Learning with the Land

By Molly Grossman

 

If there’s one thing environmental historian and U. of I. history professor Rosalyn LaPier is familiar with, it’s sharing knowledge. An enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis, LaPier has been featured in many projects that have reached wide audiences, including Ken Burns’s documentary The American Buffalo and its companion novel, Blood Memory. Growing up on a reservation, her grandmother and aunt trained her in what Western science calls ethnobotany, an experience that led LaPier to a career centered around the teaching of traditional ecological knowledge. 

A distinguished scholar, LaPier’s book “Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet” won the John C. Ewers and the Donald Fixico Book Awards in 2018. Another book, “City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934” earned the 2016 Robert G. Athearn Book Award. In addition to these publications is an ever-growing list of research papers and articles devoted to contemporary Native American issues.

LaPier’s research examines how Indigenous people interact with the land, the overlap of land stewardship and religion, and how traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) can be preserved for the future. Q Magazine’s Molly Grossman talks with LaPier about her upbringing on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, her extensive TEK background, and how Indigenous perspectives can help solve our greatest challenges. 

 

How would you define traditional ecological knowledge to someone who has never heard of the concept before?

Traditional ecological knowledge is a term that was created by Western scientists to define what they saw occurring in Indigenous communities. It’s not an Indigenous term, it’s a Western science term. Most Indigenous communities have different terms and words to describe their relationship with the natural world.

The most-used definition was created by an ecologist in Canada named Fikret Berkes. He was an ecologist in northern Canada who studied Indigenous relationships with fish in the 1970s. And he was recognizing that Indigenous people had a kind of a different relationship with the natural world. He went back to the same community over and over again to look at the way that they were dealing with their own fish ecology.

The definition that he came up with is this: Traditional ecological knowledge is based in three things. The first is knowledge. Indigenous people have an understanding of the natural world, usually based on a long relationship. The second thing is practice, meaning that they practice knowledge of the natural world some way in their daily life. And then the third thing is belief. This is the main difference from the way Western science thinks about the natural world. Almost always in Indigenous communities, there is some sort of religious belief or religious practice around the way the people think about the natural world.

When I first started doing this, I was not using the term “traditional ecological knowledge.” I had not learned about it yet. Again, it’s a Western science term. But now I like the term and I do embrace it.

The first thing I learned about it was within my own community and with my grandmother and my oldest aunt, who I apprenticed with for many, many years to learn what is called “ethnobotany,” also a Western science term.

 

We keep using Western science terms to describe your work in ethnobotany.

Different communities have different words. When I was growing up, my grandmother always used the English term, “root medicine,” which is an understanding of how roots are raised. When she said root medicine, she actually meant all parts of the plants and everything about plants — understanding the climate, weather, ecosystems, and ecology, too.

 

Can you tell me more about your experiences learning from Blackfeet elders?

When I was learning about it within my own family, the depth of their knowledge never occurred to me until after I came at it from the academic side. Then I was like, “Wow, there really are these like incredible connections between religious practice and everyday knowledge about the natural world.”

I worked for a while for an organization on the Blackfeet reservation that did Blackfeet language revitalization and documentation. I worked there for 12 years, and one of the things that I did was interview a lot of elders in order to document the language. I wanted to write about the idea of purification, so I was collecting information from them about smudging. Smudging is a form of purification — you purify yourself, then you can pray and communicate with the divine.

It took them a while to explain it to me in a way I would understand. I’d have to ask them a question like, “What happens to you when you smudge? What are the plants used for smudging?” Really ask things step-by-step. They’d have to think about it, because it takes a while to explain to a young person why you would do things one way versus another way, or why particular plants are used, or why you do something differently than the way another group does it.

I get those questions now myself with young people asking me about plants. Even when I am speaking English to somebody who knows English, it takes a while to explain the “why” of their question.

 

It seems like your family and community played a big role in pushing you toward learning about traditional ecological knowledge.

I learned way more about soil health from my grandmother than I thought I ever would. I just thought she just knew about plants, but soil is what makes plants work.

She taught me how to smell soil. At first I thought, “Okay, that’s weird.” She’d always be like, “Smell this. Is it right? No, it’s not. You need it to smell a certain way before you can harvest the plants.” And then it wasn’t until later I was like, “Oh, wait, okay. We’re actually waiting for certain microbes to be in the soil in order to know that we’re harvesting it at the right time.”

The elders I interviewed possessed a lot more knowledge than I thought. Unless somebody really unpacks what they’re doing, they’re almost always going to answer with, “Well, we’ve always done it that way. That’s just the way we do it.” I realized, for example, that we have to wait till there’s certain tannins in the root, which give off a certain odor. When we can smell that, that’s when we’re going to harvest this particular plant.

 

How can studying Indigenous belief systems help us understand topics surrounding sustainability and ecology?

That’s a great question, and I think people are beginning to recognize this more and more. The more people do research on Indigenous communities, the more they recognize that there are these kind of deep connections between religious ceremonies and ecological practices. A lot of Indigenous communities, for example, have ceremonies that are centered on harvesting plants at the beginning of the new year. And for most Indigenous communities, the beginning of the new year is spring. It’s not January 1st.

These things help us understand how Indigenous people in the past and today continue to sustain their own ecosystems. It’s harder to do that today because of lots of things – climate change, colonization, and larger changes to the natural world.

There’s almost always some sort of ceremony that acknowledges the beginning of spring and the beginning of the new year. We celebrate the return of rain. We celebrate planting season. So there’s almost always some sort of ritual that is connected to how we use the land and rituals that are connected to the natural cycles of the world.

It’s also embedded in the mythology around certain ceremonies that explains why we are doing this a certain way. And sometimes there’s a myth where there’s a deity who’s telling humans to take care of the soil a certain way. We fertilize the soil to prioritize its health, then we can plant our plants.

 

Does your academic and familial training in traditional ecological knowledge shape the way you discuss it with others?

Most people back home know that I’m a teacher. In most tribal communities, people don’t really care what you do for a job. And I know that sounds a little weird. It’s very different from Western society where your profession is your identity. In tribal communities, your identity is your family. People don’t sit around and talk about what profession they’re in — I don’t think anyone in my family has ever asked me about being a teacher, not even once. Let me set that as a baseline.

In reservation communities, it’s much easier to transmit knowledge to other people because they’re literally closer to you. My entire family still lives on the Blackfeet reservation. My mother is still living on the Blackfeet reservation. Most of my cousins and relatives are there. There’s only a few of us who don’t live on the reservation, and I’m one of them. It’s definitely easier to pass on knowledge when you’re back home.

I’m usually home every summer, so I am able to work with folks who are asking about traditional knowledge and interested in learning.

However, now we have modern conveniences like Zoom. So I actually do work with several people who are interested in ethnobotany and interested in traditional ecological knowledge. We meet on Zoom or we text back and forth. It’s different than if I’m physically there. Sometimes it’s a little bit harder in terms of explaining what something should look like, what something should feel like. You can’t describe the smell of the soil.

I once had to explain to a student how to identify sweetgrass over Zoom. Sweetgrass is hard to find “in the wild” because it looks like what you think of when you think of grass.

You can identify sweetgrass by its vanilla-y kind of smell. But then it makes the entire meadow smell that way, which makes it hard to distinguish it from other grasses that might be present. So you can identify it by what its roots and seeds look like compared to the other plants. Most grasses have seeds, but you don’t notice them because they’re so teeny tiny.

 

It seems like your senses serve as your primary tool for data collection.

Like I said, I was really surprised while learning from my grandmother and my oldest aunt that a plant’s growing cycle was connected to smell, not just what I was looking at. And one of the things I’ve learned over time, especially with ethnobotanical knowledge, is that Western science is very sight-based. Indigenous science is much more tactile, where you’re using multiple senses and not just looking or seeing what it looks like.

 

What resources would you recommend to our readers that want to start learning more about TEK?

It depends on the person. There’s a couple of great books — one is called Sacred Ecology by Fikret Berkes. It is used mostly as a textbook in a lot of classes, but you can just read it.

There’s another book by an ecologist named Kat Anderson titled Tending the Wild. And that’s an excellent book about understanding Indigenous relationships to the landscape.

 

Beyond conservation and rehabilitation efforts, in what other ways can traditional ecological knowledge be harnessed?

I think most people, when they think about including what is sometimes called Indigenous science, traditional ecological knowledge, or just traditional knowledge, they are almost always thinking about restoring damaged landscapes or restoring overdeveloped landscapes.

But I think that another way to think about TEK is that it is a method of knowledge transfer, a method of education similar to university systems. We pay to go to school, and we almost always take classes with people who are experts in their field. Everybody has a different specialty with TEK. And when you are learning about TEK or ethnobotany, especially within a community, you pay the people that you’re learning from because they’re experts in their specialty.

Indigenous knowledge is very similar to Western science in that it is based on observation and testing things. If I’m talking about grass, going out into a field and talking about and showing people that grass is preferable to showing them in a classroom. There are ways we do that in Western education systems, to have experiential education and have hands-on education. We do it in agriculture, science — I think that we can continue to incorporate Indigenous knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge into Western education systems.

 

Any final words related to learning traditional ecological knowledge and sharing information?

There’s a lot of information out there in our modern world. A lot of books and articles have been written, and there’s a lot that people can learn from reading about traditional ecological knowledge. I think one of the things to remember as people educate themselves using these methods is that behind that information and knowledge are people.

The people who know this information are connected to the land and landscape, right where that knowledge comes from. We don’t want our education to only come from reading — we want it to come from people and the land as well. We can continue to protect those places, the land and landscape and the Indigenous people from those lands, because that is where the knowledge comes from.

About the Author …

Molly Grossman is a December 2024 graduate with a B.A. in English and a recipient of the Certificate in Environmental Writing. Originally from the northwest suburbs of Chicago, she is serving as Q’s student editor for the Spring 2025 semester.

Q Magazine and iSEE commissioned Grossman for this piece.