In preserving Indigenous philosophy and practice, ethnobotanist Nancy Turner builds partnerships through plants.
BY DAVID LENNAM | PHOTO BY JEFFREY BOSDET
It’s not surprising that Nancy Turner became one of the world’s leading ethnobotanists.
When she was 14, Turner began writing a book about lichens, simply because there were no good reference books available. But even by then, “Nancy Nature,” as she was called in grade school, had already logged a decade identifying plants and memorizing their names, first as a youngster in Missoula, Montana, picking chokecherries and sarvisberry with her sister; then, from age five in Victoria, where she joined a junior natural history group and recalls feeding her Grade 4 friends dandelion salad (“much to their mothers’ horror,” she says).
By high school, after coming across a pair of books that would define her destiny (The Ethnobotany of the Thompson Indians of British Columbia and Ethnobotany of Western Washington: The Knowledge and Use of Indigenous Plants by Native Americans), Turner declared her intention to pursue ethnobotany. It says so right there in her class yearbook.
“I was really fortunate to grow up in a natural-history family,” she says. Indeed, both Turner’s father and grandfather were entomologists. The natural world was wide open for her as she began deciphering its codes as a teenager.
Now 77, the UVic professor emeritus and member of the orders of B.C. and Canada, who makes her home on Protection Island near Nanaimo, remains a towering figure in academe, though she presents as gently soft-spoken and humble in person.
Learning from the Elders
Turner’s had a great deal written about her — and she’s written a great deal herself: 30 books and counting. A much sought-after speaker (she gets five requests a day), a conversation with her is like a class in how much our lives are defined by plants.
She’s best known for her connection with Indigenous communities and has spent more than a half-century documenting and promoting the traditional knowledge of plants including foods, materials and medicines in the territories of the Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw, Secwepemc, Stl’atl’imx, Nlaka’pamux, Tsilhqot’in and Gitga’at nations.
Theirs were sustainable agricultural practices, notes Turner, with a spiritual aspect and belief in a life force binding all living things.
“That’s why they were very careful and asked permission even to harvest,” she says. “My friend [Secwepemc Elder Dr.] Mary Thomas, she taught me so much, like how to harvest the inner bark of red willow … We went out to do this and the first thing she did was talk to the bush and offer it some tobacco as a gift, thank it, and was very careful and took only one branch from the tree because that’s what she needed and made the medicine. So each step involved a conscious developing of the relationship.”
I ask whether we should look to Indigenous knowledge as a way forward. Turner doesn’t say no, but qualifies that their knowledge isn’t something one can just help oneself to and use without permission.
“It’s really important to develop a partnership, not integrate the knowledge, because they’re different knowledge systems, but to listen to people who are living on the land and are very familiar with the land and the species in their territories.”
Reconciliation and Renewal
One could argue that Turner’s work is more relevant than ever as the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada starts to mature into reconciliation. Her exhaustive research into plants and how they inform Indigenous culture, along with her deep relationship with elders — from whom she has gleaned much of her knowledge — give her a rare understanding of the kinds of partnerships we need to forge.
Asked what reconciliation looks like and whether we’re headed in the right direction, Turner replies that it’s a long, slow, reflective and interactive process.
“We have to work and take things, as my friend [Nuu-chah-nulth Hereditary Chief] Richard Atleo says, from the ‘here and now.’ We can’t go back and redo the past, but all of us can educate ourselves about what happened to Indigenous peoples across the country when Europeans arrived and started to ‘take over,’ usually without invitation or permission, and what has happened since, with the horror of residential schools, loss of land rights, fishing rights, languages and ceremonial rights like the Potlatch.”
Turner suggests recognizing and acknowledging the importance and value of Indigenous languages and knowledge is a good way forward. Along with full and equal partnerships.
“Recognition, respect, reciprocity, revitalization and renewal are what we all need to be a part of,” she says. “But making sure that First Peoples are given their own voice about what they want, how they see their future, and how we as non-Indigenous people can support them is crucial.”
Her love and respect for the First Nations people she’s collaborated with for 50 years is a reciprocal one. In the words of one elder, “Without Nancy … we would have lost our family’s medicines.”
I suggest, rather boldly, that perhaps the most important work Turner has done is to preserve Indigenous wisdom and share that knowledge with the rest of us.
“I think that’s a responsibility for anyone like myself who has had the privilege of being able to learn this knowledge to make sure that other people understand how important it is,” she confides, then has a giggle about what an elder of Bella Coola’s Nuxalk Nation once told the inquisitive ethnobotanist.
“ ‘You white people ask too many questions.’ I can hear Margaret Siwallace say that. ‘Just listen. Just listen.’ ”