As we celebrate the diverse culture of our country this month, we also recognize the profound wisdom of Indigenous plant medicine. Author LoriAnn Bird, a Métis herbalist and educator, offers some insights into nature’s gifts and how they have sustained Indigenous peoples for generations.
Indigenous peoples in the Americas understand health and well-being as a complex interplay among body, mind, spirit, and emotion.
Indigenous science in the Americas uses the same plants that are found in Western/allopathic pharmacopeia, but Bird says “the history is not a written history. It’s an oral history, a transmission. It’s what all cultures did.”
The plants that prevent, reduce, and relieve pain and inflammation have sustained humans across the globe for generations. “This knowledge is not specific to any culture,” Bird says. “We are all people of the earth.”
Indigenous peoples, both historically and today, have used healing practices shaped through experience and knowledge of their natural environment. Although the Western biomedical model has led to better outcomes for some populations in many areas of public health, modern life has created a rise in inflammatory conditions, including allergies and other autoimmune diseases. (COVID-19 and long COVID are also inflammatory conditions.) Plants, for this reason, remain a vital food and medicine today.
The world’s oceans contain multiple plants with active pharmacological properties. In 2020, a European research team led by scientists at the Institute of Virology in Erlangen, Germany, worked with natural compounds collected from land and marine sources around the world to discover candidates for new antiviral drug development.
Their published, peer-reviewed research paper noted that natural products “have the advantage of more favourable toxicological profiles, fewer side effects, and a faster approval process in comparison to chemically engineered drugs.”
Before colonization, Indigenous peoples on the Northwest Coast of North America used marine algae, such as fresh rockweed, as medicine for swelling, burns, and muscle aches. Bull kelp was made into a skin salve for sunburns and other complaints. To preserve these keystone marine species, we need to maintain the biodiversity of the world’s oceans.
Bird, whose new book is Revered Roots: Ancestral Teachings and Wisdom of Wild, Edible, and Medicinal Plants (Cool Spring Press, 2025), sees plants as teachers.
“We all want to be in control, because of our traumas,” Bird says. “We don’t want to feel that ever again—but the more we don’t want to feel it, the more we’re going to feel it. Everything is a teacher. What can I learn from this experience? How can I accept this experience? How do I find my centre in this experience?”
When we’re in pain, Bird says it’s usually because our mind, body, spirit, or emotion is out of alignment. When this happens, we can use tinctures, salves, and teas to influence the mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional aspects of our existence.
Western medicine has discovered that healing inflammation, which is at the heart of many chronic diseases ranging from arthritis to heart disease and cancer to mental health, is about moving the lymphatic system. Or, as Métis herbalist, educator, and author LoriAnn Bird explains, “We have an ocean inside of us.”
“Inflammation is heat in the body,” says Bird. “Heat can be created when we’re feeling angry. We can’t see the unconscious, so we project it out on to someone or something else before we’ll take responsibility.
“If you’re in pain and you have inflammation, you need to ask what’s causing it. What is it that you don’t want to let go of? It might be something you’re not even conscious of.”
“There’s got to be something underneath this anger that we’re walking around with,” Bird says. “Physical pain can be rooted from the spiritual. We go into our mental space; we’re thinking too much; we don’t want to feel our emotions, so we deny them and use all these things to cope.”
When settlers arrived on Canada’s east coast, Indigenous peoples gave them pine needle tea to heal the scurvy they’d developed on their ocean voyages. Bird still collects and eats wild plants that are high in vitamin C, like evergreen tips.
When she plants a garden, Bird creates an ecosystem, planting yarrow to support pollinators and comfrey near the compost pile to accelerate decomposition. This ecosystem approach also extends to the human body.
Plants are potent medicines, so Bird says that each person must learn which plants work for them and which plants are not recommended for their particular conditions. “It’s a lifetime journey of learning,” Bird says. “Plants give up their lives [to] teach us, to help repair our bodies, to put us back in balance, but they can do damage to our bodies too.”
Bird works with learners of all generations and backgrounds to help inspire them to communicate with and recognize the wisdom of the natural world around us.
Bird is thinking ahead, with a plan to revitalize and preserve Indigenous knowledge and the healing potential of medicinal plants for generations to come.
There are many plants that are used to help prevent, reduce, and relieve pain and inflammation, including the following:
sorrel (Rumex acetosa) |
for fever, UTIs, nausea, sore throat |
echinacea (Echinacea purpurea) |
was used by the Blackfoot for toothaches, the Dakota for poisonous bites, the Pawnee for pain and burns, and the Cheyenne for rheumatism and arthritis |
maple (Acer circinatum) |
polyphenols may reduce inflammation and help prevent conditions such as arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, and heart disease |
slippery elm (Ulmus rubra) |
used to soothe the mucous membrane of the gut; may also be helpful for burns |
willow (Salix cortex) |
contains salicylates, used for pain relief |
rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis L.) |
has anti-inflammatory properties that may help improve concentration and alleviate cognitive decline |
peppermint (Mentha) |
is an anti-inflammatory and analgesic that may help alleviate nausea, heartburn, and painful menstruation |
paper birch (Betula papyrifera) |
has anti-inflammatory properties and is sacred to the Cree and Ojibwe |
horsetail (Equisetum arvense) |
is an anti-inflammatory that has been used to help relieve allergic reactions |
This article was originally published in the July 2025 issue of alive magazine.