Rooted in the Plains

What the Prairie Knew

• Season 2 • Episode 7

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0:00 | 11:22

Before the plow broke the prairie, the prairie was already a library. Every plant had a name. Every name carried a use. Every use carried a story.

In this episode, we explore the deep relationship between the peoples of the Great Plains and the plant life they had cultivated, tended, and understood for centuries. From the sacred cottonwood along the river bottoms to the purple coneflower in your supplement aisle, the knowledge was always there, built over generations of watching, experimenting, teaching, and remembering. And when that world began to fracture, a few people recognized what was at stake. Some of what they gathered survives. And the work didn't stop there.

For photos, maps, and glimpses of the past, follow @rootedintheplains on Instagram.

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Other Kindscher books and publications: https://kindscher.ku.edu/publications

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to Read It in the Plains, a podcast about the people, places, and moments that shape the Great Plains. I'm Nicole, and in each episode, I take you back to a time when sod houses lined the prairie, railroads carved through the tall grass, and community meant survival. For photos, maps, and glimpses of Plains life, be sure to follow along on Instagram at Rooted in the Plains. Before the plow broke the prairie, the prairie was already a library. Every plant had a name. Every name carried a use. Every use carried a story. And the people who lived here, the Omaha, the Pawnee, the Dakota, the Ponka, the Hidatsa, the Winnebago, they didn't just know these plants. There was a relationship with them. That relationship wasn't built in a generation or ten generations. It was built over centuries of watching, experimenting, teaching, and remembering. This is what the prairie knew. And this is what the people knew about the prairie. Take the cottonwood. You've seen it. Every river bottom on the plains has them. Those tall, restless trees with the leaves that catch the faintest breeze and never seem to stop moving. Early settlers mostly saw them as firewood, fence posts, shade. But to the Omaha, the cottonwood was sacred. The sacred pole of the Omaha nation, the most venerated object of their ceremonial life, was made of cottonwood. An object so holy it traveled with the tribe, cared for by the designated keepers and present at great ceremonies of the nation. And the tree itself, the Dakotas said the air is never truly still. The cottonwood leaves are always moving. Even on the calmest summer nights, when the land is quiet, you could hear them. The winds were paths of higher power. So the cottonwood, always in motion, was always in conversation with something beyond itself. Children made toy teepees from the leaves, splitting each leaf down from the tip, folding back the edges for smoke flaps, and pinning the base with a thorn. Dozens of tiny lodges arranged in a circle, just like the camp circle of their tribe. The same tree, a fuel source to one group of people, a living, sacred, endless, useful presence to another. As we wander from the gentle giants, whispering words from their dark green foliage, as the winds carry those words alongside white, fluffy tufts, releasing stars into the night sky, we can see among the tall grasses a drift of cone flowers in an array of magentas, fiery oranges, and creamy yellows. Echinacea doesn't naturally come in a capsule or in a tea bag, blended with nettle leaf, lemon balm, rose hips, and ginger root to help your immune system. A billion-dollar industry built on a purple prairie wildflower. But the plains people had been working with the plant for centuries. And what's striking is how differently each tribe saw it, each name a window into what they noticed first. The Omaha and the Ponka called it the comb plant or the eyewash plant. Two names, two uses, both embedded right into the word. The Teton Dakota called it the whip plant, because the children took the stiff stalks and played with them, whirling them around by their heads. The Pawnee had a similar name for it based on their words for hand and for whirl. Same children's game, same plant, different language. But that wasn't all it was. Echinacea was used for snake bites, toothaches, mumps, burns, infections. It was used in the steam bath to make the great heat endurable. A Winnebago medicine man said he used the plant to make his mouth insensible to heat so that for a show he could take alive coal into his mouth. Echinacea was used across multiple tribes in similar ways centuries before a single pharmaceutical company existed. The knowledge was always there, in the plant, and in the people who knew it. For thousands of years, the peoples of the Great Plains lived in a relationship with this land. Not passing through it, not extracting from it, living with it. Europeans came gradually into the plains. Spanish explorers pushed north from Mexico in the 1500s. Then in the 1700s, French traders were working their way west along the Missouri. By the 1830s and 40s, immigrant wagon trains were rolling through on their way to Oregon and California, and the plains were suddenly a corridor for a whole continent in motion. Those travelers wrote about what they saw: the grass, the sky, the buffalo, the strangeness of it all. And what they rarely wrote about was that the people already here had spent centuries learning. The plains were not empty, and they were not wild in the way that those travelers used the word. The Hidatza women along the Missouri River bottoms tended fields of corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers. Carefully selected varieties, bred and improved over hundreds of years. They knew which soil held moisture the longest. They knew to plant squash when the gooseberry bushes leafed out. They let the land rest every few years so it could recover. They saved their best seed, and they knew exactly why. The Omaha planted their corn, beans, and squash when the wild plum came into bloom. Not because it was a pretty coincidence, but because generations of observation had taught them that when the wild plum bloomed, the conditions were right. The Pawnee knew that when the sunflowers stood tall and bloomed, the buffalo were fat and the meat was good. The prairie was their calendar, their pharmacy, their map. Here are a couple plants you may not have heard of. Focaita cimosa, the ground bean. The vines grow in dense masses over shrubs along riverbanks. Unremarkable to look at, easy to walk past without noticing. But underneath those vines, on leafless branches spreading along the ground, something remarkable happens. The plant produces a second crop of beans, underground, hidden and visible from above. About the size of a lima bean, gathered not just by the people who knew where to look, but by the voles, small, burrowing animals who stored them in underground caches through the winter. The Dakota women knew about those caches. They sought them out, but they didn't just take them. They carried corn with them, and when they took beans from the voles' winter stores, they left corn behind. Equal measure every time. They said it would be wicked to steal from the animals. Fair exchange was not robbery. And then there was Lobelia cardinalis, the cardinal flower. Brilliant red, grows along stream banks, and in low wet places. The Pawnee valued it deeply for ceremonial use, for medicine, for love charms compounded with other plants. But here's what makes the cardinal flower remarkable in a different way. It shouldn't be in Nebraska at all. The cardinal flower's natural range doesn't extend into Pawnee territory of the Central Plains, and yet isolated patches of it exist, all of them within the boundaries of the old Pawnee domain, near old village sites, near old ceremonial grounds. Botanists believe that the Pawnee brought it with them, that medicine men deliberately carried seeds or living roots and planted it close to homes so that it would be available when needed. A people moving across the landscape, tending it as they went, not just using what they found, shaping what could be there for the next generation. By the late 1800s, their world was fracturing fast. The Dawes Act of 1887, as we covered in the last episode, broke communal lands and confined people into individual allotments. The freedom to move across the landscape, to follow the seasons, to gather what each place offered, gone. The old ways of teaching, of passing knowledge from grandmother to granddaughter on the prairie itself, were disrupted in a single generation. The elders that held this knowledge were aging, and most of it had never been written down. A few people recognized what was at stake. Scientists, botanists, and anthropologists arrived with notebooks and specimen bags, trying to capture what they could before it was gone. Their work was imperfect. Their methods sometimes extractive. Their frameworks didn't always fit what they were trying to record. But some of what they gathered survives. And that work didn't stop there. In the 1920s, an ethnobotanist named Melvin Gilmore was working with Erica elders on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, recording their plant knowledge, interviewing elders, and collecting what he could. He never finished. A debilitating illness stopped him before he could complete the manuscript. His notes sat in archives for nearly a century. In 2020, researcher Kelly Kincher at the University of Kansas went back to those notes. And he didn't finish them alone. He brought in Lauren Yellowbird and Michael Yellowbird, Ericora community members, along with linguist Logan Sutton. Together they completed what Gilmore couldn't. 106 plant species, 31 plant families. The knowledge the Erickera elders had shared a century earlier was finally in print. On the cover of that book is a photograph Gilmore took himself in 1923. A woman named Yellow Corn Woman. She is one of his most important sources. She was 83 years old. She is sitting making baskets with her two children beside her. As I mentioned in the beginning, if the prairie was a library, she was one of the greatest librarians. She shared what she knew, and eventually, her people were able to make sure it wasn't lost. The Prairie still knows, and so do they. Thanks for listening to Rooted in the Plains. I hope you learned something new today. For photos, maps, and a little glimpse of Plains' life, visit the Instagram page Rooted in the Plains. And if you want to dig a little deeper, check out the show notes for sources, including Kincher's work and a full list of references for this episode. Thanks.