For: April
Check back on this page for monthly homework assignments for our 2026 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
We spent a lot of time with wild cherry medicine this past month. Pick a different herb, and investigate it with the same curiosity: try the tea, tincture or another preparation. Experience it slowly. 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? How does it shift your thoughts and emotions? Try it a few times and see how it shifts in different moments.
Plants and Botany
Go look at trees. Are there any your recognize from our tree walks? Choose two trees in particular 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 based on your description.
Pick a couple of plants, using the botany handout to try to identify whether they are:
- Opposite, alternate or whorled, or are there just basal leaves
- Simple or compound leaves
- Leaves entire, toothed, lobed
- If there are flowers:
- are they regular or irregular
- how many “parts” (eg. petals or sepals) do they have?
- can you spot the petals, sepals, stamen and pistil?
- is the flower single or in a head? If a head, do you think it’s a spike, a raceme, a panacle, a corymb, an umbel, a cyme?
Bonus 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)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OoBaDt9cvQ
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