Our topic this week was plant medicine. In the classroom, we watched a short film from KCET called Tracing Indigenous Medicine to Patent Medicines. Students learned that drugs like aspirin and cocaine originated from plants Indigenous peoples have used for thousands of years. We also watched a short film called Indigenous Plant Healing where two Indigenous elders from the First Nations of present-day Canada talked about their relationship to plants like stinging nettle, dandelion, the Sitka spruce tree, and Devil’s club.
In the kitchen, we worked with foraged stinging nettle from Mendocino County and made a bright green potato and nettle soup. The fourth and fifth graders blanched the nettle before chopping it (hot water neutralizes the chemicals produced by the fine white hairs on the nettle leaves), and added it to leeks, celery, potato, garlic, herbs, and vegetable stock. We also made fresh butter from heavy cream and blended the butter with edible flower petals.
The soup has a strong vegetal taste and is loaded with vitamins. Even those who didn’t love the soup had a chance to try an ingredient that is rare if not impossible to find in the grocery store, though there is small nettle growing wild in the planters along Collingwood Street right outside our school! The Kawaiisu people view nettles as a source of dream power and intentionally walk through the plants to get stung in preparation for visions.
