PLANTS | SADIE OLSEN | A LIFESTYLE, NOT A CAUSE
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Young and Indigenous podcast is an outlet for people to know about Indigenous knowledge, storytelling, and history. Through our youthful journeys as Indigenous people, young people, and elders share their experiences with us. Without them, we wouldn't be able to do this. Come listen to Plants, a podcast series featuring many different plant knowledge keepers with diverse perspectives and plant philosophies.

A series brought to you by Children of the Setting Sun Productions and Cultural Survival Youth Fellow Opportunities. Hello, welcome to Young and Indigenous Podcast. My name is Free Borsi. Today, we're sitting down with one of the knowledge keepers from the Lummi Nation, Sadie Olson. Hi, everyone. My name is Sadie Olson.

Hello! Good day! My traditional name is Kwaslmutt and my English name is Sadie Olson.

My father is Sahanat Pasmeen and his English name is Troy Olson. My mother is Kusumat and her English name is Shirley Williams. I am from the Lummi Nation. I am from K'chartlip, which is part of the Hussainich Nation on Vancouver Island. Thank you all for coming today. I just wanted to say a few words. I do not know the Lummi language and I am still learning how to speak it.

I'm excited to be talking with this podcast today because I'm really interested in native plants and it's a deep passion of mine and it helps guide the work that I do through my education. I'm an activist through various things that I like to do with my life, just following with the passions that I have for native plants and

My passion for Indigenous public health and preserving our environment, I think that will do us best for protecting our health as Native peoples. Like I said, our elders have said food is medicine. So I've been working on a resolution with the tribal youth delegates from the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board to work on a healthy food resolution. And that's something that I'm

actively trying to work out and I've been doing for two years. I do environmental work through White Swan Environmental, through our Native-led nonprofit, and we do community engagement and we also do various projects where we can help educate people about how important our environment is to us, how important our salmon is to us.

Since my interest is in native plants, I support people learning about native plants and just try to encourage the connections within our community, whether they're people to people or people to place. I think that it's really important because that's our culture. That's our sovereignty. That's what we've been gifted by the Creator. So it's our inherent right and our acquired right. We should definitely be going out into our environment and learning the

that we have been given by our elders and ancestors and the creator. And then also as students and people who are responsible for this land and we are the voices for the plants and the animals and the creatures of the deep and of the sky and all of the living resources that we have around us.

then we should really use our voice to do good things. Salmon and native plants are really deeply intertwined and our ecosystem is really deeply intertwined and so when we connect back to our ecosystem and

Our traditional homelands, we will become healthier as a people because our culture is out of the land. Our language is from the land and our food is our medicine and our water is life. So we have a really beautiful ecosystem. And I think that using education and legislation as a way to protect our environment and to educate each other about our strengths or things of that sort is

I think that's how we're going to protect what we love. That reminds me of the Winona LaDuke quote where she says, it's funny how when you fight for clean drinking water, it makes you an environmental activist. But when you're polluting that water, it doesn't make you an environmental terrorist. And I mean, that's kind of like what you're saying with like our innate responsibilities as like,

human beings of this land, you know, it's like what is seen as like activism is like you put it a way of life and a responsibility that, um, it's that is innate with you. It's not like you're developing your life around it, uh, for status for anything like that, but rather it's like your inherent right and responsibility. Yeah.

You work with natural resources, and you're currently an intern at the Lummi Natural Resources Department. What work would you like to be doing in the future? I'd like to do more work about salmon habitat restoration. And for me, that's a lot of what's happening out in the Salish Sea and managing tanker traffic, managing the types of...

vehicles that are not our traditional clay or snuck wolf and you know having those sounds that impact our relatives of the deep and their ability to get salmon but also our salmon survival I think that would be interesting for me to research more of and then that's way out in the salt water so then coming up towards Mount Baker and

learning about the types of plants that are in the area because salmon are really interesting species that follow the scents and so they genetically understand like the smell of things and continue to follow that same scent and so we had ceremonies to do like the first salmon ceremony and is basically honoring the salmon and when we do those ceremonies

and we present an offering, it allows the salmon to kind of like get that smell back. But there's a lot of native plants that have those really strong fragrances of our plant medicines. And I think that we should do more work to restore the plant medicines and to connect youth to the plants in the area. So that was the other topic because for my capstone, I did salmon,

for my bachelor's degree. And then for my master's, I want to do salmon habitat and then focus on that. And then for my PhD, I want to do the focus on climate change and how that relates to salmon. So try to implement more projects or programs or partnerships to contribute to those ideas of native plant restoration. In regards to salmon habitat,

something that's often overlooked is the importance of log gems on a river. And in a Western sense, historically, log gems were seen as obstructs and to get rid of them or annihilate these

natural formations. It was seen as progress. But could you speak to the importance of log gems for salmon? So there's different life stages of a salmon. There's the egg, and then it turns into like a yearling or a smelt. And then it gets, that's like a juvenile salmon, and then it will continue growing and

and then it will kind of like move down river and then when they're like coming back from the salt water they come back up the river into the stream that they were born in, their needle stream to lay their eggs but while they're still going up the stream they're growing and even they need these little pools to basically teach them how to swim

And that's really important for their survival because when they're too rapidly moved down a river and there's not any place for them to rest, they will not survive. Log jams do for salmon and baby salmon is it helps give them that little rest period where the water is a little bit more stagnant and it's not so rapid because a river is like a moving stream.

body of water and it's flowing downstream. So the stagnant pools allow the salmon to grow. I think that speaks volumes on the selflessness that plants have, you know, even after they're deemed dead, you know, the logs are, were once living trees, but even, even after death, you know, they keep, they continue to give.

Could you share what White Swan Environmental is doing in general with plants? White Swan Environmental has helped to co-found a charter school called Whatcom Intergenerational High School. We helped to implement a lot of the indigenous elements into that school during the curation process of what is the school going to look like and

How will it impact the community? How will their education impact the youth? It's the type of model that we want to use for longhouse restoration. Something our ancestors used to have. It wasn't necessarily like a school, but it was like where we lived our way of life. And as we talked about before, being an activist is not intentional necessarily. It's just a way of life and a way of living your life.

Same with being a student. White Swan Environmental, we won mine for the purpose of the work, is a Native-led 501c3 since 2018. Our mission is to support community healing through the natural, cultural, and historical restoration to the Salish Sea for seventh-generation sustainability as a measure of ecological health protection for all.

And our vision is we are the vision keepers for a Coast Salish Tribal Heritage Field Institute, an indigenous-led 13-moon, mountain-to-sea, reef-to-reef, K-through-PhD program with seven longhouses in the San Juan Islands and seven longhouses in the Gulf Islands. We advocate for thriving cultures and environment for all in the Salish Sea. ♪

White Swan Environmental has an interesting tool available on their website, the ecological mapping process. Could you share about that tool and why it exists?

Yeah, so one of our projects that we've been working on has been really spearheaded by my mother, Shirley Williams, and she is helping to work with MIT and IMMERSE, which is the multidisciplinary cross-cultural and transboundary community of practice dedicated to long-term ecological research in the Salish Sea bioregion, and

And so it has an option where there's like a map and you can click on your island or your reservation or your hometown. And you can look at land plants, sea plants. You can look at marine mammals, land mammals, insects. And if you click on those things, then it will bring you into a really interesting circular catalog about things.

the types of creatures that exist under that name

Once you click a specific species, a box will show up and it will have information. It'll have the picture, it will have the scientific name, you could have traditional names, and then there's even a space for videos and you can share how this plant was used traditionally or learn more about the plant or the species as it is. And it's not just one type of species, there's multiple types of species.

that exist in micro environments. So that's why it's such an interesting place here because not one island is the same or one, if you go up to the mountains, you're gonna have a different ecosystem than if you live down at sea level and all of the different areas in between will have different ecosystems. That's why they're called microclimates. - Could you give us some examples of how plants were used traditionally in this territory? - Yeah, so,

That leads into another project area of White Swan Environmental, which is the communities of practice. The first one was of our late chief, our late CM, Salik, and it was the Native Plants Interest Group, and he talked about a lot of really important topics. He shared in the language, and he said...

which is our food is our medicine. He continued on and mentioned like various types of plants. So there's like cedar, our chlapayt, which was used for different things like mahoy, which is the cedar basket or the spachat, which is our watertight baskets, which is how we would have boiled water. Our chlapayt,

which is the clam baskets and you make those out of cedar branches and they're for allowing the water to be released from the clams so that you can gather pre-colonial times. And he talked about nettles, which is really good for helping with inflammation and

The second episode that we did was with Grandma Saseatha. She talked about soap berries, and you could use soap berries to support removing cataracts from your eyes. She would talk about marsh tea, Labrador tea, and those are from the bogs, and if you take that, it helps to flush your system out. There's a lot of really great

examples that they shared, you know, like the trailing blackberries and the wild strawberries and there's wild onions.

Those foods have a really dense nutrient source or nutrient count. And that's why there are medicines. And if you look at what they're saying, their traditional knowledge and what they've learned from their elders, and then you compare that to Western science. Because of my interdisciplinary interests, I took a class with Western and they talked to me about the Pacific silverback.

And so that was one example of a native plant. And so if you have a native or that native plant has to grow at one specific elevation, people would build terraces out of rocks and then they would put dirt on top of them to build out the elevation at that one specific level. Because if you were five meters too high or five meters too low, the plant just wouldn't survive. So you had to have it at one specific elevation.

And these plants were best at a specific time of the year and a specific time of the day. And that's when the elders would go out and harvest this plant. Then they did a study and they tried to pick it early, to harvest it early. And then they did all of their research and found that it had not as much macronutrients or like the...

things that our body absorbs it doesn't have as much as it does once you harvest it specifically at the time that the elders were saying or if you got it too late then it wouldn't have the amount of nutrients so the

The time that we were harvesting it and the time that the elders say it's time to go and do this thing is when our plants have the best nutrients. And that's why it's really important for us to listen to our elders because it's not made up. They're definitely passed down this knowledge and given these teachings and trying to share them with us so that we can learn them. ♪

And could you name a couple of the plants that really resonate with you? I know you talked about eelgrass earlier. Maybe you could speak to the importance of eelgrass and all of the benefits it has for our ecosystem. Yeah.

Eelgrass produces 2.5 times the amount of oxygen than a tree. So when we have, that's like one square foot of eelgrass.

And so our entire waterways is made of this beautiful seaweed and it's like this really green, long, flat strand of fibers. It flows around and when the tide is out, it's like flat on the ground. But then when the tide is up, it like flows through the water like because it's a seaweed. When we were kids, we used to just run around and swim in it, playing it all day. That's just what we did.

And then you can also like take it and separate it and it has these little fibers. But then to grow up and learn that it produced 2.5 times the amount of oxygen as a tree, it just made me really appreciate it more and think about how much it does for us as people and for the salmon and for the crabs that like to

crawl around in there. Another plant that I mentioned was cedar. Like I said, I used to go cedar harvesting with Uncle Bill, Sam Salik, and my father, Sahanat Pasmeen. A lot of our relatives, like my Auntie Tracy, have gone with my Uncle Richard, Hacha Quilton. We would practice that really high in the mountains, and Uncle Bill would bring us to the best locations, and him and my dad would have these like

where they'd just go out for days and harvest because they like to weave hats. And my dad got into weaving capes. We would just have rolls of cedar and we'd learn how to process them because it's important in our culture. We were also interested in weaving wool. And so mountain goat wool was how we used to get wool because we didn't have like European sheeps. So we would use mountain goat wool and that would get stuck on cedar.

like a shrub or a tree, like a fir tree. And people would go and like gather small tufts of them and then put it into like a mahoit, like a basket or a bag. And then they would keep it and then give it to the weavers and they would spin it and cart it and clean it. So my dad was learning how to do the weaving of wool with Uncle Bill when they were doing cedar weaving and wool weaving at the same time.

Other medicines that I personally like, okay, I like nettles. I said that before, but tzok tzok. I use it for, you could drink it, just like Labrador tea, put it in water, pour hot water over it, and then drink it. But the other thing that helps me, because I have really bad arthritis and scoliosis, so I have really bad nerve pain, and that's why native plants are so important to me is because

I know that they're medicines and that's what I've been told since I was like a really little kid. Like that pain as a child was just unbearable. We had to look for a lot of remedies, but native plants helped me. I started to whip myself with nettles and

it would take my pain away. Like, it would cause pain, and then, like, within the next week, it would be gone. And, like, within the next year, it felt like it was so much better. So thinking about how important it is for our people to heal themselves. Oho, heo, ya, kwel nitsa, solalitsa, ae.

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There are plants that I've learned about that help reduce blood pressure and they help you to have a stronger heart and a stronger bloodstream. And you think about our people and how they're affected by it.

heart disease and diabetes and suicide. Like, you think about what not having... This is something I've brought up a lot before, but I think food and our mental health are also really intertwined. Like, when our bodies aren't doing well, our minds aren't doing well. And when our bodies are doing well, our minds start to do better. And so that's why I think that it's so important. Oh,

♪

We learned about salmonberry sprouts.

and how much antioxidants those have for just reducing pain and inflammation and I remember being fed those when I was a little kid in a stroller. The other plant that I'm interested in are camas and those are complex carb and it's a really small plant and

White Swan Environmental has the spirit of the Chuales stewardship core. And so one of our projects one year when I was like 16 or so was to go out to the San Juan Islands and we did a camas digging and camas bake like week. And camas is a really complex carb that we replaced with potatoes and other carbs that we have replaced camas with are like breads and

Those turn into sugar extremely fast, but complex carbs, they like fuel your body for days and weeks and people would bake them. You have to bake them for a really long time at a really high heat. So we would have natural ovens. And so creating that heat, wrapping them in other native plants like skunk cabbage and ferns and salal leaves, and then putting that pouch around the...

putting it on top of the hot ashes and then covering it with dirt. And then we used like a poker and like poked through and put water into it. So it would like steam it basically because you have to think it was like,

If we're thinking about indigenous knowledge, we didn't have ovens. We didn't have propane. We didn't have that stuff. We had fire. And so this is how our people would use fire and use our resources to make these foods edible for us. You had to keep putting ashes on them for days. We had the fire going for two or three days and just kept putting ashes on top. And then we were able to eat them and we would...

The old people would mash them into like little patties and then we would preserve them all winter. So that was a real treat to try that. And that's kind of like what our people would do. That was our indigenous science. That was native science. My grandmother was in Lummi Elder Speaks and she preserved apples and like all sorts of fruits from orchards and

That's something that I'm interested in, but I don't really personally identify orchards or trees like that. Not something that I'm used to, but a lot of the elders that I know and people that grew up on this territory, they really put a lot of focus on the orchards and how important orchards were. So that's something that I would like to learn more about. And then willow is...

The last one that I'm interested in, because willow was used to create our reef net. So we would use like nettle is really good for inflammation, but you could also use it as a fiber. So we had these like technology or techniques to spin wool.

and to spin cedar because you could use it to make rope, but you could also use those fibers of the nettle and make nettle rope, or you could use the fibers of the willow and make willow rope. And so these all had different like flexibilities and they had different strengths. And so nettle and willow are really strong and that's what we would use to create our reef net.

But I think our whole ecosystem is just an interconnected place and like our people are interconnected with this place. It's really important for our micro climates to stay biodiverse so that they can maintain that sort of health. But then for us to be connected to those places.

and also be connected to the health of the land and like fuel ourselves. Because like I mentioned, native plants have really helped me. And I know that when I learned about them, I was trying to use them to help other people. But for me, like learning about native plants was my...

saving grace. Like it was my lifesaver and really helped me to prevent a lot of pain that like Western science couldn't do. I was going to the hospital multiple times a week for years and there was no diagnosis. There was no solution. I was just meant to deal with chronic pain from like a really young age. And I just don't think that we should be destined to live like that. I think our

youth deserve better. I deserve better, you know? Like our ancestors had a good way of life and a good healthy life and it's our responsibility to like look backwards and try to walk forwards in a good way. You are the only one to fly that high.

Fly, eagle, fly. Fly high, soar through the sky. Hey-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Hey-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Hey-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.

Yeah, wow. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that with us and your powerful testimony to two native plants and, you know, what was really gifted to you from the plant relatives. In a way, they've seen you suffering and for whatever reason, reasons of their own, you know, the plant relatives decided that they would take that from you.

your belief in those medicines potentially helped even more, helped you heal or even more. And now you're like an avid snowboarder. Like you're like, you do all of these like amazing things. Like you would have never, you would have never guessed from an outside perspective, looking in that that is something that you had to deal with. And maybe you still deal with, uh, throughout your lifetime a little bit, but like,

You've definitely found a space where it looks like you've found the right remedies. There's always more to learn, so... I'm not, like, healed, and I think that, like, medicines or...

not something to overdo or to, you know, like there's a balance and you shouldn't, you shouldn't live without it, but you shouldn't have it all the time in high quantities in any way whatsoever. It's just like, you have to be really cautious. And we had, that was another thing. Okay. So I got two more stories, but the first one was from my grandma, Saseitha from the second native plants interest group. And she always used to say this all the time, but she'd always say,

Tell the plants thank you. And she's so sweet. And she has this, like, high-pitched elder's voice. And she goes, And then you look at the next plant and then you say, And so you do that. And if you are asking them to, like, give themselves to you, you know, you, like, say thank you. But then also, like, you say,

I'm only going to take as much as I need and I'm going to use it for a good purpose. I'm not going to let any of this go to waste. And if the plant agrees, she used to say, she said this in the podcast, in the native plant interest group, but she said they would dance for you and they would like bounce. And so in that like way, we're communicating and it's a reciprocal act where you're

asking for permission and the plant gives you permission. It's not like we're just taking it all and you do that with any plant that you harvest. You should do that with any plant you harvest and have that relationship of like gratitude, but also like respect and reciprocity where you're asking for permission and gifted permission and she is so sweet. And just to go back to the topic about like portions,

I was on the Lummi cultural department team under my language teacher, Smakia, to learn the language. And he let me learn about plants and things like that. But I was also mentored by my uncle, Al, Scott Johnny. And he talked about there's a five-step system that we would do after winter to flush all of our bodies of leftover things that have just...

been stuck with us during like our stagnant periods in the winter like when you're not moving around and eating so much and drinking so much fluids and things kind of just stay with you while you're in this like

quiet winter period and we would have five plants that you can get here still to this day and they all have names and so you would use those plants and put like one finger's knuckle deep into the plant and that's how much you take so if you're

you know, maybe a larger person, you need more plants. Like I have really long fingers. I must need a lot of medicine, but some people have really short fingers and they only need a little bit. And we had various forms of measurements, even like personal forms of measurement to make sure that we're not getting too much or too little. All medicines are like personal to your body. Like what you might need might not be what somebody else needs, but it's good for us to carry it forward and keep learning it. And

come together as like one big puzzle. Like we're all just one puzzle piece and carry a little bit of information. We don't make the whole picture as one person. I'm just happy to support you and like support the community to learn and become more interested in native plants and the importance of it because well, our elders, they taught us that food is medicine and water is life. We are the voices for our relatives who cannot speak and

our relatives from the land, our relatives from the water, our relatives from the deep, our relatives in the sky, all of our relations. So it's really important for us to use our voices and advocate, protect our future generations.

Well, thank you again, Sadie Olson-Kwasomut, for joining us today on the Plants podcast series. We appreciate everything that you do in your life and in the name of plants. I appreciate you doing this work. It's great work, H.J. And thank you to my elders, my sila, my grandparents, and my

My salalukla, my extended relatives, and my sasalalukla, my extended relatives' relatives, for helping me learn this information and carrying the history of our land and our language forward for our people, because we wouldn't be here without any of them. And I'm grateful for this ecosystem and environment, for our

being so fruitful and so many people have so much respect and appreciation for this place and like this territory and we come from strong people we come from strong medicine we come from strong like territory and it's still seen and appreciated today whether or not majority of the population addresses them in that way as all species being our relatives but

They're appreciated regardless. Do you have anything that you would like to share with young and indigenous youth?

find a native plant you like and do like a research project about what your family did with that plant or what you would like to do in the future with that plant. And there's so many different uses for plants, whether they're like dyes for wool or, you know, for medicines or for tools and all of the different ways that we can use plants are just so cool. So I really encourage you guys to learn and

Just be grateful to the plants and listen. I might not be the elder who said it, but she said it to me and I would like to pass that forward. And that's a practice that she carried forward with her through so much in her life. And she obviously carried it forward for a reason. So never forget who you are and where you come from.

Hey, what up, y'all? Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Plant Series. This episode has been produced by Roy Alexander, Free Borsi, Cyrus James, and Ellie Smith. Original soundtrack by Roy Alexander, Mark Nichols, and Free Borsi. Additional songs by Sadie Olson. Huge thank you to our funders, the In It's High Foundation, the Cultural Survival Fellowship, the Paul Allen Foundation, and the Whatcom Community Foundation.

Young and Indigenous is a part of Children of the Setting Sun Productions. We are an Indigenous nonprofit set in the homelands of the Lummi and Nooksack people. Hachika for listening. Later, y'all.