Iwigara Quotes

“Iwígara channels the idea that all life, spiritual and physical, is interconnected in a continual cycle [and] expresses the belief that all life shares the same breath. We are all related to, and play a role in, the complexity of life.” Knowing that I am related to everything around me and share breath with all living things helps me to focus on my responsibility to honor all forms of life. Or, as native writer N. Scott Momaday puts it, everything around us has “being-ness.”
― Enrique Salmon, Iwigara: The Kinship of Plants and People: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science

“Juniper holds a very special place in the minds of native peoples, Hispanics, and other multigenerational residents of the Southwest community. It is tough and resilient, with many practical and sacred uses. It shows up in several American Indian origin stories and has even been used as an analogy explaining why American Indian peoples will always occupy this arid landscape. “Indians are like the juniper tree. Our roots are deep and strong. When the next big wind comes across the land, we will still be standing.”
― Enrique Salmon, Iwigara: The Kinship of Plants and People: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science

“Languages are fascinating windows into how a culture expresses the reality of the universe. In other words, language is culture and worldview. In many American Indian languages, there is no word for poison, nor are there any words for poisonous plants; if words are windows into how a culture thinks about things such as plants, then we can infer from this that to American Indians all plants—even dangerous ones—must have some kind of beneficial purpose.”
― Enrique Salmon, Iwigara: The Kinship of Plants and People: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science

“American Indians use goldenrod as a gambling medicine, among other things. But American Indian games of chance must be perceived through an American Indian lens. Gambling is not only a source of entertainment and community building, it is a sacred practice that is representative of the unpredictable Trickster consciousness and those unknown and unexplainable gray areas of the cosmos. Gambling is sacred chance, an opportunity to be in contact with the living, breathing, scattered cosmos.”
― Enrique Salmon, Iwigara: The Kinship of Plants and People: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science

“Corn is the only traditional American Indian food plant that needs humans, planting its seeds, in order to survive. This is because humans created corn: according to paleoethnobotanists, corn was first hybridized about 9,000 years ago, from teosinte (Zea luxurians), a wild grass relative. Some think that it was somehow also crossed with eastern gamagrass (Tripsacum dactyloides) and possibly other relatives, such as Z. perennis or Z. diploperennis. Archeobotanical evidence suggests this crossing and selection occurred somewhere in southern Mexico.
It is more than a food. It is also a medicine, used in crafts, and in construction. In addition, we feel that we are directly related to it. It is often a significant part of ceremony and even traditional arts. My people, the Rarámuri, believe we emerged into this world from ears of corn after a huge cleansing deluge. The Hopi believe they were asked by the Creator to choose from certain ears of corn after they emerged into this, the Fourth World; they also maintain spiritual figures known as corn maidens. Corn is really a large grass: it’s in the same family as the grass on your neighbor’s lawn, bamboo, and wild rice and other grains. Corn is a true annual: it must be planted by humans every year.”
― Enrique Salmon, Iwigara: The Kinship of Plants and People: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science

“The land and its plant and animal inhabitants are an important source of American Indian morals and values. It can even be said that the land embodies our sense of right and wrong. These morals and values are culturally reproduced and transferred through our oral literature, our stories, and chokecherries figure in many of these. In an indigenous Pacific Northwest tale, Coyote fixes Magpie’s broken wing with a piece of chokecherry. Afterward, Coyote learns of a large sucking monster that is wiping out one of his favorite foods, salmon. In the process of killing the monster, Coyote saves all his animal friends and creates the landscape of the Pacific Northwest as it looks today.”
― Enrique Salmon, Iwigara: The Kinship of Plants and People: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science

“Of all native peoples in the contiguous United States, the peoples of these arid regions (The Hopi, the Navajo, the Tewa) have remained most admirably resilient, adhering to their lands, their languages, their spirituality, their food ways, and their plant knowledge. Up on the Colorado Plateau the Hopi continue to practice the Hopi Way, a spiritual lifestyle that does not strive for a specific outcome or product but rather is a journey, focused on what is learned along the way about their relationship to place and community.”
― Enrique Salmon, Iwigara: The Kinship of Plants and People: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science

“To the west of the Great Plains were the Rocky Mountains. The caretakers of the elevations and valleys of the Rockies and the Intermountain West were the Ute, Arapaho, Crow, Flathead, Shoshone, Jicarilla Apache, and Nez Perce. Their origin stories include morals that suggest they were chosen to occupy their mountainous environments in order to protect them. The people of the mountains were few in number but developed lifestyles that took advantage of what was offered by the seasons as well as by the different elevations. They knew how to use the different kinds of aspen, piñon, cedar, and dogwood for medicine, food, and for building shelter. They often stayed in the lower elevations in order to take advantage of mountain mahogany, chokecherry, currant, nahavita, and all the Rocky Mountain plants that have adapted to cold winters, short summers, and high elevations. They traveled east onto the plains in order to hunt buffalo and traded for foods with their Pueblo neighbors to the southwest.”
― Enrique Salmon, Iwigara: The Kinship of Plants and People: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science