I'm doing a lot of really fascinating research into ethnobotany of the Plains tribes (especially Ponca) for part of the novel I'm working on now. What incredible information! My character was a real person who left her Mormon settlement to live with the Ponca for 2 yrs

in order to study their language. She also found she had a knack for midwifery and general healing, and learned those skills from her Ponca foster family, too. This isn't made-up white nonsense, btw--this "exchange program" is a documented fact.

ANYWAY...

in reading about all these plant medicines and healing traditions of the Omaha, Ponca, and other Plains people, the (presumably white) researchers keep saying that these plant remedies--which have been tested in recent times and found to be effective, not just placebo--

were discovered by "trial and error" over many hundreds or thousands of years of experimentation.

Uhh... that's not actually how anthropologists have documented the origins of Indigenous knowledge about plant-based medicine.

All the whiteys who have actually bothered to ask Indigenous healers where this knowledge came from, instead of just assuming it must have been trial and error, have been given the same answer: "The plants told us this is what they can do, and the plants told us how to use them."

How are Indigenous folks having conversations with plants?

Via the use of psychedelics, of course. Psychotropic substances.

Imagine what remedies we may discover (and re-discover) when we finally decriminalize psychedelics and LISTEN to what the earth is trying to tell us.