Medicinal Plants

Amber Meadow Adams is a writer living and working at Six Nations Grand River Territory. She received a B.A. in Literature and Writing from Columbia University and her Ph.D. in Indigenous Studies from the University at Buffalo.

Starting with the invasive ‘medicinal plant’ broad plantain described by Fulvio in this essay, Haudenosaunee scholar Adams excavates the impact of colonial plants on women’s ‘illnesses’ also produced by colonization. She asks us to dig deeper into the destruction of the social fabric that supported women in childbirth.

“An Imported Medicine for an Imported Ill”

Plantago major

In 1938, Albert Jones, Onöndowa:’ga’ from Ohí:yo (Allegany), told newly-minted ethnographer William Fenton about some of the uses of plantain. Fenton recorded that it was “good for what whites call ‘nervous breakdown,’ or when [a] female overworks. When she has many children to look after … She feels badly, dizzy in the head”.¹ Jones describes what Fenton identifies as both Plantago rugelii, a species indigenous to North America, and Plantago major, a Eurasian import. Whether Jones referred to one species or two, Plantago major — so aggressive in its spread it earned the name “Englishman’s foot” among some Indigenous nations — had eclipsed rugelii in many parts of the Haudenosaunee homelands by the twentieth century.

It was the imported medicine for an imported ill. Until the 1790s, the Haudenosaunee continued to live in houses designed for extended families, organized around one’s Clan. Children had not only ista, a Kanyen’kehaka term encompassing both mother and aunt in English, but also uncles, cousins, grandparents, siblings, and friends to share the responsibilities of feeding, teaching, and caring for them. Women typically spaced their pregnancies three or four years apart, avoiding the physical overtax of carrying and breastfeeding children, sometimes simultaneously, that their European contemporaries often faced. Haudenosaunee women in the 17th and 18th centuries had regular access to something many North American women in the 21st do not: reliable, economical, and effective care, not only for their children, but for themselves.

Breaking the longhouse into single-family homes — “single” counted as that proletarianized unit of production, the nuclear family — has taken centuries. Removed from the insulation of extended family, losing access to birth control as traditional herbalism was driven underground and habitat was urbanized, Haudenosaunee women were forced to meet greater responsibilities with fewer resources. European invasion transformed a rich biome into a state of poverty: land theft, disease, war, and internment in residential schools meant higher average rates of morbidity and mortality in Indigenous populations. As the primary caregivers in more isolated households sheltering poorer, sicker people, a Haudenosaunee woman in Albert Jones’s time could expect at least some periods of extreme overwork. The “dizz[iness]” he describes is a clinical presentation of dehydration, malnutrition, anemia, hypo- or hypertension, migraine, and panic disorder — all conditions associated with physio-neurological stressors. Even the menstrual retirement traditional to longhouse life was no longer possible, nor the period of care of the woman, self-given or offered by others, that privileged her health and wellbeing rather than her dependents’. Also, as capitalism overwhelmed the more matrifocal Haudenosaunee economy, women began to lose voice in Council, both within communities and between their nations and the Crown and its daughter states. This displacement, though never complete, further eroded the social space women’s kasha’tstenhsera — capacity and autonomy — had occupied for centuries, marginalizing them within their own eco-legal system and further increasing burdens of stress.

Jones’s reporting of Plantago spp. as treatment for an individual’s disease stands as a sign of pragmatism and defiance — uprooting and metabolising an invasive species as an act of resistance to being uprooted and metabolised. In that respect, a Haudenosaunee woman was not taking plantain to reverse the disease process, but to fortify herself by absorbing a form of life, no matter its origin, like her and her peers: tenacious, adaptable, and capable of surviving and growing under hard conditions. Yet I wonder if, in 1938 or a century later, the question, “What are your medicine plants?” drives healers toward answers that Western medical philosophy can only misinterpret. The Haudenosaunee woman having a “nervous breakdown” can swallow her Plantago privately, and privately return to all the things that made her sick. No public change, no structural disruption, no biomic recovery is needed.

The Haudenosaunee healers for whom I have greatest respect treat illness as systems reaching beyond the borders of any one body. Ka’nikòn:ra, the spirit, will, desire, and consciousness manifesting as physiological phenomena, exists only in relation to all other yoti’nikonhrashon’a. All parts touch, and all parts move. How would the work of rescue ethnobotany change if curiosity about medical systems, food systems, and even ecosystems became curiosity about the matrices of macro and microlife? What if the acknowledged treatment for one woman’s nervous breakdown were the regrowth of a forest, or a renaissance of the kind of equity-in-care that capitalist medicine cannot accommodate? A sick woman and the sick Earth, our Creation story tells us, are one body. Where do we look for the medicine and the respite care for our shared mother?