Ethnobotany

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• Ethnobotany
• Tribal College Librarians Institute
• National Museum of the American Indian
• Washington, DC June 12-16, 2006
• Natalie Davis

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What is Ethnobotany?
and why isit important?

• The aim of ethno-
• botany is to study
• how in what ways
• people use nature
• how and in what ways
• people view nature.

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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.

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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
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The burning questions of Ethnobotany

• What are peoples conceptions of plants?
• What use is made of plants for food, med-icine,
  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?

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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. -- Thats
contact!
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Where Nebraska Is
Kindschers walk across Kansas
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Kindscher wrote
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Little Priest Tribal College
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The Winnebago reservation is in Thurston County,
Nebraska
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It is on the Upper Missouri River
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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

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Indigenous plants at my house
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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.
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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.

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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 con-servation use.

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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 Wisconsins plant use,
which I also used.
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Moermans 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/
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Looking for ethnobotanical information

• Fort Lewis Community College at Durango,
• Colorado has
• an ethnobotany
• program,
• strongly linked
• to its archaeology,
• biology, environ-
• mental and re-
• gional programs.
• The website is http//anthro.fortlewis.edu/ethnobo
  tany/