Wild Cherries – Intro to Herbal Medicine Homework

For: September • August • July • June • May • 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 September

Media – Ableism & Disability Justice

BASIC (read if you haven’t heard about the spoon theory)

REQUIRED

BONUS

EXTRA BONUS!

Ableism Reflection Activity

How does ableism show up in western medicine?  In western herbal medicine?

How does ableism and healthism show up in your relationship with taking herbs and taking care of yourself?

Garden Activity

  • Sit with the garden, witness and be witnessed by the plants.  How does this feel?  Water and weed!  Harvest calendula and make the tincture.  (The tincture is in the shed by the sitting area. The key for the shed is stored in the lockbox on the refrigerated trailer, and the code to get into that lockbox is posted on our Discord. It’s the smallest key in the lockbox. The tincture is on the first shelf on the left.)

Plants ID & Botany

  • Find six new plants you don’t know! Key them out!

End-of-Year Presentation

We want to bring your attention to the exciting upcoming class projects!  In November, you’ll have time to present on a topic of your choosing to your classmates! This can be in the form of a powerpoint, a lecture, an experiential activity, a reading, a writing, a demonstration… the possibilities are endless. We want you to engage in a topic that peaks your interest and to share that with each other in some form. Your homework for this month is to come up with a topic that you’re interested in and email it to us — we’ll give feedback and suggestions and help you narrow down your topic if needed!

Some past student projects have been:
Experiments with natural dyes
Pine medicine
Slavic herb traditions and mythologies zine
An illustrated children’s book about the magic of plants
Herbs for ADHD
Derbalism- Herbs for Dogs

For August

White Supremacy and Health Care

Rest is Resistance with Tricia Hersey, Become a Good Ancestor, episode 10 (video – 1 hour)

Roots of African American Herbalism, From the Herbal Academy (21 pages)

Body Practices

From My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menkem, pages 63-65 and 77 and 78

Readings for White People in the Class (Optional for People of Color)

The Sugar Coated Language of White Fragility, by Anna Kegler (12 pages)

Writing Prompts to use if you’ve been accused of white fragility, spiritual bypass or white privilege, by Leesa Renee Hall (12 pages)

Bonus content

Blue Pill (on MDMA-based therapy for black folks for healing racial trauma and PTSD), The Nod, 2/4/2019 (podcast – 39 minutes)

Reflection Questions

  • What parts of these articles/recordings feel painful for you?
  • What parts make you want to act differently?
  • What parts left you with more questions and things you want to think more about or spend more time with?
  • Are there parts that you had a hard time with or disagree with?
  • What did you learn about yourself?

Garden Tending

  • Visit the class garden.  Weed, harvest, observe!

Materia Medica

  • Try a tea, tincture, or snack on a plant that we’ve talked about in class – using the grounding and listening techniques we’ve been practicing. Spend an hour with it (or at least 15 minutes), for a week or two, and write down any notes about your observations.

Plants ID & Botany

  • Find six new plants you don’t know! Key them out!

For July

Roots of the Medical Industrial Complex by Cara Page (6 pages)

The Racist and Sexist History of Keeping Birth Control Side Effects Secret by Bethy Squires (8 pages)
Alternately, a past student made an audio recording of this piece for us – 12 minutes

The following two writings on the history of the American Medical Association and how it strategically destroyed women’s roles in healthcare and healing. The first writing is very Eurocentric and doesn’t include a comprehensive history around practitioners and healers of color in the USA. We’ve included the article about race and the AMA to add some parts of that history, but haven’t found a comprehensive resource covering both. The brief history that the Witches, Midwives, Nurses covers of the destruction of lay healers and witches in Europe, can also be traced into any culture around the globe that was colonized by Europeans — one of the first tactics in colonization is to destroy healers and their knowledge.

Witches, Midwives and Nurses (Text or Pamphlet) by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English (68 very short pages, plus a 25 page introduction you can read if you want)
Or listen to this (77 minutes) or this (92 minutes) audio recording

The culture war between doctors and midwives, explained by Ranjani Chakraborty
(6 minute video)

Where did all the granny midwives go? (4 minute video)

Reflection Questions and activity

How does patriarchy show up in your experiences of western medicine?
How does patriarchy show up in your relationships with plants?

Invite magic and anti-patriarchy into a healing ritual for yourself and maybe others this month.  What do you do?  How does it feel?

Tend to the Garden – weed, water, spend time with the plants, harvest as needed and make communal medicines. We’ll go over more notes about making medicine as the plants get bigger, so look out for that tutorial

Digestion – pick ANY ONE intervention we talked about (eg. try taking bitters or aromatic bitters before meals, or keeping a food and symptom journal, or slowing down and paying attention while you eat, or using herbs that tonify your mucus membranes, or…) and try it out regularly for the month! How does it go for you?

Plant ID – key out 5 brand spankin’ new plants in Newcombs – what’s flowering near you now?

BONUS CONTENT

The American Medical Association and Race by Robert B. Baker, PhD (10 pages)

Mary Coley’s 1953 film All My Babies- A Midwifes Own Story (54 minute video)

For June

  • Read the tea hand out, make 2 kinds of tea.  How did it go?
  • Connect with oats and motherwort medicine this month.  Make a tea or take the tincture 1-2 times a day to support your emotional health.  How does it feel?  Are there short term or long term changes?
  • Put a loved one in a foot soak.  How does this act of community care feel?
  • Tend the garden 1-2 times this month
  • Key out 5 plants

Video/Audio – Fatphobia

  • This American Life, Episode 589: Tell Me I’m Fat (audio – 67 min)
    • (We feel the interviews in this episode are really meaningful, but we apologize for subjecting you to Ira Glass’ commentary, which we find unbearable.) 
  • Maintenance Phase, The Body Mass Index (audio – 69 min) – Apple Podcasts, Spotify
  • The Roxanne Gay Agenda, Best of Hear to Slay: The Fat Tax, w/ Sabrina Strings and Sonya Renee Taylor (audio – 78 min) – Apple Podcasts
  • Or if you need a shorter listen, Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body is Not an Apology ~ Radical Alchemy (video – 22 min)

For May

Capitalism, Mental/Emotional Health

Reflection – pick two or more of these questions to think/write about

  • How has capitalism shaped how you think about your own health?
  • How do your ideas about health perpetuate health stigmas?
  • How do we build anticapitalist care networks?
  • How do the stigmas around mental illness affect your relationship to your own emotional health?

Materia Medica

  • Seek out plantain or violet — finding it in the world, observing, keeping it company, eating it, using the medicine, meditating with it, daydreaming about it. Write about your experience.
    • If you pick the flowers or leaves, notice how it feels to do so. Notice the impact you have on the spot the plant is growing. Also be mindful that you’re not eating plants from a location that’s likely to be polluted with lead or chemicals!
  • Bonus: Make a tea from fresh violet flowers! Add a little lemon, and watch the color change! Cool! Take a video of it and post it to the discord!

Plants and Botany

  • Key out five plants. (Turn in a sample or drawing of the plant, plus the steps you took in newcombs and your id.)

Change Work

  • What does care look like in your life, and the lives of people you care about? How can we give and receive the best care possible? What are the barriers? What are the resources we have for our care or to share with other people?
  • What role do you feel more comfortable in: a caregiving role or a care-receiving role?  Reflect on that. How could you feel more comfortable in both roles?

Additional Readings and Recordings

Podcast: Trauma, Healing, & Collective Power with generative somatics (adrienne maree brown, Prentis Hemphill, Spenta Kandawalla and Staci K. Haines) – 44 min

For April

Wildcrafting

Cultural Appropriation

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:

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

Past Homework Assignments from Bygone Years

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