PLANTS USED FOR FOOD
By the late WSANEC Elder Dave Elliott*
Some of our elders could list about seventy different plants used as sources of food. If all these plants were classified by a botanist, we would find that they represent about thirty different families of plants. These plants were important because they provided the necessary supplement to our diet of fish and meat.
The main plant foods were bulbs and berries. Many roots were also used. Each plant was collected at the time when it was best for our use. So, different plants were collected in different seasons. Cambium (inner bark of trees) was collected in the spring and eaten fresh or dried. Our people looked for a tall tree with few branches and cut at the base of the tree and pulled up to take a long strip of bark. We were always careful not to take too much, so the tree would not die.
Women were responsible for most collecting and preparing of plant foods. They made and used a great variety of containers for collecting the foods. Most often they carried baskets on their backs or over the shoulder secured with a tumpline to leave their hands free. Roots and bulbs were dug with a strong pointed stick. Cambium was scraped off with a stick.
Some plant foods were eaten raw but most were cooked. There were three methods commonly used for cooking plant foods. Some plants were roasted over open coals of a hot fire. Some were boiled in watertight containers; red-hot rocks would be put into containers to make the water boil. Some plants were cooked in steaming pits dug in the ground. This is called ȾW ̱ ÁS in our language. The pit was lined with red-hot rocks, water poured over them, then the food was wrapped in large leaves and placed in the pit.
Many of these plant foods were preserved and stored for winter use. Bulbs and roots were steamed, then air-dried and hung up in Cattail (Typha latifolia) bags. Fleshy berries could be dried like raisins. Moderately juicy berries were mashed, some boiled, and then dried out in rectangular cakes. Cambium and seaweed were also dried in rectangular cakes.
Dried cakes of berries, seaweed and cambium were stored in cedar bentwood boxes. In order to have these diet supplements through the winter great quantities of plant food had to be collected and prepared for storage. To eat them, dried cakes were either soaked or boiled in water. So, you see, we had a complete technology worked out for the gathering and use of plant foods. Each was collected in its season, some eaten fresh, and most of it preserved for winter use.
TECHNOLOGY - PLANTS USED TO MAKE THINGS
We used about 50 different plants to make the things we needed. The plants were used in four basic ways: wood, fibre, dye and fire. There were also general household uses for plants, such as pitch for patching and mosses for diapers. Wood products for the most part were made by the men. They made the houses, canoes, wooden boxes, bowls, masks, totems, bows, arrows and the smaller tools. They used many techniques to make these wooden items. Large planks were split off cedar logs, canoes were dug and moulded by using fire and boiling water, boxes were made by bending wood with steam.
Women worked with fibre materials to weave mats, baskets, bags, clothing, hats, blankets, twine and fish nets. They used shredded bark and roots, and the leaves and stems of grasses, marsh plants and some bushes. Most of the weaving was done by hand with some wooden implements to help in assembly. They use a one-bar loom to weave cedar-bark blankets and garments.
Dyes made from plants were usually extracted by boiling and the liquid simmered and used like a dip dye. Some barks contain high concentrations of tannin used for tanning and curing wood as well as hides. They were extracted by boiling as well.
Each type of wood was graded according to the quality of fire it could produce. Fire was essential to our people for cooking and heating. Generally fires were kindled by drilling a cedar shaft into a notch cut in the edge of a dry cedar or cottonwood slab. Sparks would fall into a pile of dry tinder below the notch. When travelling, a smouldering cedar-bark rope carried in a clamshell provided a convenient “slow match”. And the spongy material inside a rotting log was used to keep a fire slow burning in order to provide a light when required (Elliott 1980).
MEDICINAL PLANTS
In the past most common ailments would be cured by some herbal remedy. It was mostly women who knew the plants and how to prepare them as medicine. In some cases knowledge of certain medicines was known only by a person with special power. Much this knowledge is now [as of 1980] lost to us all. But we still know of the many common remedies passed from generation to generation with a family.
Our ancestors learned of the properties of many medicinal plants by watching injured animals to see which plants they ate or rubbed against their wounds.
Many of the medicinal plants used by our Saanich ancestors are known to contain useful drugs and vitamins. They were usually used in one of three ways – made into a tea and swallowed, made into a lotion or mashed and put on the skin, or just chewed and swallowed, or chewed and spat out.
The above is from an unpublished manuscript by Dave Elliott Sr., quoted in Saanich Ethnobotany: Culturally Important Plants of the W̱SÁNEĆ People and used with permission from the family.