Short Wave - Why Traditional Plant Knowledge Is Not A Quick Fix

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Host Regina G. Barber talks with Rosalyn LaPier about ethnobotany--what it is and how traditional plant knowledge is frequently misunderstood in the era of COVID and psychedelics. And, how it's relevant and important for reproductive health today. (encore)Have a topic you want us to cover on a future episode? Email us at [e-mail]!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers, Regina Barbara here. Can I ask you a question? Have you ever heard the term ethnobotany? Well, we're here today to talk about plants and how they affect your everyday life. I recently spoke with an amazing author and multidisciplinary professor, Dr. Rosalind LaPierre. And I asked what people usually think when they hear that word. They almost always think that ethnobotivism.

botany means plants that are used for medicine or oftentimes plants that are used for psychedelic, for lack of a better word, psychedelic purposes. So people don't often think of all the, you know, kind of dozens of different ways that plants are used by humans or that humans have a relationship with plants. But how does Rosalind define the term? The common definition of ethnobotany is the scientific study of the relationship. between humans and plants. It's different than botany. Botany is the study, the scientific study of all plants. And ethnobotany is really interested in that keyword relationship between

humans and plants. And so it's not the study of all plants. It's just the study of some plants that are important to humans and how humans think about them, use them in their daily lives. Rosalind asks her students to name all the plants they use in a day. Take a second right now and think about all the plants you've used or will use today. So the common ones are sometimes, you know, somebody drank tea that morning before they came. Or if it's somebody who is like, for example, vegan, they will say they had oat milk with their tea. If you thought of those, awesome. And Rosalind says there's so much more.

And what cracks me up is oftentimes people don't think of coffee, which is a plant because they'll think of tea because it's obvious that it's a tea leaf. As the group together starts thinking about all of the different things, you know, people start like shouting out like, what about this? Oh, I mean, simple things. Sitting on a chair that's made out of wood, you know, sitting at your desk, you know, at the university, also made out of wood. You know, most people's clothes are usually made out of cotton or linen or some type of plant material. Most of the food that we eat is actually made out of plants. They'll think about tobacco. They'll think about marijuana, but they won't think about oftentimes liquids that are made out of plants.

So things like beer, which all the main ingredients of beer are some sort of plant material, you know, whether it's hops, wheat, barley. And then also wine, you know, which is primarily made out of grapes, but other things as well. Today on the show, we're exploring ethnobotany with Rosalind LaPierre. What she learned from her grandmothers and how political realities are sparking newfound interest in traditional plant knowledge. And herbal reproductive health. I'm Regina Barber and you're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Rosalind actually started her academic career as a physicist, then studied theology. Now she's at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

But where did her passion for ethnobotany come from? It actually started at the very beginning, growing up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. So you touched on how plants are everywhere in our lives, but as an ethnobotanist, can you speak a little about how traditional plant knowledge factors into all of this? When we think about traditional plant knowledge, that's often the knowledge that's been passed down. usually through our grandmothers because in a lot of especially indigenous communities and traditional societies, plant knowledge is usually women's knowledge. And so it is usually this knowledge that today we often don't use those plants in the same

way that people did historically. So oftentimes those can be foods, those can be medicines, those can be plants that were used for particular creating of household objects or tools that we just don't use anymore because we're using something else. What was your earliest experience with being taught about our relationship to plants and their uses? You know, I have lots of memories about plants, obviously, because my grandmother, you know, was a well-known ethnobotanist.

And so she always had, you know, plants around her house. But I'll just say this. So I grew up in a house primarily on the Blackfeet Reservation. In my grandmothers and grandparents' home, they used a wooden stove because they did not have electricity and running water, as most people did, didn't back in those days. So using a wood stove inside a house as your primary source of either cooking or using it for heating your house, you have to use certain kinds of wood. because, and you have to use wood that does not have a lot of, for example, sap or resin in it. For example, pine woods are notorious for this, pine trees. And they pop and they crackle.

People love that when it's outdoors and you're at a fire, you know, a campfire. Right. And so from a really early age, I remember learning the difference between wood to burn indoors versus out of doors because of that. And we were talking about like this traditional plant knowledge. It's very place-based, right? Like, and so do you have a story or a memory or an experience about that you, that you usually talk about that are plants used in your culture, in the Blackfoot culture?

So the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana represents only 10% of the total land base. of the Blackfeet people. So the Blackfeet lost 90% of their land territory because of American colonization and because of treaties and different executive orders. And so one of the things I learned early on when we would go out and gather plants

is that we would go off reservation a lot to go and get plants. Or my grandmother would tell us stories about, oh, you know, back in the day, so-and-so would take the train and travel several hundred miles, get off the train, gather plants, jump back on the train, and go back to the reservation. Wow. Because people lived on the reservation for so long, some of that knowledge was not passed on.

You know, some of that knowledge was lost. Some of that knowledge was passed on more as family stories. So one of the things that we are seeing happen now with young people, is they really are interested in revitalizing our plant knowledge and revitalizing this traditional knowledge that was passed on through the generations. And it's still there within the community. And so I realized, you know, there was a big distinction between what previous scholars had recorded and written down about plants and then what your grandmother is going to be teaching you about plants. And I think one of the things that I saw,

that was really missing in some of those kind of the academic published material was really the broader story of the history of this particular plant, why humans use it, how this particular plant perhaps came from the sky world and is now on earth, or it came from the underwater world and is now on earth and why humans are using it. I really appreciate that larger context, kind of spanning history. But more recently, there's been some troubling trends. Social media and disinformation has led to a lot of unfounded claims about traditional herbal medicine curing all sorts of things. Like, for instance, the big one, COVID.

What's been your experience with that? Yeah. So I know the World Health Organization put out all of these great, like, infographics that were really funny that included different types of plants that people around the world were using. as what they thought were, quote-unquote, cures for COVID. I tried both kind of on social media, but then also when I gave public talks to constantly remind people that there was not, you know, a cure for COVID or a lot of other things,

the common cold, right? There literally can be like medical malpractice in the field of medicinal medicines as well, of people saying that particular plants can do something. I think that, again, falling back kind of on the wisdom of our grandmothers, they would never say that a particular plant cures a particular issue. They would almost always say, this will help the symptoms of this particular thing. So remember, again, before the vaccine, there was just so much,

especially again on social media about your immune system, boosting your immune system, what plants are going to boost your immune system, you name it. No, so I used to get that question a lot. So if you were to ask grandma, right, about that question, the first thing grandma would say is, one, are you getting enough exercise? Two, are you getting enough sleep? Three, are you eating healthy and getting enough to drink? Like any medical professional would say.

Like in any field. Like any medical professional. Yes. And then like the last thing would be like, okay, well now let's introduce some like herbal medicine to like add to all of these positive things that you should be doing in your life. And I think what again on social media people are looking for is that quick, quick fix. And instead of saying, hey, am I getting enough sleep and I'm getting, you know, good food, you know, am I exercising every day? All those things that actually do boost your immune system. People were trying to, again, like I was doing when I was first learning about plants.

Can I cheat my way through this? Well, let's actually go to like this traditional plant knowledge and relate it to reproductive health. Because now you were talking about that there's new laws that might threaten the legality of what people have been doing for generations. So can you tell us more about that? What's the biggest concern? Yeah, I guess one of my biggest concerns after the Dobbs decision that occurred this last spring is that different states are creating different rules and policies around reproductive health. And, you know, again, the knowledge of our grandmothers, indigenous people have been using herbal. medicines for thousands of years for reproductive health from the sort of the beginning of life to the

end of life. From the time a child is born, you're using some sort of medicine to take care of them at birth. When that child becomes of age, so for example, if they are female and they're going through their menstrual cycle at the very beginning, there's usually herbal medicine that they're being introduced to, or indigenous communities often have some sort of body positive ceremony that young women go through to teach them about that change of life throughout their monthly cycle. There's medicine that you can take every month, herbal medicine. And so indigenous people always viewed abortion as one part of reproductive health. There are many different plants that indigenous people utilized for abortion, whether it was something that people used as a choice or used because they knew that they couldn't carry a fetus to full term because of health.

So those options were always there as reproductive health. Right. My concern is when states have sort of this blanket statement about certain parts of reproductive health are not legal, it's not written into the law that indigenous methods of medicine, meaning traditional plant knowledge is exempt. And so that's a concern for me. because I think that it does then infringe on people's rights, especially indigenous people's rights,

to continue to practice their traditional plant knowledge and utilize their traditional plant knowledge and then also kind of pass on that traditional plant knowledge to the next generation. But I try to think about what happens in our contemporary society, our relationship with the natural world, our relationship with the plant world, and how it's connected back to, you know, grandma's knowledge.

That's amazing. You've made me think about so much and you've made me more plant-aware. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you for sharing all that with us. Thanks for the invite. This episode was produced by Devin Schwartz, edited by our senior supervising editor, Giselle Grayson, and fact-checked by Ubi-Livine. Josh Newell was the audio engineer. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR. See you tomorrow.