Aside from the fact that the land transfer happened under threat from the U. S. Army using tactics no realtor would engage in, the idea that the Potawatomi could sell the land is one only the invading consciousness would buy. For clarity’s sake, the "Potawatomi" call themselves the Bodawadomi and are part of the larger Anishinaabe nation. In times past the majority of people in this area were Anishinaabe, mostly Bodawadomi, Odawa and Ojibwe (also called Chippewa). A primary understanding among traditional Anishinaabeg is that the earth and the beings who move around on the surface are inseparable, both from the earth herself and from each other. We are really all very closely related.

If you think about it, the truth of this way of understanding becomes self evident. When we are eating food grown and harvested locally (which is how it was always done in times past), we are literally consuming the nutrients that Earth in this location has put into the plants and animals. We are drinking the groundwater, river water or both that flow through this place. We place our wastes into the ground (at least in times past) and the nutrients in those wastes go back into the Circle of Life. We are not separate from the Circle of Life in this place, but part of it. I’ve been told that the reason there is no word in the Anishinaabe language for "nature" is because humans and nature are inseperable. Our bodies are constructed from the nutrients of the soil, water and air of Earth, and the more our consumption is local, the more we truly are this place.

I’ve heard that Native people couldn’t imagine selling the land because it would be like selling their mother. I think it’s more accurate to say that selling the land would be like selling a crucial part of your own body, like your liver or your heart. Either way, the idea that the land could be bought and sold is one the invading culture brought with them. The Anishinaabeg here moved because they wanted their children to continue to live, even if it meant learning how to live in a different place. It was made clear to them that if they did not move they would not live. A land transfer under threat of death can hardly be called a sale, even if money and/or goods changed hands.

I have learned to pray in the ancient Anishinaabe way. In the way I have been taught, we sing to the beings in each of the four directions. Next we bend down and sing into our true Mother. We are told this direction is not down, but IN. We then reach up and sing toward all of Creation including the sky and stars. We are told this direction is not up, but OUT. The assumption behind these practices is that we ARE the land, and that we are inseparable from our mother Earth.

Perhaps the effect of the food grown on this continent, the water from this place and the air that flows across this land is making a difference. I sometimes think that these influences are why so many American people are drawn to understand more about the people who lived here before the conquest. There is a curiosity about Native ways and Native perspectives evident among many Americans. It is difficult for these curious people to find good teachers among the Native people, and even more difficult for them to be able to discern the good teachers from the not so good. There are cultural norms evident in people who are walking their talk and following the traditional ways that people from outside that culture have trouble spotting. And there are powerful reasons for Native people to be cautious in their dealings with people from the conquering culture.

Despite these difficulties some evidence of the influence of this continent on the people who live here is apparent. If you ask people from the rest of the developed world to name their most sacred places you’ll hear answers like "Notre Dame Cathedral," "The Taj Mahal," "Westminister Abby," and "the Vatican." If you ask the same question of Americans you hear answers like "the Grand Canyon," "the Everglades," "the Redwood Forest," and "Glacier National Park." We ARE the land and some of us are waking up to that fact.

First, we only have a rudimentary understanding of the symphony of chemicals that are bioactive within our bodies from even the most well understood plant medicines. We may be able to determine that, for instance, motherwort has 5 or 6 chemical compound that are active. There are many many more that we have no understanding of. We do know that the chemical constituents of plant medicines work together to create healing in our bodies. So if we’re standardizing herbal capsules to one chemical in a very poorly understood mix we don’t even know if we’re paying attention to the most important elements.

Second, we use plant medicines to heal a wide variety of health problems. For instance, motherwort can be used for general anxiety, digestive problems, and irregular heartbeats among other disorders. We don’t know if one of the chemical compounds in motherwort is more important than another in dealing with one of these difficulties in particular, or if they all need to be in a certain balance to receive a certain benefit, so standardizing an herbal remedy to one of the compounds is sort of like shooting in the dark.

Third, we end up using plant medicines prepared by others. Sometimes those others have different ways of understanding plants and the healing they can bring. Most of the time these plant medicines are gathered and prepared with profit in mind which can affect how things are done. While many of the manufacturers of herbal medicines are honorable and conscientious, we do have to trust them to do what they say they are doing and to do a good job of it.

Fourth, there is a gap between us and the plants we are using. When we use herbal medicinals that we purchase we have a direct relationship with the store we purchase them from who has a direct relationship with the manufacturer who has a direct relationship with the people who gather and/or grow the plants who have a direct relationship with the plants. Our personal connection with the plants we use under these circumstances is not close.

I think a more reasonable approach is to go local with plant medicines. We know that the chemical components of plant medicines vary with the seasons, from year to year, and from location to location. The chemical components of our bodies also vary according to these same influences. It makes sense that if we are using the plants from around us they will be growing and changing according to the same factors that are affecting us. They are more likely to carry the factors that we need at that time and place. They are more likely to be able to work in in synchrony with our bodies, minds and spirits and be uniquely suited to our particular needs. Using the plants around us is a way to tap more deeply into the harmony of the natural world that is always a part of us.

In addition, if we are using the plants around us for healing we know all the details about how they are growing, how they are gathered and how they are prepared. We don’t have to wonder if someone gathered them from a field next to a highway or toxic dump. We know they are healthy plants if we gather them ourselves. We know they are fresh, and we know how they were handled after they were gathered. We don’t have to be concerned if the correct plant was used or if something other than the plant was added to the medicine we’re using. We know everything that went into the remedy we take or give to those we love.

We have a long tradition of using plants growing around us as medicines. Before the Industrial Revolution cookbooks usually contained recipes for commonly used medicines. Every household prepared what they needed to maintain health and happiness from what grew around them. Two hundred years ago before the settlers arrived in this area it was the responsibility of mostly the mothers and grandmothers to monitor the members of their family and notice if things started to go out of balance. If someone seemed a little "off" a tea or a salve would be prepared to restore harmony before anything more serious could develop. Or maybe a little bit of a certain plant would be added to the family’s dinner to help everyone. This kind of attention is a natural part of family life, but many of us no longer know what to do about the things we notice.

A couple of weeks ago my friend, Carey Ryan, was telling me about a new garden that was being planned by some of her friends. These people were preparing for a garden of herbs and medicinal plants. They had training in Chinese herbal medicine and the Western Herbal tradition (mostly European plants), so naturally they were planning a garden with these medicinal plants. I began a little rant about how we have a perfectly wonderful pharmacopeia of Native medicinal plants that no one really pays attention to. We go to great trouble to import plants from the Far East and Africa and call our Native medicinals "weeds." Then dear Carey, an acupuncturist trained in Chinese Medicine, asked me to teach her something about our Native plants.

We arranged for her to come to my garden. I have encouraged Native plants to grow here for the last 20 years and now have over 50 medicinal and edible plants growing on my little city lot. She brought some friends and we spent the afternoon visiting with some of the plants here and sharing information. Some of the plants in my garden are even plants that she studied in her Chinese Medicine training. She had only studied them from books and dried specimens, so seeing the living, growing and flowering beings was a new experience for her. At the end of the afternoon we made a tincture of Motherwort so everyone could see how easy it is to prepare these kinds of medicines. The people here that afternoon learned about not only some medicinal uses for the plants, but also about the ease of using the ones growing nearby. They also learned something about having a direct relationship with plants and about the plants’ generosity.

More about that later.

I’m preparing to go North and spend some weeks at home, visiting with Elders, making medicinals, learning more about the green ones and helping others connect with the natural world in old ways. I will deeply appreciate these weeks away from cell phones, pavement, "news" and advertising. Pandora, here I come. And I don’t need space travel or an Avatar body.

In my opinion, the most useful knowledge obtained through this project is the growing understanding that we have an epigenome. It turns out that we have many genes that control the processes involved in the chronic disorders. Some of these genes turn up the processes and some of these genes turn down and/or stop the processes that create diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc. The epigenome controls which of these genes are activated. And the epigenome is controlled to a large extent by our behavior and choices. In other words, what we do, how we feel and what we think determines the genetic activity that drives our bodies’ chemical processes. Essentially this means that we exert far more control over how our bodies work than we previously realized.

Up to this point most Americans didn’t really think they could do anything about what their genes did. "It’s genetic" meant there was nothing that could be done to influence the situation. Now we are realizing that we can have a lot of influence about which of our genes are turned on, or expressed. And it turns out that dietary fats are a great example of this.

It’s been known for quite some time that certain fats enhance inflammation, one of the things most Americans have too much of these days. Many people are not aware of it, but levels of inflammation in the body, as measured by C-reactive protein, correlate much more accurately with heart attacks than do cholesterol levels. In fact over 60% of people who are experiencing an initial heart attack have perfectly normal or even low levels of blood cholesterol. But they very consistently have elevated levels of C-reactive protein. Omega-6 fats, largely from processed and refined vegetable oils, promote inflammation and our "modern American" diets are full of these oils. Omega-3 and Omega-9 fats work to counter inflammation and should be in about a 1:1 ratio with Omega-3′s. In many processed foods (like frozen dinners, packaged foods, fast food, chips, snack foods, etc.) that ratio is more like 20:1, with the "20" being Omega-6′s. It’s no wonder many of our chronic disorders have inflammation either at the root of the problem or as a major component. We are actually turning on the genes we carry for type II diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease by grabbing a quick bite at the drive through and by snatching that bag of chips to tide us over until dinner.

It turns out that the food that is full of Omega-3′s and that dials down our inflammation is the stuff that our Great-Great-Grandmothers cooked 100 years ago. Cookbooks from that time are full of recipes using lots of butter and cream, lard and beef tallow. And heart specialists in that era could go through their entire professional career and never see someone with a heart attack. Now we are moving a little in that direction with fish oil supplements, but we’re trying to balance an entire diet of pro-inflammatory fats with a few supplements. Why not just eat the food that dials down inflammation instead?

That food is the stuff that comes from the farmers directly to us without going through a factory first, just like with our ancestors. Whole milk, butter, cream (not ultra-pasturized), meat from animals who have lived outside and eaten grass, not who were raised on grains and confined indoors. Chickens and eggs from birds who get to peck the ground and find the insects that make the egg yolks dark orange. Wild fish who swam around and ate what they chose.

Science is giving us more and more information about how our bodies are exquisitely tuned into the natural world around us. We’re finding out that the sounds of nature are deeply healing to our nervous systems. We’re discovering that the vegetables and fruits that grow near us carry a lot more of the specific nutrients we need than the food grown thousands of miles away. We exist in a network of life that supports us and nourishes us if we let it. We can tune into the support and nourishment of this network with our forks!

This is real food. This is what our bodies are designed to eat and this is what nourishes us toward true health and happiness. This is the food that lets our epigenome enhance our experience of being alive. And it tastes wonderful, because our taste buds are designed to appreciate it. It turns out our bodies are a lot smarter than our brains on this one.

Resources and works cited:

• Primal Body-Primal Mind by Nora T. Gedgaudas, CNS, CNT
• Weston A. Price Foundation
• New Trends Publishing
• DVD, "Nourishing Traditional Food"
• DVD, "The Oiling of America"

I can’t see it from the "Y" but I know our river is there. It’s called the Huron River now, but a Bodawodomie (Pottawatami) friend told me it was called "Nottawasiipi" about 180 years ago. That means "Snake River" in Ahishinaabemowin, the language of the people who were in the majority here at that time. In those days it was a busy thoroughfare. The people here got around mostly by canoe and on foot, so Nottawasiipi was not only a source of water and food, but a means of getting from one place to another. I understand it was an important part of the journey between the straits now known as Detroit and the area now known as Chicago.

Nottawa can be translated into English as "snake." The part of this name that means "river" is "siipi." You might recognize this as part of the name for another famous river. "Michi," in Ahishinaabemowin, means "really big," so "Michisiipi" means "really big river." It isn’t far from that to "Mississippi." And it truly is a really big river.

In Ahishinaabemowin the river, "siipi," shows up in interesting places. It’s part of the verb "to wash something," giziibiginan, and part of the verb "to take a bath," giziibiigazhe. Even for us now the truth of that is evident. Our city water comes in part from Nottawasiipi/the Huron River, and although it flows through pipes underground to reach our sinks and showers, it is still our river.

The part of our water that does not come directly from Nottawasiipi is still connected to it. As the test wells monitoring the Gellman/Pall debacle are showing us, the water under the ground here flows to the river. The interconnectedness of the water here is much larger and more complicated than we knew.

Nottawasiipi is a big part of our connections with all that lives in this valley with us. As it flows through our bodies, supporting our living chemistry, it also flows through the squirrels, robins, dandelions and tomatoes, supporting the dance of life within all. We humans are waking up to the fact that what we do with and to the water of our river makes a big difference to ourselves and to all life around us. We’re starting to landscape and grow food without chemical fertilizers. We’re taking phosphorous out of our washing machines and dishwashers. We’re using rain barrels and building rain gardens to help Nottawasiipi and ourselves. We’re learning how to live lighter here, often using knowledge and technology from earlier times.

A little over a year ago I was looking at the plastic shampoo bottle in my hand. I thought of the rivers that received the chemical waste from its manufacture, of the acidification of the water that was the result of that bottle’s transport to me and wondered about what our river would receive from the bottle after it left my hands. Sure, I would recycle it, but did I really need to have it in the first place? And look at all the ingredients! What about the rivers that contributed to the manufacture of the chemicals in that bottle and received the waste from that manufacture? And what about the effects of all those chemicals on our river as they washed down my drain after their brief encounter with my hair? There wouldn’t be much impact from my single shampoo, but there were hundreds of thousands of heads being shampooed in our valley just that morning.

I remembered the first bottle (glass) of shampoo that came into our home when I was a girl. It was called White Rain. It only had two or three ingredients in those days. And what did we do before that? I was sure my mother had washed my hair before that shampoo showed up.

I remembered. It was a white bar soap, Ivory soap. My mom worked it into a nice lather in her hands, then rubbed it thoroughly through my hair, down my neck and all over me as I stood in the basement laundry tub. After a good rinse my hair sometimes got a special rinse with vinegar and water to make it easier for Mom to comb and set into pin curls. As I remember and my earliest photos show, it seemed to work pretty well.

Last spring I decided to try it again. A good friend had given me some home made glycerin soap, shaped like the moon and a star. That soap looked like a good subject for my experiment. I put about 1/2 cup of vinegar in a quart jar and filled it up with warm water, as I remember Mom doing. Then I stepped into the shower and the adventure began. The soap lather was smooth and lush, much nicer than the lather I remember from that white bar in Mom’s hands. After all the sudzing and washing and rinsing I dipped the ends of my hair in the vinegar water, then slowly and thoroughly poured it through my hair. Just to be sure I didn’t smell like vinegar all day, I rinsed my hair again.

I dried my hair as usual, and noticed how soft it felt and how easy it was to manage. It was shiny and smooth. My hair falls almost to my waist and it felt good all the way to the ends. After three shampoos with the moon and star my hair was smooth and lustrous like the hair of the shampoo models in the slick magazines. I’ve never gone back. When the moon and star soaps became too small to use I bought a bar of lemon glycerin soap. The label said it was hypo-allergenic, biodegradable and cruelty-free. That sounded good. It worked just as well as the moon and star. I have been shampoo bottle free for almost a year now and my hair has never looked or behaved better.

I do not yet have a totally plastic free shampoo experience. I still use a plastic bottle when I go to the "Y." I put the vinegar in the bottom and carry it with me to the shower, filling it up with warm water from the river that flows through the pipes at the "Y." At home I use a lovely glass carafe for vinegar and water in the shower. And I do carry the wet soap home in a plastic soap dish. But these plastic items don’t go into the landfill after one use. In fact, I’ll probably be able to use each one for years.

The people in this valley have always lived here in relationship with Nottawasiipi. Many of us now are realizing this river’s importance to our personal well being. We are also recognizing that our river’s well being is directly related to what we as individuals do in our own lives. We are tuning in to stonefly counts and phosphorus levels the way we might tune in to the thermometer reading of an ill loved one. I’m grateful to have found one more way that I can live responsibly and well in this valley.

My experiences from over three decades of work in the health care field have shown me that our bodies are wise and intelligent beyond our wildest dreams. I have witnessed the miracles that occur when we listen to the wisdom of our own bodies and spirits and allow that wisdom to guide our healing work. I work with individuals to facilitate their personal understanding of their own body’s wisdom and to develop a plan for healing that combines the information from within with realistic self care measures that allow healing to take place. I then coach people through the transformations that healing brings.

My work is not a replacement for medical care. I work in conjunction with physicians of all specialties, nurse practitioners, dentists, physician assistants, physical therapists, chiropractors and other bodywork practitioners. I have a wide network of referral sources both in the Ann Arbor area and throughout the United States. By employing the techniques they learn with me, people often find that their need for medical care decreases.

I have helped people to successfully overcome the following problems:

• headaches of all kinds
• neck and back pain
• teeth clenching or grinding/bruxism
• chronic and acute sinus pain and infections
• hip pain
• head injury
• birth trauma
• thumb sucking
• infant feeding problems
• Temporal Mandibular Joint Pain or Dysfunction (TMJ or TMD)
• tinnitus
• vertigo/dizziness
• anxiety and tensions
• arthritis and joint stiffness
• knee and ankle pain
• shoulder pain
• numbness and tingling of hands and feet
• Bell’s Palsy
• Reynaud’s disease
• the effects of trauma of all kinds including surgery
• allergies
• asthma
• IBS/irritable bowel syndrome
• chronic constipation and diarrhea