Indian Use Of Wild Plants For Crafts Food Medicine And Charms

Ethnologist with the Smithsonian Institution offers a wealth of material on nearly 200 plants used by Chippewas of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Emphasis on wild plants and lesser-known uses. 33 plates.

Use of plants by Native Americans.

Bridging Two Peoples tells the story of Dr. Peter E. Jones, who in 1866 became one of the first status Indians to obtain a medical doctor degree from a Canadian university. He returned to his southern Ontario reserve and was elected chief and band doctor. As secretary to the Grand Indian Council of Ontario he became a bridge between peoples, conveying the chiefs’ concerns to his political mentor Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, most importantly during consultations on the Indian Act. The third son of a Mississauga-Ojibwe missionary and his English wife, Peter E. Jones overcame paralytic polio to lead his people forward. He supported the granting of voting rights to Indians and edited Canada’s first Native newspaper to encourage them to vote. Appointed a Federal Indian Agent, a post usually reserved for non-Natives, Jones promoted education and introduced modern public health measures on his reserve. But there was little he could do to stem the ravages of tuberculosis that cemetery records show claimed upwards of 40 per cent of the band. The Jones family included Native and non-Native members who treated each other equally. Jones’s Mississauga grandmother is now honoured for helping survey the province of Ontario. His mother published books and his wife was an early feminist. The appendix describes how Aboriginal grandmothers used herbal medicines and crafted surgical appliances from birchbark.

Challenging the view that Aboriginal medicine was helpless to deal with European disease, Lux argues that the diseases killing the Plains people were not contagious epidemics but grinding poverty, malnutrition, and overcrowding.

Volume Two of this retrospective bibliography is both a continuation and an expansion of Volume One (1984). It contains references to Canadian medical-historical literature published between 1984 and 1998, and also includes much additional material published prior to 1984. Finally, it substantially enlarges the content of French-language material. Every effort has been made to be as inclusive as possible of articles, theses, book chapters and books, both in English and in French, relating to the history of medicine. No single electronic source can replace this bibliography. The contents are divided into three sections. The first is a listing of material expressly biographical. Section two lists material under a wide variety of subject headings related to medicine, and the third is a complete listing of the authors who have contributed these articles. Simply organized and easy to use, this bibliography will be of value to historians, archivists, librarians, and anyone interested in the history of medicine.

Donated by Alain Arts, 2010, and autographed by author.

Hunter-Gatherer Archaeobotany shows how archaeobotanical investigations can broaden our understanding of the much wider range of plants that have been of use to people in the recent and more distant past. The book compromises sixteen papers covering aspects of the archaeobotany of wild plants ranging across the northern hemisphere from Japan, across America, Europe and into the Near East. Sites examined span the Upper Palaeolithic to the recent past and demonstrate how such studies can extend our understanding of human interaction with plants throughout our history.