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Preface
Growing up between Portland’s exurban fringe and Oregon’s wind-beaten north coast, I experienced a childhood that played out alongside the deep green backdrop of Northwestern native plants. My earliest memories involve crawling through patches of wild strawberries that my mother had transplanted and tended into a robust backyard groundcover. When, as a toddler, I needed to nap but resisted, my mother walked me through the Douglas-fir and cedar forest behind our home, asking me to identify each plant by name until fatigue set in and I drifted off to sleep, with visions of Oregon grape and wild lilies dancing in my head. We cut trails into the blackberry thicket tangles in summertime to find the biggest and juiciest berries. We scaled mountains, where we gathered wild onions and ate handfuls of huckleberries as we watched ravens and red-tailed hawks ride the thermals below. Academic confirmation of these landscape lessons came from unique venues: special wild food programs sponsored by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and other regional organizations, taught by retired professors and earnest hippy biologists. Cumulatively, these experiences were the cornerstones of my early education and gave me insights that I still draw from as a professor and researcher today. I sincerely hope that future generations of children will be so fortunate as to experience this kind of hands-on learning upon the land and, through that process, gain a profound love and understanding of this verdant home of ours. If this book helps a parent usher even one child along a similar journey, I will consider the entire writing project a great success.
As I entered adulthood, though, I was disappointed to learn that the landscapes and plants that I valued so much were seen as an anonymous tangle to many Northwesterners, just so much green noise scarcely noticed as they motored past or bulldozed through. I increasingly sensed the nagging truth behind Lewis Mumford’s admonition that our national flower had become “the concrete cloverleaf” of the highway interchange, even here in the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps it is the fact that we Americans mostly descend from immigrant peoples, with relatively shallow histories in this far-flung corner of the continent. Perhaps it is the fact that we are largely children of an urbanized, industrial age, which has undervalued those resources that are local, wild, and free in exchange for those that are universal, interchangeable, and revenue-producing. Whatever the reason, I have long felt that there was a need to address our chronic dissociation from the landscape. A deeper appreciation of useful plants might help us to see that landscape anew and with greater interest and investment. Certainly, edible plants are all around us, a rich source of food, beauty, entertainment, enlightenment, and many other pleasures, if only we pay attention. Ironically, we are all inheritors of a great prosperity of which most of us know very little.
Well-intentioned people have sometimes called out in alarm when they have seen my children eat even the most common edible berries, astonished, grasping for their cell phones, unsure if they should first call a poison control center or child protective services. I appreciate their concern. Fortunately, the times are changing, and people are tentatively reconnecting to plants and places in myriad ways, with welcome energy and experimentation. Workshops, field trips, blogs, and any number of other venues are emerging, celebrating native foods as a solution to many of the economic, nutritional, and ecological challenges of the age. Perhaps, in time, those well-intentioned people with the cell phones and the angst will put down their phones, pick up a berry bucket, and harvest merrily alongside my kids. We will all be better for it.
In my quest to understand these matters, I had the opportunity to work with some of the best teachers available, both in the world of academia and among the Northwest’s Native American cultural leaders. I worked with outstanding biogeographers and ethnobotanists in universities in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and beyond, seeking an understanding of the natural history of the Northwest and the consequences of human activities on regional ecologies. I was also able to work with many great Native teachers—Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Tlingit, Coast Salish, Klamath, and many others—seeking to comprehend and help document their exceedingly rich repertoire of cultural knowledge related to plants. In time, I was adopted by more than one tribe, but most relevant here by the Kawakadillika clan of the Kwakwaka’wakw. Their chief, Kwaxistalla Adam Dick, has instructed me over the years with a mixture of chiefly generosity and paternal patience. Sequestered from the non-Native world as a child, Adam received from the elders of his day unique and focused training in all aspects of traditional resource management, from the mechanics of plant harvesting to the philosophical foundations of plant cultivation and associated rituals. These elders gave him this training, motivated by prophecies that through such an urgent educational undertaking they might ensure that their cultural knowledge survived into the modern day. I consider myself an enormously fortunate beneficiary of their efforts. So, too, readers of this book are beneficiaries, indirectly, of the labors of these elders hailing from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this book, I have had to strike a balance, presenting what is common knowledge among traditional harvesters, while steering clear of the medicines, ceremonial uses, and other highly sensitive and proprietary forms of knowledge. There are no state secrets contained herein, but the content and perspectives of this book clearly bear the imprint of my own teachings from this rich and venerable tradition.
It is to my teachers and their teachers before them that I dedicate this book. For this reason, a specific portion of my proceeds from this book will be used to help support programs in the region with Native oversight that document traditional ecological knowledge and ensure its perpetuation for the benefit of future generations through educational programs for young people, both Native and non-Native. It is my hope that, through such efforts, we will continue to learn from the intimate relationships that human communities have maintained with Northwestern environments over the millennia, and this knowledge may yet inform modern people as we seek to make a sustainable home here in the Pacific Northwest, for the long haul.
The gathering of wild plant foods is a small business in a way—the plucking of a few trailside berries here and there as you pass by—but it is also part of something much bigger, the greater sweep of history and the fate of the region’s ecosystems. Either way, it is clear that we are in this together, from the tribal elders carrying forward ancient wisdom to the young foodies and bloggers whose experimentation adds spicy new ingredients to the mix. You can approach wild food gathering from whichever perspective you wish. Whatever your motivations, you are enthusiastically invited. Happy harvesting!
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