Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Saturday, July 13, 2024
Friday, July 12, 2024
Tuesday, June 25, 2024
Prairie des Femmes at Botanica
Life Everlasting | Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium
Ashlee Wilson, 2024
Installation
In "Café des Exiles," George Washington Cable reports,
"An antiquated story-and-a-half Creole cottage sitting right down on the banquette, as do the Choctaw (women) who sell bay and sassafras and life-everlasting."
What was this old herb the Choctaw women sold while sitting on the banquette in New Orleans? Used by traiteurs in down the bayou communities for centuries, life everlasting known also as fragrant rabbit tobacco and vinéraire is revered for her healing properties, as well as a distinct syrup smell. Indigenous people of this land used her as a sweat lodge and funerary herb, smudge, lung and skin healer, as well as psychological aid. She is a spirit plant and integral part of smoking blends of the Americas. In Creole culture, she was used as a remedy for fever.
Living in southwest Louisiana, I was told that vinéraire was a "lost" plant, her absence a sign of the impact of saltwater intrusion and habitat destruction. But in 2011, a patch appeared at my home, Prairie des Femmes (Prairie of the Women), in St. Landry Parish. I first realized vinéraire was growing by smelling its fragrance. I often say she's smart like a chaoui (racoon). If you leave food out and make a habitat for it, she will follow you around. A mid-successional species, she can appear when a prairie begins to heal, coming back to its original vitality. The quest to identify and grow her has given me what feels like a secret wink from the universe.
From the first three volunteer plants, there are now over 200. I celebrated every new plant, complimented her, called her "darling," manicured the caterpillars, cleared the weeds and protected her from poison as well as from man's cruel blade. The plants multiplied and they got bigger. In addition to making medicines, I save the seeds and share them with native women, and all those who need it, in an effort to return this important healing herb to the land and people of south Louisiana.
edited by Rachel Breunlin
The Prairie Has a Memory Ashlee Wilson, 2024
Ashlee Wilson is a Ville Platte native and self-taught Louisiana French speaker. She is a teacher and artist known for her writing, photography and visual journals that document her acquisition of Louisiana French, as well as native plants and folk herbalism. She is the creator of the Prairie des Femmes blog (2012), an online space that documents this historical prairie's daily life, as well as The Plains of Mary (2014) and the Ô Malheureuse collection (2019 UL Press). She teaches French at the Academy of the Sacred Heart at Grand Coteau.
The Prairie Has a Memory is an homage to her home, La Prairie des Femmes (Prairie of the Women), in St. Landry Parish. Found in records since the mid to late eighteenth century, the land is located in an area of high native traffic near the boundaries of the Attakapas-Ishak and Opelousas territories, just east of the sacred hills of Grand Coteau. A former sweet potato farm, for more than twenty years, Ashlee has cultivated plants and knowledge of the prairie with her family as an act of restoration- planting native species, and implementing a plan to minimally mow, periodically burn, and forgo poison on the land.
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.
Thursday, May 30, 2024
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
Part 9: The prairie has a memory.
Part 9:
Over the two years that I observed this plant I gained an ability to spot her and tell the difference between her and her cousin purple cudweed. In May of 2023 I had Amanda Lafleur, Bill Fontenot and Dr. Charles Ray Brassieur over for what we called a vineraire-coffee summit. I walked them out to the field to see one of the closest plants.
Since I had seen Dr. Allain last winter, every once in a while I would send him a new photograph of the plants. His photos on the USGS survey website were one of my main resources in identification, so we all knew his word was gospel. So finally on a particularly hot day in July I found 13 more plants in the overgrown coton jaune patch to the east side of the field. They were five times the size of the plants in the west yard. With that, I found the courage to call Dr. Allain, who lives 2 miles as the crow flies from me. I explained again what I had growing and encouraged him to come anytime to see the big plants. He was at my field within an hour.
As we walked around he told me that he was initially incredulous because he had never seen this plant just “growing in someone’s yard” like that. He said that it was a mid-successional species, and that they appear halfway to when the prairie habitat is “healed”, that is, back to its original vitality and biodiversity. I found some metaphor in this.
Although Prairie des Femmes is remote, she is hardly untouched. Dr. Allain said that this life everlasting can be found in some of the rehabilitated prairie habitats as well as prairie remnants, and as I understand, needs the biodiversity of the intact prairie soil and root system (never tilled for agriculture) to thrive. Although we are an old and somewhat insulated prairie close to the wild oxbow swamp to the north, our field was not a prairie remnant, but rather a fallow and overworked sweet potato field. In my opinion, this plant must have survived in our place not because it was pristine, but because of the way we managed the land, including planting native species, forgoing poison, minimal mowing and burning periodically.
So my field was not a prairie remnant but maybe the place where I found the first plant in 2011, in the far southwest corner of the yard, was rounded by the plow and retained some type of biodiversity needed for this plant to survive. Perhaps she came on the feet of some bird or deer, or in the fur of the coyotes who passed noisily in the field. Whatever it was, somehow this vineraire patch had survived here. The prairie has a memory.
When we went to the local neighborhood boucherie my neighbor Monique Verdin’s cousins from down the bayou were all there. I gave some of the rabbit tobacco to all the neighbors, Monique’s cousins, as well as her most matriarchal aunt who remembered it. That fall I was put in touch with Marlene Toups who called it the “lost herb” and said she had not seen it in 40 years down the bayou. When I hand delivered a bag to Mrs. Marlene at festivals Acadiens et Creoles, she smelled it and said, “you found it”. Mr. Clovis Billiot said that the salt water intrusion had “tout tue’ en bas”. Hurricane Hilda and Ida were the worst and the water stayed a long time inland, enough time to kill the tender medicinals. I gave the plant and beaucoup seed to Theresa Dardar as well as Janie Luster (or maybe I just called Ms. Janie and offered it).
I was also able to return a big bag to the Attakapas-Ishak tribe through their daughter Maaliyah Papillion, a Creole and Indigenous actress, singer, model, former Ms. Louisiana and third-generation healer. In return her father and uncle gave me information on the ceremonial blend rabbit tobacco was used in, as well as a spear point directly to my eldest son, who had escorted me there.
Vineraire Part 8: Life Everlasting
Life Everlasting
An antiquated story-and-a-half Creole cottage sitting right down on the banquette, as do the Choctaw squaws who sell bay and sassafras and life-everlasting. -George Washington Cable, Café des Exilés
As any good student of Louisiana literature I had read Toole, Grau, Gaines, Percy, Fontenot and Chopin at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. However, it was reading George Washington Cable’s Old Creole Days under the tutelage of the late Dr. Maurice Duquesnay, rumored muse for certain attributes of Ignatius J. Riley HIMSELF, that brought me the first mention of the elusive herb, life everlasting.
No mind, the herb was one of those details that, as a college student, I glossed over. Bay laurel and sassafras were common enough in our food. Bay leaves went in soups and gumbos. I foraged bay laurel at the top of a bluff on Santa Rosa Island, Florida. The sassafras root I was given to chew as a child. The leaf was known in my town as the ubiquitous tonic “tisane” and was, according to Mayor Vidrine, good for everything, including puberty. With harvested sassafras leaves (sometimes green, sometimes red) I would dry and grind filé to sprinkle in my gumbo bowl at the last minute. But life everlasting? What was this old herb the Choctaw women sold while sitting on the banquette in New Orleans?
It took twenty years for me to close my knowledge gap in the indigenous women’s herbal trifecta. As I was identifying the same mysterious herb in my own field, my husband at the time was creating a performance at the Music Box Village in New Orleans called "Café des Exilés" where our friend and poet Moose read so beautifully the very excerpt about the Choctaw women and their life everlasting.
Life everlasting. They say this herb will heal anything: skin, lungs and spirit, and make you live a long time. For me, there was a deeper meaning. Not only was my life feeling utterly over and un-lasting at that time because of my failed marriage, I had reason to attach the folklore about this plant as a respiratory and funerary herb, a protector and smudge, and connector to the afterlife to other experiences I had had. There was a spiritual lesson in this name life everlasting and vineraire, as well as in the properties of this plant. I often say it's smart like a chaoui (racoon). If you leave food out and make a habitat for it, it will follow you around. The everlasting came into my life at a time when we were both at risk of survival. The name life everlasting and the quest to identify and grow it out gave me what felt like a secret wink from the universe and indeed encouraged me to live a long time.
Vineraire Part 7 - Big Bill as the Voice of God
Vineraire Part 7
“What if I told you that plant was sent straight to you from God.”
In May 2023 like the old stories, I found myself alone for the first time in twenty years in the Prairie des Femmes.
I sat in the pasture and relied on my work with this plant to soothe, preoccupy and heal me, and she did all of these things in abundance. I told myself over and over that I was growing this plant to seed for the ladies down the bayou. This gave me hope. I checked on the different plants and their progress, even watering them by hand over a six acre patch. The more I wandered crying aimlessly, the more my tears acted as prisms to magnify her presence. When I watered one plant, another appeared larger in the path before me, until I had found many who were competing with the overgrowth of our uncollected coton jaune. I celebrated every new plant, complimented her, called her "darling", manicured the caterpillars, cleared the weeds and protected her from poison as well as from man's cruel blade. The plants multiplied and they got bigger. From 2022-2023 I had gone from 3 volunteer plants to over 200.
In utter despair at the illusion of a twenty year life I was brutally waking up from, in complete disarray I called on horticulturalist Big Bill Fontenot, who is like an uncle to me. Being from my own hometown our families had connections across the centuries. Over the years of my questioning land and plant memory and “herbal adventuring” Bill had become a trusted mentor. I was completely humbled flat at the turn my life had taken, but Bill was able to clear the weeds for me and show me that through this utterly unbearable pain, there was God. “God is as easy as fallin’ down,” he said.
If finding God was as easily as being near the earth, I was there both mentally and physically and it felt wonderful and terrible. Big Bill offered me the idea that God sent me this plant as a gift as well as and an offering to the intellect and senses I possess to receive her in perfect timing, or at all. God was in the essence of this plant, after all we are all manifestations of God, and if God loves the humble, she was most loved.
Bill also offered that it was strong medicine and required a strong person to handle it properly. I took these offerings and kept him supplied with the dried rabbit tobacco, a spray and a balm I made. In this way survived the summer of 2023.
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Native Ethnobotany Uses of Life Everlasting
Native American Uses of Life Everlasting According to the Native Ethnobotany Database
Alabama
Sedative
Compound decoction of plant used many ways for nervousness or sleeplessness.
Decoction of plant used as a face wash for nerves and insomnia.
Cherokee
Analgesic
Compound used for local pains, muscular cramps and twitching.
Infusion of plant rubbed into scratches made over muscle cramp pain.
Antirheumatic (Internal)
Used with Carolina vetch for rheumatism.
Cold Remedy
Decoction taken for colds.
Misc. Disease Remedy
Used in a sweatbath for various diseases.
Cough Medicine
Used as a cough syrup.
Misc. Disease Remedy
Warm liquid blown down throat for clogged throat (diphtheria).
Throat Aid
Chewed for sore throat.
Respiratory Aid
Smoked for asthma.
Choctaw
Analgesic
Decoction of leaves and blossoms taken for lung pain.
Cold Remedy
Decoction of leaves and blossoms taken for colds.
Creek
Cold Remedy
Compound decoction of plant tops taken and used as inhalant for colds.
Adjuvant
Leaves added to medicines as a perfume.
Antiemetic
Decoction of leaves taken for vomiting.
Misc. Disease Remedy
Decoction of leaves used as a throat wash for mumps.
Psychological Aid
Decoction of plant used as a wash for persons who 'wanted to run away.'
Sedative
Decoction of plant tops taken and used as a wash for old people unable to sleep.
Witchcraft Medicine
Decoction of plant used as a wash for persons afflicted by ghosts.
Koasati
Febrifuge
Decoction of leaves taken for fevers.
Pediatric Aid
Notes: Decoction of leaves used as a bath and given to children with fevers.
Menominee
Analgesic
Dried leaves steamed as an inhalant for headache.
Disinfectant
Smudge of leaves used to fumigate premises to dispel ghost of a dead person.
Psychological Aid
Dried leaves steamed as an inhalant for 'foolishness.'
Stimulant
Leaf smoke blown into nostrils to revive one who had fainted.
Meskwaki
Psychological Aid
Smudge of herb used to 'bring back a loss of mind.'
Stimulant
Smudged and used to revive an unconscious patient.
Montagnais
Cough Medicine
Decoction of plant taken for coughing.
Tuberculosis Remedy
Decoction of plant taken for consumption.
Rappahannock
Febrifuge
Infusion of roots taken for chills.
Respiratory Aid
Infusion of dried stems or dried leaves smoked in a pipe for asthma.
Candy
Leaves chewed for 'fun.'
Compiled from Native American Ethnobotany Database
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