Ethnobotany
Tribal College Librarians Institute
National Museum of the American Indian
Washington, DC * June 12-16, 2006
Natalie Davis
What is Ethnobotany?
… and why is
it important?
The aim of ethnobotany is to study
how & in what ways
people use nature &
how and in what ways
people view nature.
http://sciencebulletins.amnh
.org/biobulletin/Success/
belize1.html
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)
b)
c)
d)
e)
What are people’s
conceptions of plants?
What use is made of
plants for food, medicine, material culture
& ceremonial purposes?
What is the extent of
knowledge of plants?
In what categories are
plant names & words
that deal with plants
grouped in the language
What can be learned by
studying this?
Mgebbu Ashy, born in 1934,
has encyclopedic knowledge of
plants and the local environment 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 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!
Kelly Kindscher, Associate
Professor, KSU at
Lawrence.
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
Native IMAGE Boot Camp
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.
… 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 pronunciations.
• Elaine Rice, a teacher
with the Ho-Chunk
Renaissance Language
program, & the whole
staff of HCR, gave me
with pronunciations.
Up to my knees in
wild roses
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 conservation use.
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 has
an ethnobotany
program,
strongly linked
to its archaeology,
biology, environmental and regional programs.
The website is
http://anthro.fortlewis.edu/ethnobotany/