Botanical Magic: Medicine Woman’s In-Depth Study Reveals Plants' Offerings

Review of PLANTS HAVE SO MUCH TO GIVE US, ALL WE HAVE TO DO IS ASK by Mary Siisip Geniusz.

Plants Have So Much to Give Us (Geniusz)The book represents three decades of learning and exploration on the part of author Mary Siisip Geniuz, who was a teaching assistant to the late Keewaydinoquay, an Anishinaabe/Ojibwe medicine woman. Keewaydinoquay, a teacher and ethnobotanist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, charged Geniusz with the responsibility of passing on her knowledge to another generation.

“Now, at the time of this writing, Keewaydinoquay is gone on the four-day journey to the Other Side, my children are grown, and I am rapidly aging,” Geniusz writes. “I face the same quandary that mymashkikiiwikwe,medicine woman, faced: how to manage not to die until I have transmitted the knowledge that she gave me, that she held from Nodjimiahkwe and the ancestral teachers down the ages.”

Read the full article.

Published in: Indian Country Today Media Network
By: Tanya H. Lee