Tending the Wild: Gathering Medicine

what the Spaniards came and saw in California they described as looking like a well-tended garden it looked like that because it was the people had lived with the plants had lived with the animals and had evolved in ecology based on bringing what they needed close to their home villages to maximize the growth of that through our land management techniques to keep it growing in close to the village to bring game in close to the village so they didn't have to go farther and farther afield that's our ecological knowledge what plants are used for food what plants are used for tools what plants are used for medicine Jahna hey Yanni Jana hey Arnie Jana hey Yanni Jana hey anna hey anna hey honey it means i'm coming in a good way it means i'm coming with a song in my heart and if you don't have that song in your heart don't go gather if you don't have that song in your heart don't go cook and it brings that spirit of happiness and joy into what you're doing so i take this little tobacco i leave it down here i sam i'm coming and you're gonna help me make medicine you're gonna help me make some tea my name is kat hi and i'm a descendant from the Hupa tribe in northern california I grew up in Redondo Beach Palos Verdes and learned about plants from my father and my mother down in Southern California this is mugwort it grows in a moister area it's used for ceremony in Northern California it's also used as a medicine you can make a tea out of it or you can make a tincture which you would put externally what I'm gonna do is boil up some water with some mugwort leaves in it for a teacher for mosquito bites to decrease the itch and the pain from them I have learned from elders and from others that if you're out in the woods and you get the poison oak the mugwort is a really good antidote for it and you can see the color has gotten dark green the mugwort can be used as an antiseptic sage can be used as an antiseptic white sage is medicinal you take a couple liters and make a tea to get rid of cold stuffed up sinuses and stuff it relieves mucus so the only person that shouldn't drink white sage tea is pregnant and nursing women so we eat the seeds toasted seeds and deceased kind of chia seeds one of the most important uses of this plant was it it was our toilet paper because it's soft and it smells good and it's actually a stringent - my name is Richard Bubbe and I'm pie Uncle Tom yo am kumi hi sweet Monday jolly yo Gombe aunt a wiener I was apprenticed for a teacher named Jane Dumas and her first lesson was how do I gather plants and she taught me the first thing I do is to say a prayer to the plant the second thing is to ask permission and the third thing to do is to give the patent Kent what you're gonna use it for because plants have lots of different purposes and they need to be a little directions sometimes traditional ecological knowledge is a body of science that encompasses all sciences if you're a people living in the same place the same region for a thousand years you've watched the turn of the seasons the migrations of animals birds insects fire regimes and how they move through plant life all of those things together how we hunt and fish how we gather our plants how we are able to subsist all of that encompasses tech my name is sage latina I am numb to palm and no masseuse wind - from Northern California and I am a ethno botanist and certified medical herbalist we're at one of the villages on the American River that was part of this whole river corridor villages which is missing my new territory or southern mighty there's at least three or four plants just in this small area that are very useful so this is Artemisia and it is one of the plants we use a lot for either women's medicine but also for protection it's made into a tea and it's drank to help regulate your moon cycle or your menstrual cycle the main constituents of the oils that it has in it are very bitter in nature and that bitter action helps balance all your systems in a row so there's a domino effect or a cascade when you intake of bitters your digestive system is working better because then your gall bladder and your pancreas talk to each other they work in unison the tonic has to do with tone if vacation so you're toning those walls which and then is also going out through that cell wall and helping that tone through both the blood digestion and then that's getting into your blood system and then actually going out through your intestinal walls is helping to tonify your overall system herbalism is so much more than just here's an herb go ahead and take it the way I was trained to be an herbalist was starting actually sitting in the woods going with the person who was my mentor I started as a child working with Mabel McKay she is well known as a basket weaver and also as a doctor and she had me sit for periods of time out there and just be observant be conscious I learned a completely different type of understanding of herbalism as a whole in nature as opposed to just how herbs affect individual body systems for tens of thousands of years Indian people have had a reciprocal relationship with clowns and it's been good for the people and been good for the plans everybody's been healthy and happy for the last 500 years that relationship has been severed plants are being gathered anymore the plants are not happy that's why they're kind of growing wild an Indian there is no word for a while I really want people to understand we as native Californians as traditional people are utilizing the same medicines they are and we're trying to harvest these things traditionally on our own or public lands that are in our tribal territories and when people learn about herbs and how wonderful they are and then they go out and gather all of them we don't have access to our medicine I firmly believe that Native people and all people ought to be establishing their own gathering areas in their own homes or communities gardening in your own home is something that we've been developing here we developed our dogbane forests and we turned our gray water into a grey water Marsh so that we could grow tule we could grow the junk aztecs tillis we could grow the year romanza a lot of the plants that require more water without us having to water it using the grey water I wouldn't be teaching about our culture and our environment and the way we do things without the belief that this is open to all people to not only learn but understand to adopt to take on as their understanding this so many people are relocated and we have terms for that it's called rootless and what I am hoping will happen is that all of those people will find a way to sync their routes into this earth and get nourishment from it and get an understanding of it and be able to get back to it we've been trained a long term generationally particularly in this country to react a certain way to our environment or not react at all to just have more consciousness about what we're doing on a regular basis the biggest misconception is you take humans out of nature that nature comes back and that's not true you take humans out of nature and there's something missing out of nature you

Channel: KCET

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Id: jbbcok8Lzs0

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 29 2016