The Forgotten Harvest: Plant Wisdom of Native and Frontier North America (The Forgotten Series)

There was a time, and not so long ago, when a walk through the woods was a walk through a pantry, a pharmacy, and a general store.

For thousands of years, the peoples of Native and frontier North America fed, healed, clothed, and sheltered themselves from the plants around them. They knew which marsh grass would carry a family through winter, which bark broke a fever, which root became cord, dye, or medicine, and they knew each one by name. Most of that knowledge has very nearly vanished from ordinary life.

The Forgotten Harvest gathers it back into one place. More than eighty short chapters survey the plants and skills that mattered most, organized by use: food, medicine, dye, and craft . From the wild rice and sugar maple that fed the northern nations, to the roots and barks that healed them, to the bloodroot and walnut that dyed their quillwork and the birch, basswood, and black ash they built their world from, it is a plain record of how these peoples actually lived off the land.

Two streams of knowledge run through the book. The deeper is Indigenous : the plant wisdom of nations who held it for millennia, attributed here by people and source, and offered as a tribute to the communities who carry it still. The second is settler and frontier folk craft, the kitchen medicine and homestead skill of people far from any store. It is drawn entirely from public-domain records (Frances Densmore and Huron Smith among the Ojibwe, James Mooney, and many more) and retold in the author's own words.

Part field guide, part history, part elegy, The Forgotten Harvest is a tribute to a technology older and more durable than our own: the kind an Elder recites from memory and a book keeps. Every food and medicine note is a historical record, not a recommendation.

For foragers, historians, herbalists, and anyone who has ever wondered how people stayed alive on this land before the supermarket.