Arctic pharmacopia

I think I am safe in stating this as fact: Anyone who is unaware that Inuit are the consummate hunting culture has never heard of Inuit.

And since everyone knows that Inuit are a hunting culture, and since everyone knows that Inuit dwell in some of the coldest places on Earth, Inuit don't get a lot of questions about their traditional herbal knowledge. Most folks, in fact, assume that herbalism would be an alien concept to Inuit, that the Arctic doesn't hold enough variety, in its flora, to base a body of herbal knowledge upon.

Well, the truth is that the assumption is a bit true; but it is also a bit false. I'll explain.

It is true that pre-colonial Inuit, in general, were not especially engrossed in the pursuit of herbal lore. Plants were often not plentiful enough to command the attention of Inuit. This makes sense, since the Arctic can be maddeningly cold, and the time when plants are able to flourish represents a short window of opportunity — the all-to-brief summer months.

Arctic plants are evolved to lie in wait for that seasonal warmth, then explode into action. Three-quarters of the Arctic year is white, grey, black, and blue - until summer warmth elicits a sudden burst of orange, scarlet, violet and green from the patient, low-lying plants that carpet the landscape.

Those who are foreign to the North often have a difficult time understanding just how much plant life there is, all quite low to the ground, but thick and spongy underfoot. Such plant life seems to appear out of nowhere when the snow and ice recede.

Sometimes, it seems as though, in one moment, the world is all crisp, white, crunching angles. In the next, it is endless, moist, yielding colour, a thousand different floral shapes in which fat black spiders, dancing flies and numerous other creatures make innumerable homes.

And, believe it or not, the stuff is useful, too.

The truth is that Inuit have always known that the plants around them are medicinal. They have always known, just as southern aboriginal peoples have, that they are medicines waiting to be used.

Now, southern aboriginal peoples have always made a great deal out of their traditional herbal knowledge — and justifiably so.

Some of the stuff that I have learned from reading and from talking to Indian elders, can make a modern pharmacy look like a cheap candy-store by comparison.

And no human culture, if we look at its ancestry, is different from any other in this respect. We are all human, and therefore all heirs to the same genius, the ability to observe and learn whatever edge our environment might offer us in order to survive.

Ancient Celts, for example, once used the leafy branches of their sacred mistletoe (not the poisonous berries) to soothe nervous disorders. Zulu warriors rushed into battle after ingesting a complex concoction of roots and fungus that dulled pain and amplified aggression. The ancient Greeks and Romans both used lavender for its sedative effect — and in order to make a nice bath.While many cultures have abandoned their traditional herbal knowledge in favour of modern pharmaceuticals (which I am not criticizing, by the way), the aboriginal peoples of North America were overrun with European colonists only recently, and so many of their elders still retain some useful herbal knowledge. Luckily, a lot of it has found its way into book form. This is due, in part, to the great importance southern aboriginal peoples (i.e., Indians) ascribe to their plant lore.

So why don't Inuit ascribe the same importance to their own herbal knowledge? Well, there are really two factors that combine to make up the answer to this question. One is that Inuit were nomadic over almost incomprehensible distances.

This is one of the reasons why different “Eskimoan” cultures can pretty much understand each other's languages and customs from one end of the continent to the other. The other is that the Arctic landscape varies greatly, causing the available plant life to do likewise.

In other words, unlike in the South, there was little consistency in the types of plants Inuit were able to access. And consistency — predictability — is what survival is based upon.

(Continued in part two.)

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