EthnobotanyTribal College Librarians Institute

National Museum of the American Indian

Washington, DC * June 12-16, 2006

Natalie Davis

What is Ethnobotany?

The aim of ethno-botany is to studyhow & in what wayspeople use nature &how and in what ways people view nature. http://

sciencebulletins.amnh.org/biobulletin/Success/belize1.html

… and why isit important?

Ethnobotany questions

– To get a view of past existence

– To understand present uses of plants for food, medicine, construction materials, and tools

– To have this information be a door into cultural realities and

– To understand the future of human relationships with the land.

Then and now

• At first, ethnobotanies may have only listed plants, names, and uses.

• Today we want to know what the people thought about plants and want to include conceptualization of plants in studies. Dr. Enrique Salmon, Fort

Lewis ethnobotany instructor

The burning questions of Ethnobotany:

a) What are people’s conceptions of plants?

b) What use is made of plants for food, med-icine, material culture & ceremonial purposes?

c) What is the extent of knowledge of plants?

d) In what categories are plant names & words that deal with plants grouped in the language

e) What can be learned by studying this?

Mgebbu Ashy, born in 1934, has encyclopedic knowledge of plants and the local environ-ment in the Yangjuan, China, region.

The obvious part :“Direct contact with the vegetation of a region is

recommended to know & study the plants’ physical properties.”

Kelly Kindscher, Associate Professor, KSU at Lawrence.

Kelly Kindscher teaches Ethnobotany at the University of Kansas at Lawrence.

In 1983, he spent 80 days walking 690 miles across the prairie from Kansas City to the Rocky Mountain foothills, foraging his way, gathering & preparing native plants for food. -- That’s contact!

Where Nebraska Is …

Kindscher’s walk across Kansas

Kindscher wrote:

Little Priest Tribal College

The Winnebago reservation is in Thurston County, Nebraska

It is on the Upper Missouri River

My story …

• I graduated from NICC in 1995 at this same location with an AS in Natural Resources– “Range Management” = start of my obsession

with native plants in my yard

– What I should grow? The plants that would do the best are those that normally grow here.

• Surveyed during the winter of 1995/96

• Began work at Little Priest Tribal College Library in December 2000

Indigenous plants at my house

In April 2004 Jan Bingen, head of Native IMAGE, offered a one-day GIS/GPS workshop.

With my background with maps & surveying, using GPS just clicked. It all made perfect sense.

Native IMAGE Boot Camp

… and then• Jan hired me for Native IMAGE …• Started an ethnobotany project on the Winnebago

res. I drove country roads, documenting where plants used by the tribe are, their uses, what their Ho-Chunk names are, and pronun-ciations.

• Elaine Rice, a teacher with the Ho-Chunk Renaissance Language program, & the whole staff of HCR, gave mewith pronunciations.

The Plan:

• Create a easily-usable database of plants

• Locate (see the [ invisible ] GPS unit in my hand?) & map locations on the reservation for future research and local and con-servation use.

Up to my knees in wild roses

One of the few books on the Ho-Chunk

uses of plants

There is also a paper by

Kindscher and Hurlburt, on the

Winnebago Tribe of

Wisconsin’s plant use, which

I also used.

Moerman’s Ethnobotany is

another.Moerman

covers many, many tribes and their plant uses. He has put his material into a

searchable database at

http://herb.umd.umich.

edu/

Looking for ethnobotanical information

Fort Lewis Community College at Durango,Colorado hasan ethnobotanyprogram,strongly linkedto its archaeology,biology, environ-mental and re-gional programs. The website is http://anthro.fortlewis.edu/ethnobotany/