Plant Medicine
We gather, we process, we use.
I. We Gather
“Alright, we need to head out soon.” My mom starts walking back to the car, halfway down the mountain and below where I am. I’m still hunched over on a steep hill. To my right are thin rocks, grey sheets slowly peeling off the mountain. From here, I’m not even on a mountain it seems, but a pile of rocks. To my left, green rolling foothills that will soon connect to the Rockies. Further in my gaze are the yellowing prairies of the Blackfeet reservation. Cars and RVs of tourists heading to Glacier National Park whiz by on the highway that weaves forty feet below me.
My right knee is bent and tucked under me, my left leg is outstretched to balance myself. I’m annoyed at the dirt blowing in my eyes and the fact that my cowboy boots are two sizes too big. The boots don’t have much traction, but they protect my ankles from rattlesnakes. As I readjust my weight – hearing the light sound of pebbles tumbling around while I find my balance – I dig. My great grandparents, and those before them, had digging sticks. I have a flathead screwdriver. But no matter the tool, we make the same motion, coaxing a cream colored root from beneath the earth. The roots can be a foot or longer, but are delicate, so I loosen the rocks and dirt around them by snaking the screwdriver under each individual primary, secondary, and tertiary root that moves down the hill. The root itself is a cream color, but if you lightly scrape it with your fingernails, it’s blue in the center. I scoot down the mountain following my screwdriver, revealing a galaxy of roots, trying to see how long I can go before the root ends, breaks, or I rip it out impatiently. After a few minutes of careful work, I toss my root friend into a paper bag with the others, and head down the mountain to join my mom.
Indigenous peoples have a very different relationship to the land than white colonizers. Land is where food, medicine, and material goods were (and are) gathered or farmed. Land is where place-based religious ceremonies were (and are) held. Land politically and culturally defines tribes as sovereign nations. Land is also the site of tribally specific knowledge and stories, which Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls “land as pedagogy” and my na’a, Blackfeet and Métis historian Rosalyn LaPier, calls “land as text.”
Disrupting and destroying Indigenous nations’ relationship with the land and the land's knowledge was a key strategy of colonization, achieved through treaty making, forced relocation, and the General Allotment Act, among other tactics.
Between 1828 and 1887, the federal government forcibly removed tribal nations from our homelands. Tribes in the east, in particular, were pushed further West. The Indian Removal Act was passed by Congress in 1830, which authorized President Andrew Jackson the authority to forcibly remove nations from east of the Mississippi River to west of the Mississippi or to small reservations in the East. Though the Blackfeet were not forcibly relocated from our homelands like some tribes, the contemporary Blackfeet reservation is but a sliver of our historic territory. In 1851 the Fort Laramie Treaty was signed. Though no Blackfeet were present for the signing, Article 5 defined and shrunk our territory significantly. In 1855, the U.S. planned to build a railroad, and needed more land. A new treaty was signed that shrunk our territory further, and established a communal hunting ground with other tribes. In 1895, our land shrunk once more, with a portion of it turned into Glacier National Park and another portion used again to expand the railroad. The contemporary Blackfeet Reservation in northeastern Montana, standing along the Canadian border and where the Rocky Mountains meet the Great Plains, is just 3,000 square miles. Historically, our nation state stretched through much of Montana, southern Alberta, and western Saskatchewan – encompassing tens of thousands of square miles. While our nation state was dramatically decreased through the violence of colonization, the mountains, rivers, and foothills that I grew up collecting medicine on, the stars that I gaze up at, are the same my ancestors gazed up at for generations before me. We weren’t pushed out, but we were choked in.
II. We Process
When we return from the mountains to the reservation prairies, we bring the roots to my grandma’s back porch. My grandma, like most people on the reservation, lives in tribal housing. When she first moved into tribal housing, the tribe tried to place her in an apartment building since she lives alone. She argued that because she’s an elder, she’d never be alone: her grandkids, nieces, nephews and children would need a place to stay when they visit her. This was the Blackfeet way, she told them. The tribe obliged, and she was given a small two bedroom home on a sizeable lot in a subdivision on the northside of town (despite the fact that she is a life long self-proclaimed “southsider,” as she was born on the southside of the reservation in the country near White Tail Creek south of Heart Butte). She keeps her small, five room home immaculate. She has a spacious yard, but only waters and mows what she can see out her front window. To the left side of her house, wedged between the east-facing wall, a small shed that stores holiday decorations and lawn chairs, and her neighbors fence, is a back porch. Along the wall of the house is a handmade wood bench. We set up a row of mismatched rectangular buckets along the bench to fill with roots. They’re still in the paper bags we collected them in – sometimes cotton pillowcases – but never plastic bags. With paper or cotton, they can breathe and start to dry out. Plastic makes them sweat and potentially mold. In addition to the blue root, we have alum root and huckleberry leaves to clean, dry, and process. On the porch, we remove extra sticks, stems, and dirt, wash them as needed, and hang them to dry. My grandma keeps a long, now smooth stick in her kitchen above her stove. When not in use, it hangs by a slight metal chain to the right of the stove along the wall. On the ceiling just in front of the stove is a hook she can place the end of the stick on so it’s parallel to the floor with her various plants tied to it. Each dry plant will become a different medicine to be used by family members, depending on their health needs. My grandma will use the blueroot tea for pain relief. Her sister and my cousin will use the alum root as a daily rub for their arthritis. My aunt will use huckleberry tea to manage her blood sugar. We have used these medicines for thousands of years.
As more and more white settlers desired more and more land, it no longer became viable for the west to be entirely Indian territory. Congress achieved their dual mandate of keeping Indians on reservations and getting white settlers access to more land through the General Allotment Act, which passed in 1887. This law broke up communally held reservation land into individual plots of 160, 80 or 40-acres. Plots were distributed to male heads of household, and “surplus” land was sold to white settlers.
Scholars consider allotment one of the most devastating policies for tribal nations. Tribal nations lost 90 million acres of reservation land through this sale of surplus land. To this day, the majority of land on reservations is owned by white people. It disrupted tribal nations' political strength by spreading the community across reservations, rather than living in towns where political power, government meetings, and organizing gatherings occur. It recognized only men as heads of households, which was not a traditional family arrangement for many tribal communities. It also disrupted Indigenous peoples' relationship to the land. A key aspect of allotment was forcing Indigenous people to farm on their allotment, even if their land was not suitable for agriculture or the tribe was traditionally nomadic, like the Blackfeet.
The Blackfeet Reservation was allotted in the early 1900s. One of those allotments is still in the family, that belonged to my great great grandfather Aims Back and his wife Hollering in the Air. The land is 14 miles south of the Canadian border in the foothills of the Rockies. In one direction are the windswept prairies of the Blackfeet Reservation, in another stands Chief Mountain, which is the striking, flat top butte at the end of a long backbone of mountains along Glacier Park in the U.S. and Waterton Park International Peace Park in Canada. The land is stunning, but it’s not suitable for farming. It’s rocky, with a tight forest populated with aspen trees, wildflowers, bushes. There is one small creek in the corner of the allotment. Despite this inhospitality, Aims Back and Hollering in the Air, like all Indigenous people who were allotted land, were assessed by the federal government in how well they were farming, that is, how well they were assimilating. In a review of my great great grandparents land from April 29, 1921, a government agent took a photo of Aims Back and Hollering in the Air, listed the amount of livestock they had (“four horses, no cattle, no chickens”), and noted that their two room home was “clean and well kept,” but that a farm had not yet been started. It also notes their degree of Indian blood: Full and their Status: Ward (of the state – Native Americans wouldn’t become citizens for another three years).
This land was inherited by my great grandparents Francis and Annie, who then divided up the plot between each of their eight children. Today, just two of her children are still alive, my grandma Angie and her younger brother Francis. My grandma divided up her portion of the lot between her three children, my mom, her older brother Bill, and her younger brother Augie. My mom will divide it amongst my sister and me. With each passing generation, it's cut further and further apart.
III. We Use
“We were raised just knowing exactly what we had to pick and where we had to pick it,” says my grandma. We’re sitting in the dining room of her mothers home with her, an older sister, and a younger sister. The home now belongs to my grandma’s youngest sister Dimples and is filled with plant medicine. Open the fridge and you’d find a white pot – the metal kind used in camping or cowboy movies – filled with alum root. The root can be boiled and used multiple times before losing its medicinal potency. My great-grandma, who my aunt Dimples lived with until she passed away at age 94, used plant medicine every day.
I’m a year out of undergrad and recently got a grant from a Native-run foundation to conduct oral history interviews with community elders on Blackfeet food and plant medicine. I made them bison soup and bannock bread, and gave them gift bags with tea, sugar free candies, and $100 in cash as payment for their knowledge. I had a long list of questions prepared about foods they ate growing up, how they accessed, gathered and prepared their foods and medicines, current challenges with access to healthy and traditional foods in the community, and what they imagined for the future of food on the reservation. But with this group of women, I only had to ask: “Where did you grow up?” and they launched into a multiple hour long conversation with each other, I more wallflower/observer than interviewer. They talked about moving from a sheep wagon to canvas tent to finally a small wooden frame house during the youngest sister's childhood in the 1950s. They talked about the shame they felt of wearing braids – a symbol of their Indianness in a time when many were rejecting their identity for safety reasons, at the end of explicit policies of forced assimilation. They talked about their mom getting beef guts at the slaughterhouse and preparing them like her ancestors had done with bison, using the whole animal. They told me how when their brother Gilbert went to Vietnam, their dad – raised on traditional Blackfeet religion and sang prayers daily – started singing a new song, a coming home song. With a single prompt, they went into a long conversation about childhood, religion, shame, changing traditions, cultural loss and revitalization, and how their childhoods in the 30s and 40s were a site of dramatic political and cultural transformations for the Blackfeet.
Near the end of the conversation, my grandma reflected on what she calls “Indian ways”: “In the old days, you just knew what to do. You didn’t put it in the paper, you didn’t put it on the radio. You didn’t tell nobody what [you] were going to do, you just knew what you were going to do and you went and did it.”
Today, gathering medicine is not romantic work. We’re not deep in nature, removed from civilization, where we can create new worlds absent of colonialism. We’re reminded of our status at every turn. We’re perched on mountains by highways throbbing with Cruise America 1-800-Rent-An-RVs from West Virginia and Alberta to gather blueroot. We’re off reservation, where my mom says, “the owner gave me permission,” as we scratch ourselves on barbed wire fences to gather sage. We gather in ditches and city parks, on ranches and in national forests. Physical and bureaucratic reminders that no, this isn’t really Blackfeet land anymore. And our relationship with these barriers is not benign: my great aunt was stopped by a cop for gathering sweet grass. Even when we exercise our rights, we are questioned.
So I am reminded that sometimes our resistance is obvious – with cardboard signs, chants, sit ins or letters to Congress. Other times it may be too subtle for an outsider's eye. It’s the shape of my grandma’s medicine drying stick hanging from above her stove. It’s a screwdriver and extra cowboy boots left in my moms trunk. It’s me exchanging wild mint bee balm tea that I gathered myself this summer, for homemade broth made by my neighbor. It’s all the ways that we keep living how we have always lived. Even if we have to cross a few more fences to do it.
This essay was written for a class on braided essays which I took in winter 2025 at the Loft Literary Center. Thank you to my instructor and classmates for their thoughtful feedback and to the Loft for allowing me the space to write.