Student blends traditional knowledge with academics

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A community college student in The Pas, Man. is finding that a school work experience project is reconnecting her with some of the traditional medicine knowledge of her people.

June Bighetty, 31, is in her second year of the Ecotourism program offered at Keewatin Community College. She is using the Sam Waller Museum in The Pas as the base for her research into traditional native use of medicinal plants. The museum has a sizeable collection of natural history materials.

Bighetty is from the Mathias Colomb First Nation, a Swampy Cree community of about 2,500 at Pukatawagan, north of The Pas. She plans to supplement her museum research with oral histories from people in her band, primarily her father and her mother-in-law, a medicine woman.

"I want to get as much information as possible for about 15 different plants, plants I know that people have used and have worked," explains Bighetty. "When I was growing up, after school in June all the families would go out to summer camps. When you were out there you couldn't come back to the nursing station. The things my parents used, we were cured and we didn't have to come back."

Her partnership with the museum came about informally when she was talking with the museum's director, Annette Milot, one day. "In one of my courses we have plant studies. I told Annette about it, and Annette had an idea of showcasing native plants, building a display around the idea. I hadn't really gotten into native plants before. I've grown up taking medicine from my mother-in-law, and first of all I was taking it out of respect for her.

"But right now it's so interesting, I think why didn't I listen to my granny or my mom trying to tell me the stories? With the oral histories, now I can take it down and people can learn from it."

The museum has given Bighetty some guidelines on taking oral histories, basically a set of instructions to help her get the vital information she's looking for in as much detail as possible.

Bighetty plans to link the Cree names for the plants with their common names, while documenting where these plants typically grow and the kinds of healing effects they possess. One example is Wekis, or Sweet Flag.

"My mother-in-law picks it along the shoreline of Little Pukatawagan Rapids. You can chew on it for a toothache or earache. Or you can simmer it in water and inhale the steam for colds, because it helps to clear the sinus passages. You can also use it as an antiseptic cleanser. You boil the root, and use the water to clean a wound, or mix it in with something as part of an ointment."

Another versatile plant is Common Yarrow, used for infections, to soothe burns, and to relieve headaches. Bighetty's research has revealed that Common Yarrow has been used by humans for more than 600,000 years.

While the information she finds in books is useful to a point, it does have shortcomings, Bighetty has found. "The sources I've been using are U.S. books. That's why I want to do the oral histories and research with the people in Pukatawagan."

Bighetty also wants to try to understand the ways in which medicine knowledge is or isn't passed down. A medicine woman can't cure a family member, or pass down that knowledge directly to a family member, she says. But it can be passed down through different family relationships, from a mother-in-law to her daughter-in-law, for example, which is how Bighetty herself has learned.

But she says there are instances in which traditional knowledge simply has not been passed down. Although Bighetty's mother-in-law learned a lot about medicine from her mother-in-law, she did not receive the knowledge of how to cure the most serious afflictions, such as blindness and cancer, which the woman two generations from June Bighetty was said to possess."Why not? This is one of the things I want to find out," Bighetty said.

Over the winter Bighetty will complete her research and oral histories in preparation for field collection of the plants next summer, likelyin early June. Then the plants will be pressed, mounted and displayed.

Obviously, Bighetty's on to a good thing. "My dad, Henry Linklater, is 79 and he's never been to the nursing station in Pukatawagan except one time for a burn. He looks 15 to 20 years younger than he is. And my mother-in-law, Theresa, doesn't look her age at all," she said.