talked about this one is metal now I just use food grade olive oil now I mentioned on that slide there are several different options you can use jojoba oil coconut oil all sorts of sunflower oil but I usually just use food grade olive oil and the reason I use food grade is because it's actually regulated by the FDA cosmetic grade oils are not and so I would rather have little bit of extra parity that I know it's gone through some betting that it's not toxic for us at the very least right so I buy them in these huge jugs of olive oil and I really just fill my jar up until it's cupboard once I have it covered I have my jar with my herb herb and I don't have it in here but what I would do is I would put this now I would set it down in my craw sideways like this and I would fill the water to about 3/4 of the way up the jar so most of the jar is under water inside of your crock pot then I put my crock pot on warm now not low we're not trying to cook these plants we're just trying to infuse that medicine into the oil so it's important not to put it on low and just to put it on your warm setting now that's called the fast infusion the slow infusion the traditional way and would be to let it sit in that oil for four to six weeks in a cool place not in the sunlight and give it a good shake every couple of days now in modern day time I'd mostly just use the crock pot eight to twelve hours in the crock pot and you can go a little longer with some hearty herbs or barks really when you have really tough material you want to kind of maybe increase that time when you have really light and frail herbs you're not probably going to get much more out of it after that eight to 12 hours and you may actually end up moving into that quick cooking process so after the oil after that the jar comes out of the crock pot it looks like this it's very dark and you can see the physical color change you can put that up for me the physical color change the oil just gets rich and dark with all of the minerals and the vitamins in the medicine that's in there and what we do and I'm not going to have time to do this part today but I will show you is all of this it's poured into what my grandma used to call a flour sack rag and I just balled it up in there twist and twist and twist and twist and get all of that oil out through a strainer in case anything pops through you never know and into a bowl here and so what I have is all of my oil separated and strain from my medicine now that oil I pour into a pot and that's what I have going here I have a nice warm pot of oil you have some good nettle oil and this once out in the crock pot for eight to twelve hours and then it's been sitting on my counter for the last couple of days so it'll be a really really strong listen once you have that oil though I like to mix in some coconut oil I just think it feels good I love the smoothness of it I don't always do it but I will usually pour in a quarter to a half of a jar for a full jar of Medicine once I have that oil in I just give it a really good mix and really all that you have to do from here is get the beeswax in now the beeswax is what kind of solidifies it now traditionally we wouldn't have used olive oil or beeswax what we would have used is mammal fats so mammal fats are solid at room temperature much like a coconut oil is solid at room temperature and so animal fats would be the ideal the ideal medium to use for making a stout traditionally bear or something that are still used today but the seal facts bear fat you look in oil but it would have been really heavily used in this area or the candle fish oil would have been really heavily used in this area for a traditional self but today we use the olive oils and the beeswax so you can buy the beeswax two ways I get these giant bricks which is really the most cost effective way to do it but it is hard to break these down and cut these down and so I buy these and I don't think you can probably see this but I have this they're like little beads and these just melt really fast it makes it easy so for today I got the beads in here and I just pour my beads in and I did give you the amount to use on the slide with the recipe so you don't feel like you're just kind of going in blind like I am I kind of know how to eyeball my quantities now so I pop my wax in here in my oil now one thing I will note about the oil that's really important is you are not trying to make like hot frying oil here you really want to keep temperature as low as you possibly can while still not being able to well melt your wax in the hotter you get that the oil the more you're breaking down those medicines that you're trying to get into your skin and into your body so once we have the wax in with an inhibitor a really good stir recipe so part of that is that I'd have to do a little bit of trial and error so what I do is I put my wax and I take a spoon and I fill it up with a little piece and I put it in my freezer and then wait like three minutes and cut test it out and feel it out and if it feels good that's it if it's a little soft I add some wax it's a little hard I I go back and forth or or coconut oil they go back and forth until I get that just perfect consistency until I feel like that that's the one and so they come down on the spoon and you want to be able to raise your spoon up and have it not slide off you want to be able to cut still be able to get some of it though you don't want it to be so hard that you're having to dig a fingernail in to kind of pop that out and so that's how I do it with my little trial and error method but if you follow the recipe that one's pretty tried-and-true it should work out for you so once we have all of our wax in there it's just putting it in containers so a lot of the time what I use is I actually buy these online they're the exact shape and size that's an Altoid mint container you can buy them on Amazon and so that's what is a really good personal sizes I make a lot of these selves and medicines for giveaways within the tribal communities in the area so some of these will go for a new journey giveaways funeral giveaways naming ceremony giveaways winter dance giveaways things like that and so I'll make a lot of them throughout the year with all of the different plants and they just kind of get given and gifted throughout the year to different people so once we have our oil in we have our racks in and we've checked our spoon or we followed our recipe exactly now we need to pour into our containers this is actually the tricky part right and kind of hard to do on your own it's kind of a cheat I just figured out how to do it on my own but it is easier with two people because somebody has to hold a funnel I've got a helper sister here and then somebody needs to pour it now I have mastered funneling and labeling but for today I'm going to use the help where I can get it so really you're just going to take a scoop and you're gonna pour you're gonna let that cool like cool until it's solely don't close the lid until it's cooled you don't want cousins condensation in yourself there really shouldn't be much moisture anyways because you use dry herbs but you know better safe than sorry leave that bit open and then once it's cooled you're done that's the medicine and so your skin is the biggest organ that you have it is an amazing medium for absorption and so this medicine although you're taking it in externally it is working its way into your whole body so that is how we make ourselves and one thing I think I would mention in this is that I used two dried herbs if you were to use fresh which you can do you just doubled the amount of oil for the for the for the product or excuse me I said that backwards doubled the amount of herb two times the herb for the same amount of oil excuse me and the dried herb cell lasts for like one to two years and then if you were to do fresh it lasts like six months to twelve months so that's our demonstration on making a quick and easy demonstration on making cells and medicines hey Lindsey someone has asking can you use whale blubber instead of the olive oil absolutely and so wills marine mammals have that solid fat as well that's what that's so yes absolutely you could use whale blubber seal fat was one that was really heavily used traditionally you know we can just take questions now and people I mean if you wanna you could maybe even unmute people I'm Jonathan and we could take some questions sure what I'd like to do is read the ones of people submitted perfect we are not limited on time so we should be fine someone some Lori is saying she hasn't contorted willow and her front yards right prolific she's been pruning it a lot recently when its medicinal qualities be much the same as other willows absolutely yeah so this the willow family the salix family has all of those same medicinal properties so that's not just constrained to our native willows my dad has a non-native weeping willow in his yard and I will sometimes harvest some bark from that willow okay and someone asked are these plants available to be purchased somewhere to put them in your own yard yeah there are many native nurseries you really could just google it quite honestly one that I can think of off the top of my head or a good place to start maybe just even something as simple as plant world honestly okay and the final question we've got from our chat is some someone just wanted to clarify that you could use Devils Devils Club and so well to make cells also yeah absolutely and I made the devil's Club solve it it's probably one of the one I make the most one of the ones I make the most often it is really good for nerve pain and I actually have neuropathy and so I use it to defeat my arthritis that I have and the neuropathy that I get down my leg and my neck from that so it's a really good nerve nerve pain I mean it's muscle pain too but it's specifically really good for the nerves right thank you okay we are at the end of our time that we'd agree to do you want to do you want to add anything at the end or anything yeah I just wanted to say thank you so much for participating and listening and glad you're here and don't forget to put your contact information in the chat and check out our website and also on Friday at 1 o'clock to 2:30 is another another one of these oome workshops that is with Valerie secrets and it is slightly different and some additional really good information as well and we have another one that we're planning for June so we'll keep you posted through Facebook and thank you so much for for coming and joining with us this evening I think are there any more questions Jonathan I think we checked them all I just wanted to say thank you for a great presentation we just want to say thank you as well yeah I'm good to see you [Laughter] thank you guys so much for your time and coming in hanging out with me was blessed to be invited to do this and I love you know sharing that knowledge and this is just it was just a great opportunity thank you

Channel: Nakani Native Program

Views: 78

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 9l4kOF7zAFw

Length: 88min 43sec (5323 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020