Devil's Club: A Wonder Weed

Devil's club is a most important plant to coastal people in Southeast & Southcentral Alaska, for both medicinal & mystical purposes.  Follow the link to the following article and podcast on NPR for more information about the many uses of Devil's Club: Devil's Club: A Medicine Cabinet for an Alaskan Tribe.

How to harvest and make use of devil's club stalks...

Nancy is dwarfed by the towering devil's club.

Using gloves, trim off a woody piece of the devil's club.  Use a kitchen knife to scrape off the needles.

Cut off the outer cambium layer.  This is the layer that you can dry and make into tea.  You can also steep it in cold water and use the water later to drink or help heal wounds.

The inner pith can also be used to make a salve.  When making the salve you need to use an enamel pot and mix the devil's club stems with bees wax, vitamin E and oil.

Traditional Uses of Plants, part 1

 Chocolate Lily

There are only two brown flowers in Alaska and the Chocolate Lily is one of them.  Brown flowers are rare, not only here, but around the world. The Chocolate Lily has an unusual smell. The Lily is a beautiful flower to look at but you will only want to smell it once. Because of its ghastly smell, the Chocolate Lily is also called  Skunk Lily, Dirty Diaper and Outhouse Lily.

This plant can grow anywhere from 5 to 18 inches depending on the habitat. Other nicknames for the Chocolate Lily are Indian Rice, Wild Rice, Northern Rice Root, and Rice Lily, due to the fact that it reproduces by tiny rice like that form around the plant. The flowers bloom in mid-June to mid-July.

This plant is found in damp woodlands and open coastal meadows.  Look for it when you are hiking out to the Cowee Meadow cabin on the Point Bridget trail.

The bulbs of the chocolate lily were eaten by most coastal peoples, either boiled or steamed in pits.  The bulbs grow relatively close to the surface and are easily extracted.  Bulbs were dug in the spring before the flowering, or in the summer and fall after flowering using a digging stick.  Chocolate lily bulbs were cooked immediately or could be partially dried, then stored in a cool place for winter use.  They were cooked for about 30 minutes in a cedarwood box, by boiling for a short time then mashing to a paste or baked in ashes.  The bulbs were also used as items in trade.

Fireweed

Although when Fireweed covers the hillside it looks like fire, fireweed actually gets it’s name because it is often the first plant to grow back after a fire. Meadows and open woods are filled to overflowing with beautiful Fireweed because they reproduce with underground stems called rhizomes, which are protected from a fire and allow them to reproduce rapidly. Common Fireweed stems are thick and woody and can grow between two to four feet tall.

Leaves that are reddish and orange means that it’s autumn and the long seed pods will open soon. After the seed pods open it looks like downy feathers have replaced the blossom. Along comes the wind, down is dispersed, and the ground turns white.

Common Fireweed’s stem’s long slender leaves, and flowers are edible raw and cooked. The blossoms are used to make jellies, syrup, and when making homemade honey. Bees are attracted to the brilliant color and make a delicious honey from Fireweed. One effect of eating to much Fireweed is drowsiness. Alaskan Natives used Fireweed tea made from the leaves for stomach aches and for restlessness. The greens when young are tender and can be used cooked or in salads.

Thimbleberry

 The Thimbleberry is a low, scrambling shrub that commonly grows on open, wooded hillsides, along streambanks and canyons, on borders, and roadsides.  I have seen it at Auk Rec and along the Perseverance trail road. The flowers are white and in clusters of 2-7.  The berry is "thimblelike" with hairy, red or scarlet nodules. These nodules are nearly dry at maturity and fall apart readily when picked.

Fruit is eaten by black bears and numerous smaller mammals, including coyote, chipmunk, raccoon, red fox, gray fox, red squirrel, and skunks. Provides cover for rabbits, red squirrel, black bear, and beaver.

Traditionally used by indigenous peoples throughout its range. The fruit was eaten fresh in summer and dried for winter use. The bark was boiled and made into soap, and leaves were used to make a medicinal tea. Leaves were powdered and applied to burns to minimize scarring.  Today people use it to make excellent jelly but it is too seedy for jam.  The young shoots may be eaten as greens; leaves have been used in making teas.

Raven Brings the Light

The following post was inspired by the Tlingit singers singing the song of Raven releasing the light from the box....

Long ago when the world was young, the earth and all living creatures were shrouded in the darkness. It was said that a great chief was keeping all the light for himself, but no one was certain, for the light was so carefully hidden that no one had ever actually seen it. The chief knew that his people were suffering, but he was a selfish man and did not care.

Raven was sad for his people, for he knew that without light the earth would not bring forth the food the people needed to survive. Raven decided to rescue the light. He knew that the way to the chief’s village was very long. When Raven arrived, he said to himself, “I must find a way to live the in the chief’s house and capture the light.”

So Raven transformed himself into a seed and floated on the surface of the nearby stream. When the chief’s daughter came to draw water, Raven was ready. No matter how she tried to drink some of the water, the seed was always in her way. Finally, she tired of trying to remove it, and she drank it along with the water.

The woman became pregnant, and in time she gave birth to a son, who was Raven in disguise. The chief loved his grandson, and whatever the child wanted, his grandfather gave him.

As the boy crawled, he noticed many bags hanging on the walls of the lodge. One by one he pointed to them, and one by one his grandfather gave them to him. Finally his grandfather gave him the bag that was filled with stars, and the bag that contained the moon. The child rolled the bags around on the floor of the lodge, then suddenly let go of them. The bags immediately rose to the ceiling, drifted through the smoke hole, and flew up into the heavens. There they burst open, spilling the stars and the moon into the sky.

The boy continued to play with bag after bag and box after box until one day he pointed to the last box left in the lodge. His grandfather took him upon his lap and said, “When I open this box, I am giving you the last and dearest of my possessions, the sun. Please take care of it!”

Then the chief closed the smoke hole and picked up the large wooden box he had hidden among other boxes in the shadows of one corner of the lodge. As soon as the chief removed the sun from this box, his lodging was flooded with a brilliant light.

The child laughed with delight as his grandfather gave him the fiery ball to play with. He rolled the sun around the floor of the lodging until he tired of the game and pushed it aside. His grandfather then replaced the sun in its box.  Day after day Raven and his grandfather repeated this process. Raven would point to the sun’s box, play with it until he tired of it, and then watch as his grandfather put the fiery ball away.

Finally the day came when the chief was not as careful as usual. He forgot to close the smoke hole, and he no longer watched Raven play with the fiery ball. The child resumed his Raven shape, grasped the ball of light in his claws, and flew up through the smoke hole into the sky, traveling in the direction of the river.

Raven spied people fishing in the dark. He said to them, “if you will give me some fish, I will give you some light.” At first they did not believe him. However, when Raven raised his wing and showed them enough light for them to fish with ease, they gave him part of their catch. When he had his fill of fish he lifted his wing, grabbed the sun with both claws and tossed it high into the sky. “Now my people will have light both day and night!” he exclaimed. And from that day forward, the people no longer lived in darkness.

We Are Surrounded by Teachers

David Katzeek, Tlingit Elder sharing his
appreciation of the precious children we teach.

A lesson I learned while attending the Place Based Education Institute was the multitude of teachers we have in Juneau.  Juneau's teachers do not just reside in the classroom, but they surround us and share with us daily their connections to our place.  We are infinitely lucky to have Tlingit elders who carry with them thousands of years of knowledge.  The elders are now passing down their experience to the next generation, who are now becoming our teachers.  Learning from the Tlingit is a powerful experience because they don't just teach us in the classroom but use our natural habitat as our place of learning. The following photos are from some of the moments we stopped, listened, and learned infinitely more than we ever would from a textbook.

Tlingit singers and dancers singing about
Raven opening the box of light.

A Tlingit Elder showing us how to
prepare Indian Rhubarb

Introduction to the Super Sonic Learning Blog

The Placed Based Education Institute was an inspiring program that showed me how to make stronger connections between my lessons in the classroom, my students and the incredible habitat of Southeast Alaska.  The institute generated many new ideas including the development of this blog to enhance my student's learning.  I see this blog as a tool for me to help deliver my lessons, as a means to communicate with my students on a technological level they enjoy using, and to share the ideas developed and explored in daily classroom activities with parents and guardians.

The blog will include relevant information about lessons taught in class, World Wide Web links to enhance the lessons, links to homework assignments, a weekly journal post by a different student each week to share what we did in class, photographs of student work and student activities, and a "Where's Ms. G?" post in which my students can follow where I am traveling in the fall and see how I interact with my "place" and why I love to be outdoors.