Tuesday, June 25, 2024
Monday, June 24, 2024
Botanica at the Cabildo
Botanica: Gardens, Landscapes, and Plant Medicines in South Louisiana 
Click here to visit the website.
Thu, June 20, 2024 - Sun, May 10, 2026
This exhibition explores the cultural meaning of Louisiana medicinal plants and how historically based understandings of them are evolving under the threat of climate change and land loss. Guest curators Rachel Breunlin and Monique Verdin collaborate with herbalists, artists, gardeners, and scholars to place into context stories of historical and contemporary gardens and natural environments.
This exhibition will be open at the Cabildo until May 10, 2026.
Wednesday, June 19, 2024
Rabbit Chew
I have walked the fields around here and all the way to Chicot and back practically, and I do not ever see rabbit tobacco. The indigenous women and biologists that visited me agree that it's unusual for this plant to pop up "in someone's yard". My back field is not exactly my yard, but I see what they mean.
Just last week at another visit with Big Bill, he reiterated how strange he found it all. He said that usually you see this plant along highways and clearings where the roadside has been cut or sprayed. Here it grew among all of the prairie competitors, in high coton jaune. I found that this plant rose to the competition around her. Bill suggested that I document her companion plants and geolocate individual plants.
We had not exactly cleared, but burned the prairie in Fall 2022. Prairie fire is medicine for the land and the burned sections are where the most rabbit tobacco popped up, though not the largest. The largest ones were 3-4 feet high and grew in the eastern yard in the rows of coton jaune we never gathered.
One of my wishes is to find another patch here in the prairie. No luck there yet, but I think it must exist. Another wish is to find the nearest place beyond this prairie where it survives. I know it is north of here, but how far north? My answer came this week by way of a bow hunter. He said "rabbit chew" is what the old people drink for cough, and that it grows today in the clear cuts and after-burns in Thistlewaite and Kitsatche Forest.
Tuesday, June 18, 2024
Bashuchak
I've been going down a few rabbit (tobacco) holes in search of more indigenous information about the vineraire. The first reports I received of it being nearly gone down the bayou came from native women who remembered their daddies bringing it in from the rabbit hunt. Folklore says that rabbits live in the briar patch. This rabbit tobacco is a natural healer for the thin skinned lapin if it is ever snagged.
The Native Ethnobotany Database has been helpful in listing the varied ways tribes across the continent used it. I was most interested in some of the ways of the Choctaw, since they were a major tribe in my area of Louisiana. In google searches using different common names for the plant, as well as searching for Choctaw sources with it, I found the book Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial life of the Choctaw Indians by John R. Swanson, that contained by first cite of the Choctaw name for life everlasting: bashuchak, or bvshuchak. I searched online Choctaw dictionaries and a glossary and noted that this word also looked like the word I knew for sumac, bachoucta. In an email with indigenous writer Jeffery Darrensbourg, he relayed to me information that confirmed that bachoucta was the same word as bashuchak (also bvshuchak) and could refer to four medicines: greenbriar (I know this as kantak), elderberry, purple sumac and rabbit tobacco. I can also say that all four of these plant friends grow around my home, and came into my life around the same time.
See my work featuring the above items at Botanica the Cabildo through 2026.
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