Coming Home

Part of Georgian Bay Biosphere Reserve

The UNESCO Georgian Bay Biosphere Reserve (GBBR) is holding four events this year to celebrate the Anishinaabe lunar calendar.  I wrote about the GBBR in an earlier blogpost and since I live nearby, I have wanted to find ways to connect with this innovative project.  So I was very happy to read in their email about the celebration for the Flower Moon (Waawaakone Giizis) which happens in the lunar month in May.  We were invited to visit Wasauksing First Nation just outside of Parry Sound for a Medicine Walk with one of the community members. 

I love plants.  I grow them for food and for beauty and I am continually learning about medicinal uses for plants as well.  I was told that my grandmother in England used herbal remedies which she used to mail to my mom here in Canada.  But my mother was trying to be Canadian so she never used them and that knowledge was never passed down.  

I had a very early interest in plants and my parents taught me about the plants that they knew and grew in our backyard.  I would ask adults what certain plants that attracted me were used for.  If I was told that they were weeds and were useless I didn`t believe them.  I just figured that they didn’t know either.  As I got older I read books, learned from other women who knew about medicinal plants, grew them and made some remedies to use myself.  Although the knowledge was severed between my grandmother and me, I have spent most of my adult life trying to reclaim this knowledge so that I can pass it down to my family.

So on the last Sunday in May, we headed north.  After going through Parry Sound, we crossed the swing bridge on Rose Point Road,  and the road changed its name to Wasauksing Rd.  We followed it to Geewadin Road and found the Wasauksing Seniors' Centre where we were to meet.  Two staff members from GBBR were there and we were introduced to Faith Pegahmagabow, the community member who would take us on the walk.  She told us that she didn`t know everything about the plants but she would show us the ones that she did know.

 

We carpooled out to the part of the island that used to house a settler community of 2500 in the past.  It is now a ghost town as the company that built the community is now gone.  The buildings have crumbled and only the foundations and some steps are visible. Since the land was leased from the First Nation, it has returned now to the use of the community members and they use the area for pow wows and gathering medicines as well as the plants left behind by the settlers such as apples and lilacs.

Mullein leaves

Faith pointed out plants all along the roadway and told us what they were used for.  She showed us plantain, burdock, yellow dock, jewelweed, balsam poplar, white pine, pin cherry, sweetgrass and even mullein.  Mullein is the velvety leaved plant that shoots up a tall yellow flower spike.  This is the plant that first caught my attention as a child.  I remember stroking the fuzzy leaves and knowing that it must be a healing kind of a plant.  When I asked my parents, they told me it was a weed and it wasn’t good for anything.  So when Faith told us about its uses, I bent down and stroked my old friend who is even more beautiful to me now that I am a grandmother.  It was as if time warped as I realized that after more than fifty years, the little girl’s question was being answered by someone whose people have been here for thousands of years.  It felt like coming home somehow – like coming home to myself, to what I knew as a child.  It felt like my persistence in being true to what I knew inside all these years had come full circle.

Faith went on to tell us that she is going to visit another woman who knows about plants to learn more from her.  It seems that there are many of us who are trying to recover the knowledge that the hubris of modern science deemed worthless.  As the 18 participants asked Faith questions about many plants, she told us that she figured everything was good for something but she didn`t know what all of that was.  I loved that idea.  I think that will change my way of looking at many things.  Just because I don`t know the use of something doesn't mean that it is useless.

As we walked through the remains of the destructive slag of an old railway yard and down the sidewalk and steps of a church now gone I could see how nature was growing over and through all of these signs of “progress”.  The lilac bushes, apple trees, day lilies and snow-on-the-mountain ground cover were all species brought in by the non-Indigenous town’s folk who are now gone.  However, the plants remain.  People on the reserve come and take cutting for their own gardens.  They come and pick the huge heritage apples and make apple butter.  And they gather the medicines that have grown there for thousands of years.  The plants mingle and thrive side by side.

Fiddleheads of Ostrich ferns

Faith told us that when people on the island gather plants for their use, they leave behind some tobacco as a thank you.  “You don`t take anything for nothing,” she told us.   When she showed us where she picks fiddleheads, someone asked her how she knew that they were from the right kind of ferns (ostrich ferns).  “Because I was shown by someone that these were the ones,” she replied.  Of course this is the best way to learn about plants, to be shown.  That was the gift I had longed for as a child.  I had substituted book learning which has taken me a certain distance.  But to be on the land with Faith and have her show us the plants and talk about them was a huge gift.  It was what the little girl inside of me had longed for.  It was healing.

And so when we parted, I gave Faith one of the Heart Berry pins from the Call to Action #83  and told her where it was from.  She told me that when girls become young women in their community, they have a strawberry ceremony and that her granddaughter was about to take part in that.  “Maybe this is for her,” I said.  Faith nodded and we two grandmothers hugged.