1. Ethnobotany Tribal College Librarians Institute
National Museum of the American Indian
Washington, DC * June 12-16, 2006
Natalie Davis

2. … and why is it important?
What is Ethnobotany?
… and why is it important?
belize1.html
The aim of ethno-
botany is to study
how & in what ways
people use nature &
how and in what ways
people view nature.

3. Ethnobotany questions
To get a view of past existence
To understand present uses of plants for food, medicine, construction materials, and tools
To have this information be a door into cultural realities and
To understand the future of human relationships with the land.

4. Then and now
At first, ethnobotanies may have only listed plants, names, and uses.
Today we want to know what the people thought about plants and want to include conceptualization of plants in studies.
Dr. Enrique Salmon, Fort Lewis ethnobotany instructor

5. The burning questions of Ethnobotany:
What are people’s conceptions of plants?
What use is made of plants for food, med-icine, material culture & ceremonial purposes?
What is the extent of knowledge of plants?
In what categories are plant names & words that deal with plants grouped in the language
What can be learned by studying this?
Mgebbu Ashy, born in 1934, has encyclopedic knowledge of plants and the local environ-ment in the Yangjuan, China, region.

6. The obvious part :
“Direct contact with the vegetation of a region is recommended to know & study the plants’ physical properties.”
Kelly Kindscher, Associate Professor, KSU at Lawrence.
Kelly Kindscher teaches Ethnobotany at the University of Kansas at Lawrence.
In 1983, he spent 80 days walking 690 miles across the prairie from Kansas City to the Rocky Mountain foothills, foraging his way, gathering & preparing native plants for food. -- That’s contact!

7. Where Nebraska Is …
Kindscher’s walk across Kansas

8. Kindscher wrote:

9. Little Priest Tribal College

10. The Winnebago reservation is in Thurston County, Nebraska

11. It is on the Upper Missouri River

12. My story …
I graduated from NICC in 1995 at this same location with an AS in Natural Resources
“Range Management” = start of my obsession with native plants in my yard
What I should grow? The plants that would do the best are those that normally grow here.
Surveyed during the winter of 1995/96
Began work at Little Priest Tribal College Library in December 2000

13. Indigenous plants at my house

14. Native IMAGE Boot Camp
In April 2004 Jan Bingen, head of Native IMAGE, offered a one-day GIS/GPS workshop.
With my background with maps & surveying, using GPS just clicked. It all made perfect sense.

15. … and then Jan hired me for Native IMAGE …
Started an ethnobotany project on the Winnebago res. I drove country roads, documenting where plants used by the tribe are, their uses, what their Ho-Chunk names are, and pronun- ciations.
Elaine Rice, a teacher with the Ho-Chunk Renaissance Language program, & the whole staff of HCR, gave me with pronunciations.

16. Up to my knees in wild roses
The Plan:
Create a easily-usable database of plants
Locate (see the [ invisible ] GPS unit in my hand?) & map locations on the reservation for future research and local and con-servation use.

17. One of the few books on the Ho-Chunk uses of plants
There is also a paper by Kindscher and Hurlburt, on the Winnebago Tribe of Wisconsin’s plant use, which I also used.

18. Moerman’s Ethnobotany is another
Moerman’s Ethnobotany is another. Moerman covers many, many tribes and their plant uses. He has put his material into a searchable database at

19. Looking for ethnobotanical information
Fort Lewis Community College at Durango,
Colorado has
an ethnobotany
program,
strongly linked
to its archaeology,
biology, environ-
mental and re-
gional programs.
The website is