Get to know your Relatives

Paying attention to the plant life around you will help to deepen your relationship with these relatives over time. 

Planting Ceremony

Here's what happened when a group of several faculty, staff, and students attended a planting day ceremony.  

We gathered in the circle area with a large collection of ribbons.  Each person took a different coloured or shaped ribbon.

Looking at the circular pattern of cobblestones, our Elder said that the middle circle represents children, then come the old people.  These are the most important.  Protecting these are the women, then the men.  When we think about caring for the garden, it's because we want it to be there for our children they're grown up.  

Each person was invited to select a plant.  It's OK if several people choose the same one.  Take a leaf and rub it and smell it, then put it under your tongue.  This plant is your relative.  Do some research on this plant.  Find out who its relatives are, and how it is used in medicines.  Whenever you go somewhere else, you should look for it to take care of it.  If you ever harvest any, then you need to leave an offering like some tobacco or if you don't have anything else, take a button from your shirt.  It's about reciprocity.  Each of us agreed to take responsibility for our relative.  If we ever move away from this area, we must find another person to take over our job.  This way, the garden will always have a group of people invested in caring for it for years to come.

Our Elder said a prayer and we began with a smudge.  There was singing of the water song.  After the planting, we tied a ribbon to our relative.  This helped us to remember which one we had planted when we came back to visit later.

In the Wild

You may be surprised at how often you bump into a plant relative while out and about.  

Try to find your plant relative in its natural setting, like the Meewasin trail, or Beaver Creek, or Wanuskewin.  

Be cautious in the wild!  It's easy to get so preoccupied looking for your plant that you forget about your surroundings.  Our Elder told us about accidental encounters with bears and badgers that were very scary at the time, but funny afterward!

Pay attention to the other plants, trees, bugs, and animals around your plant in thte wild.  Our Elder told us that plants that occur next to each other naturally tend to work well together in medicines.