Monthly Archives: October 2013

6. Moving In!

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Our group has had another busy two weeks, largely centered around finalizing the scope of our project with our community liaison, Dr. Eduardo Jovel, as well as establishing a suitable platform for our database. We had been expecting to present our research in the format of a UBC wiki page; now, thanks to Duncan and Eduardo, our database will be hosted directly in the UBC sites, making it much more user-friendly to access and explore, without the risk of someone altering the content. So – drum roll – our web address is:

http://lfs-mpd.sites.olt.ubc.ca/plants/

(Please note that you need a CWL login to access this site!)

Screenshot of UBC Biocultural Diversity website

A home for our database!

However, the biggest change in the past two weeks has been that our database is going to be expanded to include native plants found in the UBC Botanical Garden as well as those we have already been documenting in the IAH Garden, and possibly other gardens on campus if time permits. These two changes were largely made because there are very few plants present in the IAH Garden that fit our original criteria. These criteria are the outcome of the conversations Hannah initiated by challenging us to question how we define “traditional” plants; because we felt that non-native plants are generally well-documented, and we wanted to focus on preserving practices and diets that may be fading in memory, we had decided to limit ourselves to native species, and specifically those that are edible (as medicine or food, a distinction we are finding difficult to make), not realizing just how few of these are currently planted in the IAH Garden. The expansion to include edible native plants in the Botanical Garden will help open our scope. We managed to visit the Botanical Garden during the Apple Festival and snap some pictures for our project, but at this time of year the majority of plants are going into dormant states and don’t look much like they will in the spring and summer. Nonetheless, we have contacted the garden and they have offered to provide us with some of their own digital photographs of plants found in their Native Garden.

Post #6 in the making.

Further discussions over what constitutes traditional food and diet have included the thought that some of the First Nations of the pacific northwest practiced what could be called horticulture, tending to plants already growing, though not necessarily planting them themselves. We expect that this is a challenge for the IAH Garden, which cannot grow many regional traditional foods or medicinal plants, many of which simply do not take to cultivation on an agricultural scale, such as huckleberries. However, many people do harvest from native species growing in more natural ecological setting, which can actually be more successful; plants do best if they grow where they “want” to grow! Similar approaches to food harvesting have even earned some First Nations in this region recognition for cultivating shellfish (Clam Gardens: Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada’s West Coast by Judy Williams; http://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/1-000-year-old-first-nations-clam-gardens-unearthed-near-sidney-1.232161).

Finally, in our latest meeting with Eduardo we discussed the idea of Biocultural Diversity on campus (i.e. the diversity of culture and of biological life, specifically at UBC, and the interactions between the two). Our database will help to spread this concept as it includes both ecological and cultural information. Eduardo mentioned the possibility of starting a course on Biocultural Diversity; if he does indeed pursue this, he suggested that he will use our database – which we think is pretty neat! We are beginning to realize that our CBEL project does indeed have a lot of purpose for our community members!

Now that we have finally set a foundation for our database, our group discussed which traditional plants we wanted to include and we assigned two for each of us to research initially. A few examples are salmonberry, nodding onion, salal, and licorice fern. We hope that we will have time to complete more entries into the site, yet we do realize that we are creating the base for this project that future students can build on. Our group is also planning to visit the IAH garden for a second time, as well as attend the upcoming feast bowl on October 30th.

5. Getting Technical

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Although our group has had a thorough understanding of what we would be doing for this project, we have been feeling a bit stuck for a while without knowing where the information that we were researching around the garden would be going. Fortunately, this week, some of our group members met with Eduardo, one of our community liaisons, and Duncan of the LFS Information Technology department. This meeting has finally allowed us to really start to dig into our project; we were finally given clear directions on what our community partner would like us to do and the format in which we can publish our work.

The next step will be to assign native plants from the IAH garden to each one of our group members to thoroughly research medicinal, culinary and cultural uses. But first we must determine which plants are native! We expect this will require ongoing conversations with Hannah and others at the IAH, as we work.

The database that we will be working on will be operating within the UBC Wiki. A wiki format is easy to use and involves very simple coding, so we will be able to focus on the content of our wiki entries rather than the formatting of the database itself. This is a relief to many of us since are aren’t incredibly tech-savvy, and we had discussed our concerns about the possibility that the format would obstruct our ability to use the database. An easy-to-use format will also make it much more possible for future LFS groups to further build the database. The information that will be posted in the Wiki will be embedded into a UBC website which can also host future LFS projects on the use of plants by other indigenous communities.

Eduardo also showed us a few plant databases as examples of what we could do once we start posting on the website and how to format and organize our posts. These databases are interesting and helpful but are definitely more complex than ours will be. One of these was the E-flora BC plant identification database that was created by the Geography faculty here at UBC. It is very detailed, containing in-depth ecological information about the plants that we will be covering in our wiki, but no cultural information about the use of these plants. We will be linking the appropriate E-flora BC page that corresponds to the plant, in order to give the readers a link to all the ecological and descriptive characteristics of the plants, as well as the cultural use of the plants from our database.

This means that our main research will mostly consist of how the Aboriginal communities in British Columbia use native plants for food and medicinal purposes, without going into details on the physical characteristics of the plants. By linking our database to others we hope to expand and create more connections within the existing network of botanical and ethnobotanical information that is already available.

For all of our plant posts, we will be taking our own pictures of the plants in order to avoid copyright issues. We have discussed the idea that the cultural information surrounding the plants should be prioritized to be accessible for the Aboriginal community themselves, who have provided all the information that we are using, including what we obtain through secondary sources. Although it is not strictly stated in our instructions to do so, we are wondering how we can assure that this information will be accessible to the communities to which this knowledge belongs. We suggested this could be done through links to the UBC Wiki and LFS website on the UBC farm page, and letting local communities know about the database we are creating. Members of our group, or our community liaison Hannah, can pass on links to our database through the newsletters and listservs that go out to Aboriginal community members.

Flowers in the IAH Garden

In the IAH Garden – chamomile?

By next week we hope to have the first drafts of our research material about the native plants and their Aboriginal uses posted on our wiki page.

4. Ready to Roll

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This week we met with our community liaison, Dr. Eduardo Jovel, and also completed our project presentation and written proposal. Dr. Jovel recommended prioritizing our database to the Institute for Aboriginal Health (IAH) Garden, and the plants within it that are native to the area, due to time restraints with our project. This answers a question that has been a main source of discussion within our group; the majority of the plants that are grown in the garden are non-native species. To document the garden in its entirety would require including non-native plants, while documenting all native plants used by the IAH would have to include their wild-harvested plants. Dr. Jovel’s suggestion eases this choice, and also means that the direction that the database could take will still be left open after we’re done. He also recommended using scholarly sources for our research method to avoid the kinds of situations we encountered in “Student Researchers negotiating consent in northern aboriginal communities” (2006), where many students conducting research within Aboriginal communities encounter ethical dilemmas for which they are often unprepared. By sticking to literary research we can avoid a difficult situations, while still accessing some excellent compendiums of information from a wide variety of sources. As Dr. Jovel reminded us, what one interviewee tells us may not accurately represent the range of experiences and traditions that exist; therefore, it is safer to focus on scholarly research for now.

Presenting to our homeroom

Presenting to our homeroom.

Additionally, on Wednesday our group presented our CBEL project to our colleagues and our TA, Molly, explaining what we have determined for our project’s focus, research methods, research question and the vision for the database. We also shared our personal interests and reasoning for choosing this CBEL project as well as any concerns that we may have with executing the tasks. These ranged from interests in bringing often-overlooked traditional knowledge the attention it deserves, to contributing to the health of local Aboriginal communities, to the practical concern of ensuring that our database is presenting new and useful information, or more seriously, concerns about potential ethical dilemmas in the representation of these traditions. We found some shared interest among our classmates in the field of herbal medicine, which bodes well for the potential benefit that this database may have for future students. Molly’s feedback was helpful and fair.

Friday, Jen and Saki participated in an Indigenous Medicine workshop, which was hosted in part by Hannah Lewis, where they prepared a medicinal tobacco pipe mix. Before the workshop they were asked not to record information in order to respect oral tradition (photos shown here were taken by Hannah). Jen and Saki reflect: “The value of being present and with each other at that space and time was something that I don’t see often in my everyday life, and [I] really appreciated it. There was a clear emphasis on the importance of reciprocity: giving tobacco to the earth, gifting salmon to our guest, reflecting, hugging, and showing an overall appreciation for ourselves, the Earth and each other. It was interesting because some of the plants used in this mix are considered weeds by many people and therefore of no value. During the cutting of the dried plants our host/teacher encouraged participants to move from plant to plant, or just stop and rest, as handling one plant for a while might really affect them–It gave me a chance to be more self aware of my body and how I was feeling. And it was true, each plant did affect you, whether you were imagining it or it was actually happening, it affected you. As we prepared the ingredients we got to know each other and each and every person added their energy to the mix”. Jen found that “the feeling [she] got from being there resonated within [her] since,” and Saki summed it up: “It was a lot more than just ‘Okay, we’re here, let’s start and get this done.’ There was time taken to appreciate, to think, to sing.”
Lastly this week, we submitted our written group proposal for our project on Sunday. Overall, we are happy with the progress that we achieved this week and we can’t wait for what we‘re going to learn in the upcoming weeks.

Herbs for smoking

Preparing ingredients for the pipe mix.

Finished sachets of herbs

Finished sachets of medicinal herbs.

Looking to next week, we hope to finally meet with Duncan, our IT help, which will hopefully shed light on the technicalities of the database, although we have been informed we have a site! We are still uncertain how much time the creating and editing process will take; the more complex it is the fewer plants we will be able to input. As we stated in our proposal presentation, we are focussing on creating a functional and easy-to-use database that is simple to build upon, rather than one filled with plenty of information but buggy and clustered.

We will also need to begin researching our subject plants. We have obtained a few books to use as sources from Dr. Jovel and members of our group, but it’s expected that these alone will be insufficient. Our next steps include allocating plants to research individually, revisiting the IAH at the UBC Farm and confirming with our community partners which plants are considered traditional by the Aboriginal community.

 

Davison, C.M., Brown, M., & Moffitt, P. (2006.) Student researchers negotiating consent in northern aboriginal communities. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 5(2): 28-39.

3. Getting to Know Our Project and Who is Involved

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This week has been a very productive one for our group! In addition to visiting the Institute for Aboriginal Health (IAH) garden last week, where we took many photographs and made observations, we were able to attend one of the monthly Feast Bowls that the IAH organizes. The IAH is an institute that was designed in order to improve the health of the Aboriginal people in British Columbia and increase their participation in health careers. One of their goals is to promote indigenous health knowledge and support their traditional health care system. The Feast Bowls are a perfect example of the collaboration between Western knowledge and traditional Aboriginal health, where traditional foods from many communities are put together in order to improve the health of the Aboriginal people while incorporating foods from their traditional diet.

Herbs collected from the IAH Garden

Herbs fresh from the IAH Garden.

Attending the Feast Bowl, we learned about the purpose of the IAH garden and got to know some of the people we will be working with. We helped prepare fish cakes, tzatziki, bannock, steamed vegetables, and an apple crisp. We were shown how to use sweet cicely instead of sugar to sweeten the crisp. Sweet cicely is a local herbaceous plant that is usually considered a weed but it makes an excellent sugar substitute, especially for those with or at risk of diabetes. Almost all of the ingredients used were gathered from the IAH garden, so they were organic, fresh and made for an exceptional meal. Fortunately, there were a lot of volunteers, so the food was prepared relatively quickly and served to the crowd of about 30 people. Before sitting down to eat, we all joined hands and a prayer was given in a First Nations language. This helped to remind us of how much goes into a meal and that not to take any of it for granted. We also took this opportunity to speak with Hannah Lewis regarding future options for our project, including the database and some of the plants from the IAH garden.

Swiss chard from the IAH Garden

A rainbow of swiss chard blanching away.

We have learned many things during our project so far. We realized a need to define the term “traditional”, as we will be using it over the course of our project. “Traditional” can have different meanings depending on the context, but overall, it can be defined as an inherited and established or customary pattern in the way of thinking or behaving, associated with a particular culture. It is also the handing down of information, beliefs and customs from one generation to the other. “Tradition” is most commonly defined as cultural continuity in social attitudes and customs, but traditions are not necessarily specific to one location or culture. To many people the word “traditional” can come across as “old-fashioned”, when in fact it is highly flexible, constantly adapting just as cultures do.

Jen presents the homemade fish-cakes

Jen presents some of the amazing handmade fish-cakes.

Aboriginal communities of the Pacific Northwest, including those that we will be working with, traditionally relied mostly on fishing, foraging, hunting and forms of horticulture for sustenance. However, the IAH garden largely grows a mixture of cultivated crops that were introduced to these Aboriginal communities mostly by Europeans and have since been incorporated into their traditional cuisine. There are also some native plant species in the garden, and more are harvested from the natural forest ecosystems. The cultivated crops and the native plant species are both incorporated in the Aboriginal community lunches.

We look forward to seeing how the IAH garden promotes health through the use of food, which we expect will show a link between food and medicine. The Aboriginal populations in Canada have been using many major groups of plants as medicine, and through the IAH garden, this knowledge can be shared within the community by harvesting native plants and using them in the lunch program as well as for other means. We hope that our database will be able to spread this knowledge even further!