On Sunday July 27th, a group of about 15 participants joined Interpretative Rangers, Jay (the writer of this post) and Emma for an ethnobotany hike. The group hiked along the PCT from Little Hyatt Lake, south towards Hyatt Meadows. Along the way we encountered a variety of plant communities, including riparian meadow, mixed conifer forest, oak savannah, and dry meadow. Along the trail we made various stops to discuss ethnobotany, and I am going to share some of them in this post with you today! First, we will give an overview of indigenous removal from these lands, and why many ethnobotany traditions aren’t widely practiced today. Then we will dive into uses of camas and yampa for food, and beargrass and hazel for basketry, followed by discussion on how fire is used to manage landscapes where these plants grow. Lastly we will offer a species list of the plants that we explored on the hike, and some additional resources for finding more information!
Ethnobotany is the study of how indigenous people use plants for cultural purposes, such as food, medicine, basketry, ceremony, and more. Indigenous people have been living in Oregon since time immemorial and using plants for cultural purposes. What we call the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is within ancestral territories of the Takelma, Latgawa, Shasta, Klamath, Modoc, and other peoples, all of whom had various ethnobotanical practices. Unfortunately, many of these ethnobotany practices, among other cultural practices such as languages and customs were stolen and criminalized through assimilation and genocide.
Following settler colonialism – to a large extent the gold rush – these groups were forcibly removed from their lands and/or restricted from cultural practices. Due to competition for various resources, such as water, land, and food, settlers drove out native people. Environmental disturbances from livestock and pollution also had significant impacts. For example, Takelma peoples’ camas meadows were destroyed by an abundance of livestock hogs that would dig up the camas bulbs (more on camas later), and Shasta peoples’ salmon fisheries were damaged by effluence from gold mining. Takelma, Latgawa and Shasta people were removed to the Siletz and Grand Rhonde reservations on the coast in NW Oregon. Now the living descendents of the Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa peoples are members of the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde Indians and Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians. The Klamath and Modoc people were removed from their lands and placed on a reservation in the Upper Klamath Basin, which was economically successful through ranching and timber industries, but lost their federal recognition as a tribe and therefore lost their reservation.
For a more thorough history, Please see the tribal websites for the Klamath Tribes, Shasta Nation, and for a history of Takelma and Latgawa, see Confederated Tribes of Siletz, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde's webpages, or the BLM’s Publications.
Because these indigenous groups had no written language, through this tragic history of forced removal, assimilation, and outlawing of cultural practices, much of their ancestral knowledge was stolen from them. Despite this, the knowledge and practice of many traditions remain strong today, including ethnobotanic practices.
First Foods: Camas and Yampah
Our first stop was in a riparian meadow adjacent to Keene Creek, downstream of the dam at Little Hyatt Reservoir. Here we found remnants of camas seed pods, and discussed first foods. Foods are means of nutrition as well as a way of life for indigenous people. While plants like camas (Camissia) and yampah (Perideridia) have historically grown abundantly, meadows containing these plants are managed to produce higher yields of foods.
Camas and Yampa are examples of geophytes, or plants that have an underground storage vessel. These are perennial plants that spend the growing season pumping nutrients into these vessels for overwintering. Then, when spring arrives and temperatures warm, the plants have the food they need to put up leaves and flowers right away. We can find many geophytes in the grocery store such as potatoes, carrots, or onions, or in our gardens such as tulips or daffodils. Geophytes come in a variety of forms such as corms (garlic), roots (carrots), bulbs (onions), tubers (potatoes), and rhizomes (ginger).