Salish Plant Society aims to help native people learn about traditional food sources

From the rolling plains of Montana to the high alpine region of the Bitterroot mountains, there is a rich diet to be found.

Ethnobotanist Rose Bear Don’t Walk said she wants to reconnect Montana’s Bitterroot Salish people with foods they’ve depended on for thousands of years, after they were forcibly pushed to the side for a more Western diet.

“I’d like to think of the Salish people as being some of the healthiest people in the world before colonization … because a lot of our food culture revolved around foraging, harvesting, hunting and fishing," she said. "There was also a lot of movement incorporated in that, but we were getting a plethora of nutrients from plants, game and fish."

Bear Don’t Walk is a longtime resident of the Flathead Reservation and is a descendant of the Bitterroot Salish and Crow tribes. After receiving a degree in political science from Yale University, she returned home to get her master’s degree in environmental studies at the University of Montana. Ethnobotany is the study of how plants and culture connect, and Bear Don’t Walk’s work specifically focuses on how Salish people viewed the plants they used for food and medicine.

“A lot of Salish people knew about certain plants by the qualities that they possessed, so things like rose hips have a lot of vitamin C. There are a lot of plants used for food that were also used for medicine. So, if you can imagine hundreds of food plants being used and each of them having their own kind of full nutrition profile,” she said.

The Salish Plant Society will help increase access and knowledge for the Salish community about traditional food plants. This includes how to identify them, where they grow, and different stages of growth, all available on an online platform. Bear Don’t Walk said there will also be other related resources, such as the tenets of how Salish people interacted with food plants and how to forage in a sustainable way.

She said this guide is important because it’s a resource about Salish plants made by Salish people. Her work is about piecing it all together and presenting it in an accessible way, but the knowledge comes from watching many women in her community and her family over the years.

“There are things I’ve been doing my whole life that I didn’t realize were part of this continuous cycle of passing down traditional ecological knowledge and the role of Salish women in keeping food plant knowledge specifically,” Bear Don’t Walk said.

Every year the community gathers for the Bitterroot Feast in late spring, where for generations a young Salish girl is chosen to dig up the first root of the season. The tradition is based on a story where the bitterroot was given as a gift to an elderly Salish woman and her people during a time of famine. It is also traditional that women are the only people who can prepare the bitterroot. Bear Don’t Walk remembers being picked as a young girl for the honor.

“I was like, ‘oh my gosh, I’m so excited to dig the first bitterroot, this is so great,’ but now that I’m older and I look back on that experience, it’s a way of Salish people passing that community knowledge and kind of responsibility that Salish women are very important to our food systems and our tribal way of living,” she said.

That experience is what got her engaged in learning about traditional Salish food systems. The bitterroot is only one of the many plants important to her community; camas is another plant that was important to Salish people and was also mainly cultivated and processed by women in the tribe. Chokecherries, huckleberries and serviceberries were also huge food staples because of the ability to pick them in great quantities. Even though many tribal members still hunt and fish, most don’t experience a connection to these plants in their everyday lives anymore.

“A lot of my work and my research has been, ‘how can we come back to our traditional food systems?’ and it’s really important for me to be a Salish young woman, to be able to be a part of that larger knowledge link,” she said.

The Salish Plant Society is funded by 500 Women Scientists, a national organization dedicated to building an inclusive scientific community and to training a more diverse group of future leaders in the field. Bear Don’t Walk said the website is set to launch early next year, and is primarily for Salish people but open to anyone interested in learning more about traditional ecological knowledge and cultivating positive relationships with the land and plants around them.

Anyone interested in getting involved or supporting the project can reach Bear Don’t Walk at rose@salishplantsociety.com.