 Good afternoon and thank you everyone for joining us today. My name is Kendra Sakamoto and I'm a librarian here at West Vancouver Memorial Library. But while I recognize that we are all in different places this afternoon I would like to acknowledge that for those of us on the North Shore, we are on the traditional ancestral and unseated territories of the Squamish, Sleewa Tooth and Musqueam Nations. If you are uncertain as to which ancestral territory you live on, I encourage you to visit whose.land to learn more about the traditional lands on which you reside. Today we have the opportunity to learn about the many plants of this region and their traditional uses. I am deeply thankful to the Coast Salish peoples who are working to maintain this traditional knowledge and who have been the careful caretakers of these lands and waters since time immemorial. I am truly grateful to be able to call this place home. Unfortunately, Lushchim will not be able to join us today, however we are delighted to have Nancy Turner with us who will present on behalf of Lushchim and herself. A distinguished Professor Emerita in Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, Nancy Turner is an ethno botanist who has worked with Indigenous elders and cultural specialists in Western Canada for over 50 years. Learning about traditional knowledge of plants and environments and helping to document this knowledge for future generations. She has authored or co-authored, co-edited over 30 books and over 150 book chapters and papers. She has received a number of awards for her work, including the Order of Canada, the Order of British Columbia and Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada, as well as honorary degrees from four BC universities. She has been delighted to work with and learn from Dr. Lushchim Arvid Charlie over the past 15 plus years and to help produce Lushchim's plants in his honor. Welcome Nancy. I also want to acknowledge as Kendra did the First Nations of our region and right across the country but on the lower mainland there are the Musqueam, Selututh and Squamish nations in the Vancouver area and over on our side the Cowits and the other peoples of the Salish Sea region. And to extend sincere gratitude for these people for caring for this region and its resources for so many millennia. Some of the plants that we'll be talking about, the Quamcholts or the bog cranberries, one of the important fruits of the peat bog or Musqueam areas. And one of the tubers, the edible tubers, the quals of the Wapato that the Cowits and people got from the Fraser estuary and Lushchim's family, his mother and others remember well going over to the Fraser River estuary and harvesting the Wapato there and bringing it back and even planting some in some of the lakes in the Gulf Islands. And of course the wild rose, my favorite. I want to acknowledge Howard White and Charlotte, Rebecca, Nicola and all the harbour publishing team for the care that they took in producing our book and to our families, Lushchim's wife Darlene and his whole family are just remarkable people. My husband Bob who did a lot of photography, I call him my personal photographer and much more and all of our family as well for their support of this project over the years to Kendra and to others who are also sponsoring different book launch events over at the Cowichan estuary tomorrow and at the Nanaimo art gallery later on. And here's Howard White sitting on our couch with our dog Annie. He said it's fine to, he would be honored to be pictured there with Annie as part of the acknowledgement. Kendra for some reason, we can't seem to, oh maybe we'll try this, there we are. I want to tell you a little more about Lushchim, Dr. Arvid Charlie. He received an honorary degree from Vancouver Island University some years ago and certainly a well-deserved honour that reflects just in part some of the amazing knowledge that he holds. Not only was he raised by his wonderful parents, Simon and Violet Charlie, Simon was a well-known artist and carver of the Duncan area, the Cowichan area, but he also by his great-grandmother and his great-grandfather whose name was Lushchim, whose name Lushchim himself has inherited and the original Lushchim was born in 1870. So you can see the extent of the knowledge that Lushchim, our Lushchim today holds that extends back if you if you look back through the generations to a time before Europeans had arrived on in their territory at all. And so some of the knowledge that Lushchim has holds is not known to very many people at all. In fact, in some cases he's the only one who knows some of this knowledge about the land and about plants. And he has, as I said, a wonderful family but it was his extraordinary training by his elders and experience and as a as a forester, as a logger, as a fisherman, a traveler. He's been a teacher of the Cowichan culture and the Hulcuminum language for many years. He's a medicine practitioner. He's a canoe journey leader and he's a mentor to many, many people, young people, both Hulcuminum and non-Hulcuminum, non-indigenous people. He's a teacher first and foremost. And I think it's very fitting that we're talking today after the the day of reconciliation because the work that we're doing together I hope will be seen as an act of reconciliation, working together to promote this amazing rich knowledge that Lushchim is willing to share. So the Cowichan tribes are a diverse group of people with multiple villages traditionally located around the entire Cowichan Valley and around the Cowichan and Shanagon lakes into the Gulf Islands, onto Lulu Island in the Fraser River in the South Armour. There was a village called Tinas, that Lushchim and his ancestors would travel to each year and some people lived there year round. I was at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC and I was delighted to see there a fishing lure that had been carved and donated to the Museum by Lushchim's father Simon Charlie. So that's a lure that is pushed deep down into the water by a long pole and then the pole is jerked out and the lure itself floats up to the surface with a twirling action, a rotating action that attracts the fish, the cod and another fish that come up to the surface after the lure where the fishermen is waiting in this canoe with this spear to spear the fish when it comes up. So imagine Lushchim and his great grandfather and all that the great grandfather Lushchim knew and experienced in his lifetime going back to the decades into the 19th century when people were still fishing with weirs on the Cowichan and the other rivers where they had free use of the land all around that area from all around Lake Cowich and the mountains around there for hunting the gary oak meadows, the peat bogs, the rivers and wetlands all of these are areas that Lushchim the great grandfather would have known and had access to and the knowledge about how to make fishing weirs, how to make the canoes and all of the things that people needed to live in a sustainable way on the land. Lushchim was an expert at, I love to think about that time and what people would have been doing then. So today just give an introduction to the area of the Hulkematenum territory and talk about some of the important plants that were important to the Cowichan and ways that people tended and managed and looked after the plant resources that they relied on the changes that have taken place and just end on a note that there's tremendous renewal and restoration what one could call eco-cultural restoration happening throughout this territory and beyond and I think that's a very positive something that's progressing right now and I think we'll continue to build on. So I mentioned some of the types of areas that is part of the Cowichan territory. One of the most important for the Cowichan people as well as for the Hulkematenum and the other straight Salish people, the Songis and and Salk people it's the Garioch meadow or Garioch savanna which is a mixture of Garioch woodland and open clearings and prairies where all kinds of different culturally important plants exist with some bushy areas in between and this particular ecosystem the Garioch ecosystem which is part of the the dry sub-zone of the coastal Douglas fir zone found on Vancouver Island and and vicinity in the Gulf Islands is very rare in Canada it's the most one of the most biodiverse and endangered ecosystems and all of Canada partly because climatically it's very pleasant area to live in it's called a Mediterranean climate so it has warm summers and relatively warm wet winters and you find a particular constellation of plants and animals that live in this zone that are not found anywhere else in all of Canada but what a lot of people do not realize and that I'll be talking a little bit about later is that this is an anthropogenic landscape this is a landscape that was created in part by people by their activities using fire and other means of clearing and tending these areas to maintain the prairie lands and to promote the production of camas and the delta balsam root and the other plants that people relied on for food materials and medicine so I'll be talking about that a little bit more later the coastal Douglas fir biogeochlimatic zone which is just another way of saying a vegetation zone that is influenced by the geography and the climate of of the area and has a particular suite of different of plants that that really prefer to grow in that particular habitat uh at plants and animals as well and fungi as well we need to consider the fungi of course because they're another kingdom of organisms that are equally important but often not recognized as such so we have to think about what's happened to this area if you look on a map you'll see the southeast part of Vancouver island is the area where the coastal Douglas fir zone occurs in the rain shadow of the Vancouver island mountains and the olympic mountains of washington and the trees that grow there the vegetation that grows there the old growth trees are almost all cut down because Douglas fir is a prime uh timber tree for loggers and uh in the couch and valley if you drive up the east coast of Vancouver island there's hardly any of the big old growth Douglas fir left anywhere and there's a few little isolated spots you can see some old growth in some of the park areas but mostly any extensive old growth forests on the east southeast coast of Vancouver island have been mostly destroyed by logging and there are second growth forests that are quite old and there are third growth forests in some areas but if you look at the logging trucks coming up and down the island now even the ones with Douglas fir they're mostly pretty small little logs so this team and others would call them toothpicks i think because they're just tiny compared with the original Douglas firs which you'd need multiple people with their hands stretched out to go around one of them so they can grow up to a thousand years old eight or nine hundred years old they're very common the large trees are fire resistant you can see here uh this big old Douglas fir is scarred with black charcoal it shows that this there was a fire that came through here and burned up the trunk but the thick bark protected the inner part of the tree and this tree is still still living just say just say this is the whole commitment name for the Douglas fir uh then on the west coast of the island and all the way up to Alaska on the west coast in the lowland areas you find a wetter moisture zone called the coastal western hemlock zone where western red cedar is common western hemlock spruce red alder is very common pacific u is very common and all of these are trees that were available to the hookamen people in the wetter areas of their territory and all of them have important cultural uses and if you go up into the subalpine forest zone you which is called the mountain hemlock zone here on the island you'll see another suite of trees you see a lot of lodge pole pine a lot of yellow cedar and a lot of mountain hemlock and as you see if you climb up Mount Coakley and around Mount Aerosmith and in the mountains around Lake Cowichan as well you'll see this other forest zone where people would go very frequently for a lot of reasons for hunting for harvesting yellow cedar bark for fishing in the upland lakes and for spiritual purposes as well people would access these areas I had a wonderful trip up uh up into the mountainous area around Mount Aerosmith with loose team and his family some years ago now and I'll never forget the time we had a lot of fun exchanging knowledge my knowledge as a botanist and his knowledge as a plant expert from his nation we just really enjoyed that trip so much some of the information in the book comes from that time so as I mentioned before these different habitats we think of them as vegetation zones but they're they're biocultural systems because people have been living and using these areas for millennia going back um at least 10 000 years more in in some areas some of the oldest sites we know on the coast are 14 000 15 000 years old back when there was ice covering a good part of the continent but there were areas still that people lived in and accessed over those areas and certainly loose team and his ancestors and the mosquium and the others who are all related to each other lived in the lower mainland area going back countless thousands of years there's loose team he's just ready to harvest some lichen here uh the old man speared lichen which he uses uh as a medical practitioner as a particular medicine and of course um we're going to focus on the plant knowledge today because um that's my area that I feel I can contribute in and uh we this is what we worked on together the different ways that plants featured in the couch and coats and people's life ways for food materials medicines and um although the book doesn't contain any details for the spiritual and ceremonial purposes because those are private uh that's private knowledge that is passed on very personally and and um experientially from one generation to the next within the people who have the right to that kind of knowledge but in general it's good for you to know which plants are used and and are important spiritually as well as for these other uses so here we have cattail taifa we have a mixture of berries that are related to the raspberries we have salmon berries and trailing black berries the two colors of salmon berries here and we have sword furring we have um red huckleberries and we have uh the shredded or the peeled bark of devil's club which is one of the important medicines wherever it grows up and down the coast up to alaska east into the uh the kutni sun schwetmukh territory and here we have a boat probably a canoe on lake couch and i'm thinking people live in live in permanent villages but throughout the season different plants are available and they would travel in family groups or sometimes hunters would travel to different areas at different times of the year this is sometimes called the seasonal round they start in the early spring to go out to the ocean to the islands for herring fishing getting herring eggs um fishing getting the green shoots and green vegetables the inner bark of trees the seaweed in the spring in this early summer they'd be harvesting camas bulbs and wild strawberries and salmon berries and then berries all through the summer um different berries get ripe people would be harvesting cedar bark for their basket tree and mats and clothing cattails later in the summer for their mats medicines throughout the time in the fall different berries are ripe the bog cranberries and the high bush cranberries the crab apples and so forth nettle fiber is ready in the early fall for making string or rope uh fishnets and so forth um medicines like the true furs the grand fur and the subalpine fur and amablis fur which produces really highly high quality medicine from its pitch blisters on the trunks bracken fern rhizomes were harvested in the fall and so were the clover and silver weed roots um teas and other plants could be harvested during the winter but most of the time people lived during the the coldest winter months on food that people had stored from the rest of the year and that was a time when a sacred time when people spent time in the bakehouse and there were feasts and there were different ceremonies that took place over that time so let's just mention a few examples of the culturally important plants that loose team has taught me about over time and maybe even read a few quotes from him now and again uh because we spent over the years we probably made 20 or 30 different uh meetings where I recorded the uh our conversations about plants and then I transcribed them so uh the book has a lot of direct quotes from this team talking about the different plants and some of those I'll I'll share with you here but all in all about 120 to 130 different species of plants algae and fungi were named are named in the whole comedian language and people are still um are still really um practicing speaking the whole comedian language their their whole comedian language teachers and many of the schools and some of the younger people in the whole comedian area are speaking that language um fluently which is a great satisfaction to people like loose team who has spent uh a lifetime ensuring that that kind of knowledge is passed on and the language is such an important part of the whole knowledge system not only the names of the plants but words for different processes that go on and all of that specialized vocabulary the places where people harvest things those are really important not just the conversation of hello and how are you but these important very specialized terms are part of the language that's been held and revitalized and renewed um right right at the current time so here we have um and you have to forgive me I am not a linguist and I'm not I I will hesitate to try to repeat some of the names of the plants because I don't want you to hear the the wrong pronunciation but you can go to first voices on the web and you can um search for different names of these plants and you'll hear an indigenous speaker pronounce those names properly but I'll just give a try for this one because it's short and sweet um and the that apostrophe after the q is kind of is called glottalize a glottalize consonant so instead of which is pronounced back in the throat it's um bowl kelp the long long stems that are anchored deep in the water with a bulb on the top and then the uh fronds that come from the bulb the entire uh kelp plant or kelp uh organism is is important but the stripes the long stems if you found them on the beach and tried to break them you'll know how tough they are um so these were used uh were cured and used for making rope or fishing line and as loose team said you can if you're out fishing you can tie your canoe or your boat to the kelp in a kelp bed and use that as an anchor for when you're fishing and when you're making a bowl made from you wood you can put it inside the uh kelp and put it under the ashes of a fire and heat it up and and then you can take it out and bend the you wood very uh carefully and slowly when it's heated and when it's moistened from the kelp and that's how to keep the bowl flexible limber and springy loose team said um as well sometimes people harvested the herring eggs from the fronds of the kelp and they stored oil or some other liquids in the bulb in the hollow bulbous part of the kelp after curing it so this is a very very useful alga that we find and kelp beds as many of you will know are an important habitat for all kinds of marine life from sea urchins and and sea stars to uh all the little creatures that the salmon feed on as well as the the little young salmon themselves take refuge in the kelp beds some of you are divers and you'll know uh close up what these look like these wonderful habitats and here is to ala cup which is sort of like uh echo echo maker and that's a tree fungus there's several many different kinds that grow on the trees standing trees or dead trees snags and these all have a sort of a spiritual capacity of uh reflecting so um it's it said that when you call out in the woods this is what if you hear an echo it comes from the tree fungus as loose team says it is in charge of the echoes that's its job here on earth to look after the echoes and some of these uh tree fungi are used medicinally some of them are used to make tinder you can light you can dry them and light them and they'll hold a coal for a long time and you can put that coal inside of a double clam shell or wrapped in a tube of cedar bark or something and you can carry fire with you that way using the tree fungus this is the arches fungus the ganoderma and when it's fresh you can draw on the white underside of it and it will turn brown and you can make pictures and then dry the fungus and the pictures will stay so it's the surface um that that can be used for art in that way and um the name is also sometimes used for telephone not not surprisingly because of the echo uh capacity of the telephone some of you will know this tall skinny scratchy plant um the giant the branchless horse tail it's called there there are many plants uh in this group in a group uh in their own family in their own class uh and division but sometimes called fern allies because they're spore bearing plants like the ferns they don't have seeds they produce spores and this one in particular some of you will know you can take those segments and pull them apart and they say that the if they're growing in a wet place at least in the bottom part there's a bit of water and if you're thirsty and you need some fresh water you can pull one of those apart then you can drink the water in there it will be it will be pure even if it's growing in a swampy area and you wouldn't want to drink the water there from the swamp but uh one of the qualities of the horsetail is that it's scratchy um because it has silicon embedded in the cells silicon is the main ingredient in salt in in sand and so they call it sandpaper and you can use it as an abrasive to polish your wooden carving items or even soap stone or other materials for your knitting needles that you might make out of ocean spray or some other wood maybe your arrows and uh this plant is also used as a medicine uh that as loose team said uh if you make it into a tea or you chew on it it helps your singing voice and the various other uses for it as well you can make whistles from those hollow little segments of the horsetail and you can make a panpipe from them too because different sizes have different pitches to them so if you can put together several of different sizes you can make different tones from them which is a lot of fun to do with kids a relative the branchless horsetail is is this giant horsetail and it's small relative the common horsetail all in the genus equisitum and uh this one is called scum hum scum hum and this one actually is eaten in its very young form the horsetails have as I mentioned they produce spores from a kind of a cone structure a strabalus which is shown here in this picture this one is a little over right it's already producing ripe spores but in its very young stage before the spores are ready to be released you can pull out this whole structure this spore bearing chute of the giant horsetail you peel off the scurvy part of the stem which I call the skirt and you can eat the inside part is a green vegetable in the spring it's also a source of water if you're thirsty you can eat them as loose teen says they're watery and he says the only ones we eat are a golden color about four inches from the ground so yeah they grow up and then uh in the spring time they produce their spores and those spore bearing parts of the plant die back and then the leafy the vegetative part which you can see here is just the chute starts to grow up and it can be very tall as you can see here these ones are about a meter tall and they're scratchy like the other one you can use them for sandpaper and as an abrasive in the same way and they're also used medicinally scum hum and then we have the sword fern a very beautiful fern with that comes up and it has little fiddle heads in the early spring it's an evergreen fern so although it suffered a lot this year this summer from the drought in moisture places we still have sword ferns that survived over the summer and they'll produce shoots that grow up in the following spring and eventually the older fronds will die back but only after they're a year or two old and this is known as a sacred plant for the uh coats and and other first nations as well um the the fronds are used uh in sacred ceremonies and ceremonial bathing and in the winter dances so we think about these things how important and sacred these plants are and um it really hurts when I see uh them just being along a roadside just being cut back by a mower or something like that because to me um these plants are just beautiful and special um and and I know they are to Los Chim and others they're used um in the first salmon ceremony for example for uh carrying the very first salmon that's caught in the in the spring or in the summer the sockeye um and it's carried up and ceremonially cooked and shared amongst the people uh in the early days the salmon ceremony would take four days of of singing and special uh ceremonies to thank the salmon for their contributions to people to thank the salmon as a relative that gives itself to people for their survival and then we have the little licorice fern a seep a seep is uh is a name that's used by in a number of different salish languages as well as in the did-a-dat language and this little fern grows not in clumps like the sword fern but it grows spread out because it grows from an underground stem or rhizome that's about as thick as your little finger and it grows under the moss on rocky areas but also on tree trunks where there's a lot of moss especially maple trees the sword the the licorice fern the seep loves to grow on maple trees um because that's those that bark of the maple is rich in calcium if you did you can take a little bit you dig under the moss and just break off a little bit of the end of the rhizome of the licorice fern and you can taste it it has a very very sweet taste in fact it has a compound in it called polypotecide a which is named after this fern um that is said to be about 600 times sweeter than sugar and so it's used to sweeten the mouth as a flavoring to sweeten tea and to sweeten medicine that might be made from tree bark and be a little bit bitter tasting so you can just chew on the the root and you swallow the juice as loose team said it's also good for your voice you know when you're singing for a long time uh you're at a loud voice it can really um impact your voice so uh making a tea or chewing and swallowing the juice of the root really helps soothe your throat and um the ones growing on rock good for coughs colds and sore throats also the ones growing on the maple trees and then we have as I mentioned before the true furs there are three furs um that are related to each other and they're known as true furs in contrast with Douglas fir which is called fir but it's actually more closely related to hemlock the true furs and the genus abbeys sometimes called balsam furs which is the the true name for abbeys balsamia which is an eastern relative of these three and they have their own names as well um the grandfather is the most common at lower elevations it has very flat branches and if you look at the needles closely they're notched at the tip and if you just break off the needles and smell them they have the most delicious fragrant uh smell and um you can make a tea from the needles but as I mentioned before the young trees of each of these have blisters on the bark and if you were to press one of those blisters you get some liquid pitch very very sticky but very fragrant and aromatic um made with um yeah made with uh mixture of resins and aromatic oils and this medicine is used as a medicine for colds and coughs and to make a salve for sores also used in hair shampoo um and the bark is used for dye and uh for medicine as a wash for cleansing traps to take the human scent and for removing the scent of of uh hunting equipment and so forth the boughs of each of these are used to make bedding and uh you can imagine what a fragrant bed they would make the amabalus fur grows more on the west coast and the subalpine fur is uh found in the subalpine forests all of these are known to the cauchan people and then we have the yellow cedar pashalokpa pashalokpa which has a number of different uses as well um the inner bark is really fine it makes the very best clothing it's even finer than the inner bark of the western red cedar at lower elevations and as loose team said with a smile you have to go up high to get it and he said you know the man of the house isn't lazy if there's yellow cedar bark in in the house and in their house uh in their blankets and so forth you know that uh that that the man of the house would have gone up high to get the cedar bark which he'd bring back down to make the blankets and the baby clothing and so forth um and as he mentioned also the yellow cedar wood is easy to carve and it makes paddles um and even um in the ceremonial blankets they have the paddles uh little small paddles that are sewn across the shirts of the ceremonial dancers and these paddles are often made from the yellow cedar wood also used for for dishes although it has a slight rank smell to it um the bark you can tell the smell of the yellow cedar even when you're walking up in the subalpine you can smell it so it's not good for some things that are come in contact with food and then we have another uh tree with a very strong smell uh um means smart a strong smell the rocky mountain sorry the pacific coastal juniper it used to be in the same uh genus in the same species as the rocky mountain juniper juniper juniper scapularum but then botanists found that it's actually genetically quite different from the interior uh juniper rocky mountain juniper and so it now has its own species named juniperus maritima and you find it growing all around the coast especially as you can see it here around the gulf islands um and in special places around the territory um and as loose chain points out it's really not stinky uh it has a strong smell but the smell is actually quite pleasant and it's used for bathing it's used in the sweat lodge for producing a cleansing vapor and it's used for cleaning the house if you need to cleanse for some reason um it's used in ceremonial ways um as well so this is a very very special tree also important in the interior where it's called punj again named after its strong smell in all of the different salish languages up in the interior punj or punle and then we have the lodge pool pine which is called the dancing plant if you translate the word the name and I again I won't try and pronounce this I don't want to say it wrong I wish loose chain were here to be able to say it properly for you um I know you'd laugh at me if I tried to pronounce it but it's funny loose chain showed me why it's called the dancing plant it's just amazing if you take uh one of the the twigs with the needles on it and put it upside down on a tray and you just tap the tray the the branch will dance on the needle twigs if you turn it um and it dances around just like in the winter dances the people dancing and that's why they call it the dancing tree it's used variously medicinally the pitch is used sometimes for caulking baskets or caulking canoes it's also used as a medicinal salve so this is a really important tree that you find both at the upper elevations and along the coast and in peat bogs especially it's it's a very versatile tree and then we have the white pine which used to be loose team told me uh when he was young there was white pine everywhere and some of the trees were so big uh if they were fallen logs you could not climb over them they were so big and he remembers that from being in forestry when when he started logging in the early 60s that's what he talked about the trees that had fallen down in copper canyon you couldn't climb up on them they were so big and so um this was such an important tree but it it was vulnerable and uh susceptible to the eastern white pine blister rust which was introduced to our area and so it died out and now we don't think of it as being a common element of our forest here but um we need to see if we can bring it back there's still a few places where it does grow maybe some trees that are resistant to the blister rust and uh as loose team said the branches are used they're very aromatic used to decent traps and the pitch can be gathered in large quantities if you make just uh uh wound the tree a little bit it will produce a lot of pitch and you can create a medicine tree that way just by cutting into the living tree and have and then going coming back later to collect the pitch that is produced and you can keep that as a pitch tree for years and years sometimes for generations the same tree and then we have the Douglas fir just used for many different purposes and is highly venerated because it grows to be so old the young sapling trees um the poles are really important for uh fishing gear you can see here this is certain Katmachman on the Fraser river around Lytton but he's using a dip net to catch salmon in a very similar uh type of dip net that the Caution people would use as well made from the poles of the young Douglas fir for spears and gaffes for walking sticks and as loose team said when they were living on the Fraser river especially during the sturgeon season in the in the winter time they would use a spear made from the the saplings of the Douglas fir the pitch wood of the of a Douglas fir you find in the center of an old stump if you're out and you don't have um you don't have rain uh sorry you have a rainy weather and you don't have any way of uh keeping a fire going you can find an old Douglas fir stump and you break into the middle part and you'll find this wood that's saturated with pitch and all you need is a spark or two to keep that to make that uh light up and you can make torches from it or use it as uh for starting fires people also did pit lamping that is hunting with the torch at night um for ducks and and sometimes for fish but as loose team worms don't use that pitch wood for cooking because it will taint the food it will make it very strong smelling it seems ironic because the thick bark of the Douglas fir protects the tree from a forest fire from the heat of a fire but if you can remove the bark uh the thick slabs of bark from the Douglas fir they're one of the hottest burning fuels you'll ever be able to find my friend Dr Darcy Mitchell Matthews sorry Dr Darcy Matthews has um did his phd work on culturally modified Douglas fir trees and he found that uh First Nations were cutting slabs of big old Douglas fir trees um and on Vancouver Island uh using elk antler wedges taking these big slabs and using them as fuel and so he found this whole class of what they call culturally modified trees big old Douglas fir trees that have uh evidence of a slab taken off from the living tree and he didn't the slabs were taken without damaging the growing cell layers of the tree so the tree continues to grow but you can see where that slab was taken off because the the trunk is flattened in that area you can find those culturally modified Douglas fir trees in many parts of Vancouver Island where there are older Douglas fir trees growing even if there's just a couple so I see it's almost um almost 12 o'clock and uh the time is going so I'm going to go a little bit faster here um cape is the western red cedar a wonderful tree sometimes called the cornerstone of northwest coast indigenous cultures because it's used for so many different things the wood is uh you can split it it splits easily and um you can make canoes good canoes but as this chain points out the canoes on the river you don't want to make from a straight grained cedar tree you need one with lots of branches and knots in it because then if it hits a rock it won't split open when you're going up to the falls or through the falls the bark has multiple purposes used for used used for mats clothing rope um basket tree I have a cedar a cedar bark the basket here which I might show you after a while when we finish this this is a very spiritual plant as well and it's used in ceremony for ceremonial bathing and in other uh ceremonies this team is here beside a big old cedar tree and there's a culturally modified cedar which shows the respect that people have for the cedar trees yes they use the trees but they wouldn't kill the tree unless they needed it for a canoe they would just take a single strip of bark from the tree and then they would leave it to grow back uh and eventually that tree would heal over and that's called a culturally modified tree we have thousands and thousands of culturally modified cedar trees up and down the coast including in Holcomatum coates and territory and then we have the bowl plant the bowl tree the pacific you which has very very tough strong wood and it's valued uh for making implements like digging sticks and wedges and fish hooks the wood is springy and you can treat it as he said to make it more flexible but you is also known as a good medicine both the needles and the bark and you can harvest the medicine from standing living trees um a place on the north side of the cowichan river is called the little u tree and the name means the same as bow so that's just one example of uh the importance of this wonderful tree and then we have the common oh the paddle tree it's called the big leaf maple and you can see the licorice ferns growing on this big leaf maple tree this has the largest leaves of any deciduous tree in canada and um as loose team recalled when he when he is out hunting if you kill a deer uh you would dress it right there they would clean it and fill the cavity with maple leaves and fireweed plants and that helps the process of seasoning the meat and as he said gives it a really sweet taste and as the name implies maple wood is really valued for making paddles just like the yellow cedar and also for spindle whirls for spinning wool then we have the red alder aptly named because the bark produces a bright red dye or it can be an orange or brown dye depending on how it's prepared but people also eat the inner bark of the alder in the spring time early may even before that and loose team said it gets a bit bitter in uh in the summertime and the wood is good for making bowls and it's also an excellent wood for smoking fish and then we have willow swat swalla swalla is uh the name for the wreath net and swalla is the wreath net uh plant all being the suffix that's used on many plant names that makes a bush or tree used for the bark is very tough and is used for fish traps also as a medicine as willow is the original source of acetal salicylic acid or or willow acid salicylic acid many different kinds of willow then we have cascara um used not only for its more famous uh medicinal use of using as a laxative medicine but the wood it's also uh favorite for carving and his uh dad the team's dad simon charlie used um cascara wood for carving many different kinds of tool handles especially then we have the pacific crab apple and um the crab apple is not only a source of really important fruit in the late summer and fall but but the wood is very tough and is used for for digging sticks and for bows and uh loose tomb remembers when he was growing up the grouse really liked crab apples and so hunters would look for crab apple trees if they wanted to find a grouse they could find a place where the the grouse were roosting and just a little conscious of the time i want to leave time for questions so um um also kandra said that she would make this uh power point available to you so you can look at it later on and and read some of the detail that i haven't been able to share with you but we have the bitter cherry tree here tell them the the berries the cherries are quite bitter although they used to eat them if they were thirsty but the the bark is the part that's used mainly uh it's used as for basket tree decoration and for wrapping implements of all kinds the halves of bows and um the uh joints of implements very important as well as a medicine tree luce gene made me a walking stick of bitter cherry wood um because i had a sore leg at the time and he said it's got medicinal qualities even in the walking stick i mentioned a cherry bark is used for decoration for baskets here again at the museum of anthropology at ubc it's a cow action baby cradle that's decorated it's made from the split root of cedar western red cedar and decorated with strips of red cherry bark as well as strips of the stems of reed canary grass and there is some of the cherry bark that's a alum that is curled up there beside the leaves of the bitter cherry and as i mentioned before people didn't just um go and take uh the the plant resources that they needed they looked after them they tended them they were careful in in selecting what they needed and not taking more than they needed they uh created particular habitats and extended them through clearing and burning they tilled the soil they weeded they replanted they pruned the berry bushes and different families and communities had responsibility the ownership um of different areas that they would look after and supervise the use of and uh spreading the resource harvest in areas across the territory was another management method as well as ceremonial management like the first salmon ceremony where which would have lasted for days when the first salmon was caught allowing days for the salmon to to continue their run with until before people started catching them for them for the winter use so medicinal bark was harvested for example and just patches they wouldn't girdle the tree but they would take a patch here's a culturally modified alder tree that is had a medicine patch taken from it and it's starting to grow over cottonwood used for a lot of different purposes sometimes for dugout canoe the roots were used for shampoo for um for laundry soap the buds were used for making a medicinal salve and cosmetic has a sweet smell to it that you can smell in the spring saskatoon berries not only the berries are eaten but the wood is used for dip nets and for the hoops for the dip nets and here's the uh the bush that has very hard wood sometimes called ironwood or oceans ocean spray um is used for digging sticks arrows and knitting needles mat making needles and dip net hoops um and sometimes they would coppice or burn down the bushes to create lots of fresh straight shoots that would be good for needles and so forth and the uh also used for medicine and then we have the red ocean dogwood the berries are edible but quite bitter um but they also used the bark as a medicine for bee stings and swellings and sores to draw the poison out and it's also used in the sacred purposes making sweat lodges and use in the sweat lodge we have the hazelnut which is is very well known not just for the nuts which are very popular but the flexible branches of hazel are used for making dip net hoops and the salal daca daca that means the the name for the berries and uh a favorite type of fruit that is harvested in the late summer and used dried to make berry cakes um and the same word is used for liver given the color of the berries a high energy food uh and the branches are used in pit cooking the leaves and we have Oregon grape you can eat the berries although they're quite tart but use this as a thirst thirst quencher inner bark is used to make uh yellow dye and uh there are two different species the low one and the up the tall one which are given different names in the hoocamatenum language i mentioned devil's club earlier very very important plant used nowadays many people take a teeth of devil's club uh as a decoction and a tonic for diabetes and other purposes luciam himself uh harvests medicine for people in need and he's always careful when he's harvesting the devil's club to take a couple sections from the stem of the devil's club which can grow to be a very old age so you take the the stems from the daughter plants and you take a segment of the stem and push it into the muddy wet muddy ground near where he took the the plant from and it will root itself and grow into new plants so that's one way of keeping the population going then we have wonderful uh the tea plant the labrador tea which you get in peat bugs and people really enjoy it valdez island um it was a place where people went to pick that with the permission from the lax and people we have the stink current just juicy sweet actually quite flavorful berries and also used um as so sorry also used medicinally but luciam really enjoyed those berries we have the gooseberries as well that name is used not only in the salish and languages but borrowed into the guacola language to the north and various other languages and these berries are really enjoyed uh very flavorful and the stems are good medicine all the other berries related to the raspberry group the huckleberry sorry the blackcaps the thimbleberries the salmon berries the trailing blackberries all relatives that people really enjoyed made into cakes and for the thimbleberry and salmonberry they peeled the shoots and ate those in the springtime the salmon berries called lila also the two species of elder berries you can cook the berries and eat those don't eat the berries raw um the the seeds can be quite toxic so it's better to cook them always especially the red huckle the red elder berry soap berries squaysum a favorite fruit that used to be much more common but uh people whipped the berries they mashed them and put uh water with them or juice and whipped them up into a frothy dessert still enjoyed today and people trade soap berries sometimes say they're worth their weight in gold then the huckleberries and the blueberries all related to each other and to the commercial blueberries as well there's about eight different kinds that people would harvest and make make them into berry cakes or store them underwater for winter in the case of the bog cranberry these are all really enjoyed even today they're found people love berry picky they each have their own name mulchum chokame yechum squak chas the red huckleberry and then very quickly because we're running out of time um the common camas of staple vegetable in the old days that people would dig and huge numbers millions of bulbs dug on van Goverland alone by uh the cowits and and their neighbors and they dug them from again here's here's loose team we burn the ground area every few years comes from many different elders the great grandfather loose team along with span those kinds of places other berries the berries will grow so the burned over areas produce not only lots of camas but also those different berries the ashes fertilize the ground the strawberries would grow big after a fire skunk cabbage the leaves you don't eat them but you could have a waxy coating you can use them as a surface for spreading berries to to dry in cakes for winter and the stingy nettle the source of twine as i mentioned very very tough fiber on the stems used to sew the mats made from tuli or cat tail and this is one at the ubc museum a couch and mat made from the tuli stems wool so all of these uses are still ongoing people are still using these plants and relying on them maybe adapting them to more recent times but still relying on the plants and the territory so much this whole territory of the cowits and the whole community speaking peoples is important today as it ever was and we need to respect these plants and the knowledge the confidentiality of some knowledge and concerns we need to be aware that some of the medicines might not be safe if you don't prepare them properly you can't just go out and and think that you know what you're doing some some medicines can be harmful and you need to always consult someone who knows an expert either from that nation or from the medical field before you go out and try taking some of these medicines and even with the edible plants you have to know what you're doing how to prepare them and harvest them properly or you might harm yourself for example the yarrow is a very popular medicine but it has thuyon in it and it could be harmful if you take too much of it at once so you have to be very aware if you're trying to treat yourself with herbal medicine to know what you're doing and to take care of yourself the the elders who hold this knowledge always worry about that as well as that the medicine might be over harvested by people who don't understand that it needs to be harvested in special ways we have the bear stem parsley the hakemin a very important aromatic plant in the carrot celery family also very medicinal and spiritual and another spiritual plant the wild ginger and that that ends my presentation thank you for your attention I'm going to try and start sharing my screen and make a bit of time available for questions now thank you so much Nancy thank you so much that was so fascinating um so we do have some time for questions so folks if you have any questions please feel free to type them into the q and a and I will um ask Nancy some of the questions and while you're doing that if anyone wants to purchase the book uh loose team and you can pick up a copy of kids books in edmont village and you can also visit the kids books website kidsbooks.ca and you can order it to pick up in store or they can deliver it to your house as well um okay so couple of questions Nancy do you know of a plant that can be used for a teething baby oh my goodness baby medicines are really have to be handled with great care um I'd need to think about that uh perhaps also um Kendra you could share my email with the person who asked that question yeah and um I will do some research on that I I know there are some but they don't come to mind right off hand um yeah I will follow up with her yeah I can I can almost hear what an elder was telling me about that that they were certain I know what it was okay I remember what I was thinking was I heard about a soother for babies that's made from abalone and uh and this is not from loose teams territory it's from further up the coast I was told before abalone's were so rare because they were commercially harvested that they would make a baby soother by taking an a young abalone um from the shell and putting a stick through it and having the baby suck on that which is different from actually teething but it's a soother anyways that's a little bit different but just something that comes to mind when we talk about babies but I'd have to be happy to do some more research about that okay great um so another question do you know of any plants that were especially important for end of lifetimes and end of life ceremonies oh again I wish loose team was here with me because um he'd be able to talk about that uh so much better I know that the the aromatic plants um are are especially valued uh for for people who are sick and even things like cedar boughs I've heard many people not just loose team but many people tell me uh in the old days the elders would have a big pot on the back of the stove with the western red cedar just simmering and the um the fragrance from the boughs would just permeate the house and it's very soothing for people who are sick the yarrow the same thing many aromatic plants including um let's see I brought yeah I have these these are the kachmin the yellow sorry they um they call it they used to call it Indian consumption plant you can call it wild celery has a very strong scented seed and people make a soothing tea from it as well as using it to burn in the first salmon ceremony and as an aromatic scent or smoke if you're um if you're purifying a house or something like that so so it's mostly in wild rose it's another one if you uh if you have some wild rose branches and you can steam those on the top of the stove and breathe the vapor um people would say that's very soothing and helpful for uh for sick people yeah thank you okay so can you share any more about the burning associated with gary oak areas and do you know anything about the gary oak areas in the Fraser estuary oh yes that's a great question um now I don't want to make mistakes but there are two populations of gary oaks uh in the lower mainland one around Agassi I think and one uh I don't want to make a mistake um closer to the ocean and one of those is genetically related to the population of gary oaks in the comox valley they've done some genetic research on that which I'd be happy to share later again if you want to give that person my email address I can send uh I can send papers about traditional burning practices and um there's a work that's done on burning around um the Salmonos gary oak preserve uh and now what was the rest of that question Kendra I missed I was so busy talking about the genetics of gary oak I know that's okay uh and then the question was about um the gary oak areas in the Fraser estuary specifically yeah I don't know if there's any in the Fraser estuary per se maybe I'm wrong I might have that wrong but certainly we there is evidence that people actually transplanted probably acorns brought acorns with them from one place to another and so isolated populations can it can be an indicator not necessarily uh proof because squirrels and other and birds can also transport acorns from one place to another but um but it's an indication if you put it with the linguistic evidence we certainly know that hazelnuts would have would have were transported and maybe transplanted uh quite far distant areas from the Couch and in Musqueam lower mainland because the name the proto Salish the very original Salish language name for hazelnut is tick tick and the the niska and gixan names for hazelnut are tick and that those languages are not related to Salish and they're found well we know there's a town named Hazelton up on the Skeena River named after hazelnuts so there's an isolated population quite an extensive one along the Skeena River and because of the linguistic connection between uh there in the proto Salish that's a good indicator that hazelnuts were transplanted or brought up there a long long time ago thousands of years ago maybe but again we don't have proof of that right um so someone has shared that they were given salmon skin for teaving and that her daughter loved it oh that's a great example that's yes yeah thank you for that yeah so this question is coming in from a few people um essentially as a non-indigenous person who is interested in foraging and traditional medicines and traditional plants um what is a respectful way to enter into this field and into this work and to avoid cultural appropriation uh and just to be respectful in how they go about that you have some some guidelines yeah it's um that's a really really important question especially as I mentioned because we just passed the the day of reconciliation and all of us who learn from indigenous knowledge keepers need to be very aware of whose knowledge it is and how it's shared um but my my advice would be don't hesitate to ask questions of people if you're not sure about something ask in my experience the elders that I've worked with um you know they don't like you asking question after question after question but something like asking advice about um is it okay if I share this information with my daughter or is it okay if I take this picture or is it okay um you know to to write about this and they'll tell you they'll be very frank with you and as Lucina's been with me um I'm very respectful of the knowledge that he holds that I don't share that he doesn't share with me or even if he has shared with me I don't share it more more widely and in my book on plants of Haida guai for example I was asked don't include medicine recipes because those are Haida privilege knowledge that they share amongst themselves but they don't want other people they worry about people harming themselves if they try to use the medicine inappropriately they worry about people over harvesting or not harvesting it properly they worry about uh the potential for commercializing a medicine which would then harm it in terms of its availability for local people so all of these reasons um all of them though in my experience over so many years I find uh the elders the people who hold the knowledge who speak the languages they're very kind and um they will give you advice if you ask in a respectful way and that's I think the best thing to do just to make sure I I still ask advice all the time and another thing is to make sure that people understand I'm sharing this knowledge with you uh that was shared with me with the knowledge that it would be shared with you this is something that um it's a really good idea for people to know and understand um and even if you don't know a particular use for a plant if you know that it has a name and that it is used in a spiritual way that will give you a raise respect for that plant and you will be more caring when you're out and you see it growing thank you that's great great advice um can you speak about some of the uses for snowberries yes okay you all know snowberry waxberry it's also called it's in the honeysuckle family and you you don't eat the berries they're not they're not considered uh edible up yes in the uh in the san chazan language that means little white revenge berries and um so you don't eat them but they're used uh some people use some to remove warts uh and uh one medicinal use that's in our uh a sanich ethnobotany the book that we did with this sanich elders with richard hebda another botanist um they boiled the branches and used them uh for treating um paralysis of the limbs you can also use the sticks of the waxberry to string clams on for smoking uh for and for mat for needles sometimes if you get a nice long one and and there are various other medicinal uses uh even in in the interior some people say you can swallow if you have uh if eaten too much fatty food if you swallow one berry it will dispel that feeling of um you know indigestion that you have but uh i don't recommend that really because we don't know um how poisonous those those berries are my friend christopher paul my first teacher i say from the sanich nation told me uh when i first was learning from him in the late 60s he said a little girl in their community was killed by eating those berries i've always remembered that i just wanted to show you the walking stick that loose chin had made for me made of wild cherry and also a you with digging stick and a really important implement for digging much nicer than the shuffle yeah fascinating all right well we um are a little over our time but that's okay this was so so so wonderful and i'm so grateful to you for being here and please extend my thanks to this team as well for being willing to share this incredible knowledge i've been reading through the book and i absolutely love it um so thank you again and thank you everyone for joining us again if you would like one of those signed book plates please send me an email and i will pass that information on to nancy there were many more questions and we had time to answer so i will pass those on to nancy as well and hopefully she can answer them you know through the coming days and weeks again thank you everyone i'll do my best yeah thank you nancy okay thank you kendra thank you all of you for attending um and i wish i could actually see your faces there um but it's nice really nice to be with you all yeah thank you again and i can thank you everyone for joining us and hopefully we'll see you again at another program soon have a great day bye everyone