Ancestor Talk

Poke around a summer North Carolinian pasture or the edge of woods teeming with deer, small game and birds and you’ll find this forager’s delicacy. Its small, white flowers blooming from July through September preview dark berries that beckon bees to its stems. Although the entire pokeweed plant is poisonous to humans causing diarrhea, vomiting and irritating bare skin, indigenous peoples mastered using its safe parts. 

The Cherokees would boil or fry the young plants’ leaves and bulbs to cure colds, croup in kids, slow bleeding (anti-hemorrhagic poultice) or as spring tonics. The boiled warm juice would be applied for ear infections or drank as an anti-rheumatic. The Iroquois (who included the Tuscarora who migrated to upstate New York) similarly used pokeweed. They gave children the “pot liquor” (decoction) to drive out worms and to “clean you out.” The bulbs and leaves could be eaten raw or boiled with salt, pepper and butter or bacon. A heaping plate of poke “salat” cooked like that with cornbread, white potatoes, sliced tomatoes and pig feet or ox tails was a common Sunday dinner in my childhood home. Sometimes my mother would mix poke leaves with any other available greens e.g. collards, turnips, mustards and dandelions. That’s some good healthy, eating right there!

A word of caution: while a poultice from the leaves can be efficacious to soothe small wounds, one should seek immediate medical care for large, open wounds that do not respond quickly to the application. There are verifiable medicinal properties of these and thousands other plants/herbs springing up from our loving, amazing Mother Earth. Every indigenous culture on this globe has its traditional medicine men/women, healers, shamans, priests/priestesses, herbalists, who are trusted for their skills and preservation of ancestral wisdom. Belief amplified by plant life’s essential healing elements has cured and sustained humans since the beginning of time.

Today’s pharmaceutical industry thrives on formulating indigenous herbs/plants that it has thoroughly researched and marketed heavily as reliable prescriptions. Particularly in the West where herbalism is considered alternative healthcare, an afflicted individual may need to consult their physician or go to emergency/urgent care should the natural remedy seem to be failing to cure. But don’t be surprised if the treatment includes medicine whose base is derived from a simple botanical already growing in someone’s backyard.

He who finds an herb has found a cure. Michael Bassey Johnson