Check back on this page for monthly homework assignments for our 2025 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 June
Plant Connections and Community Care
- Connect with oats and motherwort medicine (or another nervine that we mentioned in class that you feel a connection with) this month. Make a tea or take the tincture 1-2 times a day. 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 (water, weed, pick up trash, hang out at the garden and observe/just be there)
- Key out 5 plants
Video/Audio – Fatphobia
- 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) – TuneIn
- ** NOTE— You may have to find the episode by name at this link – scroll down and click SEE MORE **
- Or if you need a shorter listen, Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body is Not an Apology ~ Radical Alchemy (video – 22 min)
We also like….
- 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.)
For May
Capitalism, Mental/Emotional Health
- Reading: Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, The Need (4 pgs)
- Reading or Audio: Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance (28 pgs or 45 min)
- Video: Gabor Mate, Why Capitalism Makes Us Sick (27 min audio only)
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?
Other things we love
- Reading: Janny Scott, Life at the Top in America isn’t Just Better, it’s Longer (16 pgs)
- Or audio recording, courtesy of Rachel (40 min)
- Reading: Emily Cutler, Breaking Free From the Stigma Paradox (16 pgs)
- Or audio recording, courtesy of Rachel (42 min)
- Podcast: Trauma, Healing, & Collective Power with generative somatics (adrienne maree brown, Prentis Hemphill, Spenta Kandawalla and Staci K. Haines) – 44 min
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.
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