Bitterroots                                 56

Water Lilies                               57

Buttercups                                59

Oregon grape                                       67

Mustards                                   70

Saxifrages                                 73

Roses                                       78

Peas                                         95

Vine maple                              102

Buffalo-berry                              107

Fireweed                                 109

Devil’s Club                             112

Wild Carrot and Lomatium             114

Dogwood                                   125

Huckleberries                            127

Pipsissewa                               129

Mints                                        140

Self Heal                                  143

Tobacco                                    144

Figwort                          145

Broomrape and Plaintain            149

Bedstraw                                   150

Honeysuckle                             152

Sunflower                                  160

Lily                                           186

False Solomon’s Seal                 189

Orchid                                       196

Mountain Lady’s Slipper            197

Iris                                            200

Bibliography                              201

Index of symptoms                     203

Acknowledgements

            Many thanks to my parents for their spending time in the woods with me as a young person, teaching me, through modeling, a love for wild places and the species inhabiting them.

Without Daryl Hoyt, my husband, and his long term support and encouragement, this project would never have been completed. He has steadfastly given me encouragement to pursue my deepest loves and been patient with the hours of typing and library work. Thanks to my son, Avery Thie Hoyt, for putting up with mom at the computer for hours on end and for his help in keeping me from being too ingrown and reminding me to take time for basketball, pillow fights, and gymnastics.

            Thanks to Dr. Eugene Hunn, ethnobiologist at the University of Washington, for opening his reprint files to me and introducing me to the important ethnobiological texts of the Pacific Northwest. He hosted an Ethnobiologist Conference at the University of Washington which I attended with my baby in 1984. He introduced me to the Desert Parsley genus (Lomatium sp.), an important food and medicine group. When I told Dr. Hunn my ethical dilemma in reprinting this information, he encouraged me to go ahead and print when he shared that he thought that knowledge helps people build appreciation and care for plants.

            James Selam for laughing with me about how every Indian needs his anthropologist and vice versa.

Adrienne Roan Bear for encouragement to print this information as many Native Americans do not have this wealth of information at their fingertips.

Dr. Nancy Turner, for warm conversation in her home one cold November, but most of all for her scholarship, reflecting her integrity and friendship with the People’s of the First Nations of British Columbia.

Robyn Klein for asking hard questions that helped me address the issues in the preface.

            Keith Chamberlain and other members of the Native Plant Society of the Gorge Mid Columbia Chapter in Mosier, Oregon for help in learning Columbia River Gorge plants.

            Cascade Anderson Geller, my herbal teacher, who keeps reminding me of the importance of grassroots science. That while knowledge may start with reading, knowing comes from personal experience in using and tasting. That the people who lived with the plants and use them daily will always know more than those who read and write about them.

Preface

          Returning to the Pacific Northwest in 1969, I started getting to know the wildflowers, trees and shrubs. Certain ones, like columbine and stonecrop, came into focus. Friends, a class in edible plants, and later formal botany studies helped me name them. Their uses fascinated me, but the references were scattered. So to organize them for my own learning, fifteen years ago, I started a card file, then transferred them to a word processor and finally to a computer. As my son grew up, I spent hours putting information into this collection while wild games of chase swirled around me. Finally I had one searchable place to go to find previously published information about any given species. Now when I take people on herb walks I have a ready reference to flip through to find information about any plant in which the group is particularly interested. When other herbalists, botanists, or land managers ask some native plant use, I can readily look it up.

            So while I have written this for my own use, for nature hikes and as a resource for future writing geared towards lay people, I hope that Northwest interpretive writers may find this a useful reference source for interpretive writing for nature trails and displays in parks. It could prove helpful to naturopathic physicians, herbalists, herb growers and educators. It may also be helpful for those interested in the complexity of forest ecosystems and how this is tied to our survival.

            Roots of this book started when I was young, while hiking and camping with my parents and sisters in the Cascade Mountains and around the world on their numerous work travels. The feel and healing scents of an ancient, integrated forest never leave you. As I grew, other focused vignettes about plants include savory spice-filled dahl, huge rhododendrons, and tea plantations in Nepal and India where I lived from age five to seven. I remember my father chewing fragrant sassafras twigs with me, showing me wild oats corkscrewing their way into moist soil, tasting sour grass (Rumex acetosella) and paying attention to the beauty in wild places and sharing that love with his family. My Mother shared her love of the beauty of wild creatures and brought flower bouquets into our home. They both gardened out of frugality, but also out of love for the vitality and freshness of the vegetables and flowers. They have a special love affair with fragrant flowers, lilacs, sweet peas and, of course, the roses.

            While I try to operate out of deep love and respect for fellow creatures on the planet, I know that, in part, from the history of my Euro-American heritage, I do not always succeed. While there is deep love in my culture, there is also greed-a deep survival fear-bred, I believe, from the constant wars and battles for land and sustenance over centuries in Europe. I think it is time to move beyond these fear induced behaviors, such as strip mining the earth, our forests and every other resource available. I think that, instead, It is time to return to our universal birthright, our inherent human qualities of love, intelligence and joyfulness. It is time to move from injury and destruction of our fellow species for short-term benefit, extraction, pit mining and clear-cutting forests-to noticing abundance and to return to original human caring.

            Reading through the numerous species listed here which at one time have proved their helpfulness to humans, I like to think that this list can help with the struggle to teach the importance of gene-pool preservation. Too often I’ve heard “It doesn’t matter if a few species go extinct, we don’t really need them”. I would argue that just for esthetics, each species is needed. However, almost every plant in some way has a connection to human health, not to mention the extensive uses of plants for homes, utensils, fishing and hunting equipment, food use, and clothing.

Many chemicals produced by plants that are healing to humans have never been made synthetically in laboratories. The plant-as a little chemical producing entity-is actually needed to provide the template for new ideas and the building blocks to create these complex chemical structures in the laboratory. Some we simply cannot yet make. Much of “modern pharmacy” is still based on the building blocks of chemicals found in the wild.

            Because of the genocide of Native Americans and the greedy taking of resources from this once abundant land by immigrant cultures, I have hesitated to publish and make more accessible this special information. But I think that knowledge also breeds care, respect and protection. After consulting with various people over the last ten years, I have decided that making this information more accessible makes it possible to help people appreciate and then to protect plant-life, rather than add to destruction. So I have decided to publish this, but with all profits going towards Native American cultural activities and teaching of all people about cherishing all other life forms on the planet. Copies of this book are available for Native American Cultural Centers.

Ethnobotany is the interactions of any group of people with plants. How people relate to the world around them gives insight into medicine, religion, as well as to how daily life was carried out. This book focuses on how Northwest Native Americans used plants as medicine.

There are numerous limitations to this approach. There are many tribal groups and traditions represented here. Yet the information is very difficult to transfer from one culture to another. I am in no way an expert on Native American religion or medicine, and yet I have a sense of how far this information is from in portraying the religious context in which these remedies were used for healing. European mindset and worldview is different from other important world thought. Even though anthropologists try to be objective in conveying information from one culture to another it is very difficult to step out of one’s cultural viewpoint.

In some of the early documents the added problem of warfare and genocide was occurring and information may not be very accurate from “Indian” to “white man”. Native American informants may well have played tricks on anthropologists (R. Klein). Robyn Klein, herbalist from Bozeman, Montana, shared with me that Native Americans have told her that these documents are not needed to convey apothecary information as it was “learned through dreams and vision quests”.

Yet if, a pharmaceutical company wants to find a new drug, the chances of success are greatly increased, if the plant scientists first work with empirical information from traditional healers. The more healers throughout the world that use a particular plant for an ailment, the likelihood increases of finding a successful drug. Herbalists, as least the European heritage ones that I know, rely heavily upon European, Native American, Ayurvedic and Chinese texts for finding whole plant medicines.

Propagate, instead of harvest, wild plants

Work to preserve native plant habitat. Learn what this is, why this is important. Join with Native Plant Societies or other organizations in your area working to preserve natural landscapes. Find ways to grow the plants you want to experiment with as medicine, especially if you promote a product made with any plants listed here, GROW them. Do not wild harvest.

            If you decide to wild harvest some species for personal use, make sure that they are hardy prolific plants and not fragile and difficult to propagate. Plants growing in areas that have been disturbed by bulldozers are usually hardy colonizers and readily adapt to the type of habitat that our culture provides: bare, open, and hot ground. Plants growing deep in an undisturbed forest are living in a shrinking habitat and will not adapt to a hot sunny location. Return to the same place year after year to ensure that the plants you harvest stay about the same in number or increase.

Check with my earlier book, A Plant Lover’s Guide to Wildcrafting: How to Preserve Wild Places and Harvest Medicinal Plants. There are so many plants to choose from, it is always possible to find a good substitute that is readily available and hardy instead of the rarer, more fragile plant. Never harvest a rare plant. This is a challenge to you to use this information to cherish and to increase the variety of the plants in your neighborhood. Each one is precious, as are you and me

Ethnobotany disclaimer

            While some of the remedies documented here may be excellent medicine, this is not the place to find self-help medicine. Do not take any of these plants as medicine, but work with your health care provider. Many people have died experimenting with plants.

These are stories and history to begin research projects with medicine. By comparing the information here with ethnobotanical and pharmacological information from other parts of the world, you may find a plant to work with that will be helpful for human health. Compare these entries to Ayurvedic medicine from India, Chinese traditional medicine, and European based herbalism. Preparation, dosage and first hand knowledge are key.

            This book is similar to Charlotte Erichsen-Brown’s Medicinal and other Uses of North American Plants, (Dover Publications, New York, 1979) in that each author, dates of their work, and the page number precedes each entry. Here the entries are usually paraphrased, rather than directly quoted, following closely to the original work including especially references to collecting, making medicine and any prayers or rituals observed in administering the medicine. Hopefully this added information will make it more useful to herbalists, naturopathic physicians, and researchers. By including this information, this book differs from Daniel Moerman’s work, Medicinal Plants of Native America. Some of the descriptions of remedies are quoted in their entirety so that you can evaluate the meaning yourself.

How to use this book

First identify the plant in which you are interested. There are several ways to do this, one being to use “social botany” or learning from a local expert. Ask around, check with your local Native Plant Society, or schools for plant identifications hikes or classes.

Check your local library or bookstore to find a plant identification key. Hitchcock and Cronquist’s, Flora of the Pacific Northwest, is excellent especially for botanists. Page numbers are cross-referenced here so that it is easy to look up a description in “Hitchcock” from this. Pojar and MacKinnon, Lyons, and Niehaus are user-friendlier for non-botanists.

Some available field guides to identify plants in the Pacific Northwest:

Gilkey, Helen and LaRea Dennis. Handbook of Northwestern Plants. Oregon State University. 1967. Covers western Washington, Oregon and western British Columbia. This has a very handy easy-to-use key to find the scientific name of the family.

Hitchcock, C. L. and Cronquist, A. Flora of the Pacific Northwest. University of Washington Press. Seattle & London. 1973. This was originally published as a five volume set where the detailed botanical drawings by Jeanne Janish are printed in full size.

Lyons, C.P. and Bill Merilees. Trees, Shrubs and Flowers to Know in British Columbia and Washington. Lone Pine Publishing. 1995. Also for northern Oregon. This is written for “scouts and grandmothers”. Since it is the book I first used to start identifying plants, it is my favorite beginner book. It is organized into categories of familiar shrubs, trees and flowers. You find flowers according to petal color.

Niehaus, T. F. and Charles Ripper. A Field Guide to Pacific States Wildflowers, Washington, Oregon, California, and adjacent areas. Peterson Field Guide Series. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. 1976. Other herbalists love this guide for beginners. It identifies flowers by color with some groupings by family. Illustrations are clear and color photos lovely.

Peterson Field Guide is just about to publish a field guide on western medicinal plants. Check it out for identification help.

Pojar, Jim & Andy MacKinnon. Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and Alaska. British Columbia Ministry of Forests and Lone Pine Publishing. 1994. This includes Liverworts, Mosses and Lichens arranged by botanical family with keys.

Vitt, Dale, Janet Marsh and Robin Bovey. Mosses, Lichens and Ferns of Northwest North America. Lone Pine Publishing and University of Washington Press. 1988. A good field guide to help you identify some of these life forms found in this document.

Once you have the scientific name of the plant and the family it is in, you can refer to either of the two family indexes by the Table of Contents. One index is alphabetical by scientific name and one by common family name. The numbers here refer to sequential family, genus and species numbers that correspond to the page number where found in “Hitchcock”. Once at the family in the text, the genera are listed in alphabetical order. Within a genus, the species are alphabetical. Alternatively the index at the back of the text, gives you the page number where a family, genus or species is found in this text.

            The numbers before each plant name refer to the page on which it is found in Hitchcock and Cronquist. Any plant names that differ from Cronquist and Hitchcock’s Flora of the Pacific Northwest are written right after the author, date and page number, so many name synonyms are included for each reference. The most recent botanical names coined after the publication of Cronquist and Hitchcock are not included here unless an author uses them in their publication. The only two authors who would use the most recent botanical names would be Dr. Nancy Turner or Dr. Eugene Hunn

For example, to find the Desert Parsley, Lomatium dissectum, there are several ways to locate it. You can turn to the index in the back and look under “Lomatium” to find that it is located on page 119 and 120. If you know the family name, you can find “Apiaceae” in the scientific name list or “Parsley” in the common family name list. This family is found at H314. That means that in “Hitchcock and Cronquist” the Parsley or Carrot family is found on page 314. In this text, each genus and species is listed in the same order as the pages in “Hitchcock”. After flipping through this text and finding family number 314. Genera are listed in alphabetical order. Within a genera the specie are listed alphabetically as well.

            The names and initials following a scientific name refer to the person who first documented and named the plant and those who came later and changed the name! Sometimes these names are helpful to trace name changes especially from older documents. As you can see in the example below, “Hitchcock” gave this desert-parsley one name. In 1929, it was Leptotaenia dissecta with a common name of bitter head. In 1957 it was called Leptotaenia multifida with Cough root or Indian Balsam as common names. In 1959 Murphy supplies the additional common name of Toza. Subsequence authors do not introduce additional names.

            Sometimes included is the tribal name such as in the reference below for 1929. But most regional or tribal affiliation is clarified in the bibliography in the back.

Example:

H330 Lomatium dissectum (Nutt.) M & C

(Desert-parsley

1929 Steedman 472. Leptotaenia dissecta. Bitter head. Thompson.

1957 Train 65. Leptotaenia multifida Nutt. Cough root or Indian Balsam.

1959 Murphy 37. Toza.

Krista K.Thie

June, 1999