For: April
Check back on this page for monthly homework assignments for our 2024 Intro to Herbal Medicine class.
Turning in Your Homework
Homework can be turned in in-person, emailed to homework@wildcherries.org (to share privately with the teachers), or uploaded to the shared google drive (to make it available to the whole class).
For April
Wildcrafting
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Honorable Harvest (excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass) (reading, 11 pgs) — This book is widely available as a beautiful downloadable audiobook from the Carnegie Library, if you prefer to listen rather than read this chapter. (It is Part 8.)
Cultural Appropriation
- Wanting To Be Indian: When Spiritual Searching Turns into Cultural Theft by Myke Johnson (18 pages) — Pick a question to answer at the end of the article
https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/wanting-to-be-indian/- Or audio recording (39 minutes)
Reflections
Write ½-1 page about a family healing tradition you grew up with.
What ways do you strive to or want to practice a culture of gratitude?
What are ways you want to have relationships with wild plants that don’t involve gathering them?
What are the impacts on us when our cultural practices are appropriated? What healing do we need around that?
What are the impacts on us when our cultural practices are lost, and what healing do we need around that?
Materia Medica
Make wild cherry tea, tincture or syrup this month. What tastes and energetics do you notice? How does it make your body feel? Where do you feel it in your body? What do you like about it and what do you dislike? Try drinking it 4-8 times.
Bonus: spend time with wild cherry trees in the woods.
Plants and Botany
Go look at trees, choose two trees and spend 15 minutes with each tree. Observe. Write down all the observations you make of the tree so that someone else could go find that tree.
Miscellaneous!
- Get on the discord! Find the #introductions channel and post an introduction!
- Try connecting to the google drive
We also love these resources:
- Karyn Sanders podcast: Wildcrafting; an Indigenous Perspective (1 hr. radio show)
- Leave it for Native People (video, 3min, hosted on facebook) or read The Ethics of Burning Sage, Explained by Nylah Burton and Jay Polish (reading, 5 pgs.)
- Finding Our Way Podcast, Season 2 Episode 5 Seeds, Grief, and Memory with Rowen White (audio, 52 min)
- Exploring Yoga and Cultural Appropriation with nisha ahuja (25 min. video)
http://www.decolonizingyoga.com/exploring-yoga-cultural-appropriation-nisha-ahuja/
When We Talk About Cultural Appropriation, We’re Missing The Point by Ijeoma Oluo
https://medium.com/the-establishment/when-we-talk-about-cultural-appropriation-were-missing-the-point-abe853ff3376