How a New Generation of Women is Reclaiming Traditional Mohawk Medicine

New York Public News Network | By David Escobar

A group of women scaled down a steep embankment toward the shoreline of the St. Lawrence River, where a freshly cut white willow tree waits below.

Armed with pruning shears, they clipped slender branches and carried them back up the slope. Jasmine Jimerson inspected each piece before peeling away strips of greenish-brown bark. The bark slid off cleanly, revealing a smooth, white wood underneath.

“It’s pretty satisfying,” she said.

The pieces of bark will not stay bark for long. After harvesting, Jimerson and the group will chop the bark into smaller pieces, turning it into a liniment used to relieve sore muscles and inflammation.

Jasmine Jimerson.

A path back to knowledge

As the cultural practitioner of traditional medicines for the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, Jimerson spends much of her time teaching community members how to identify, harvest, and prepare medicinal plants.

She first moved to Akwesasne about eight years ago from the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, where she was raised in a traditional home. A few years after joining the council, she launched a “Traditional Medicines Mentorship Program,” where she shares medicinal foraging skills she has accumulated during her time in both Wisconsin and Akwesasne.

“Together, we can combine knowledge from each community that maybe one community held onto, and another community didn’t,” she said.

Jasmine Jimerson breaks apart a white willow branch.

This is the second year Jimerson has led the workshop, an initiative designed to reconnect Mohawk people with knowledge that generations before them were often prevented from practicing.

Jimerson said the first lesson she teaches many mentees has little to do with identifying a plant.

“It’s really uncomfortable,” Jimerson said. “When you’re first learning and reconnecting with the land, there’s bugs, there’s snakes, it’s hot, it’s sticky, it’s cold. The elements are uncomfortable.”

But Jimerson said there is an obstacle far greater than physical discomfort.

For generations, Indigenous communities across North America were removed from their lands, discouraged — or outright forbidden — from practicing their traditions, and separated from knowledge through residential schools and other assimilation policies.

In Akwesasne, Jimerson said those disruptions created a void of information about many traditional customs, including medicine.

“Our people were removed from the land,” she said. “They were made ashamed of being knowledgeable of the land, made afraid of being knowledgeable of the land.”

Jimerson said that part of her role is to help community members pick up those older traditions, reclaiming knowledge their ancestors once carried.

Kaniehtine LaFrance peels bark from a white willow branch.

A new generation of teachers

As students chatted around a blue tarp later that morning, they snipped branches into smaller pieces before peeling the bark into inch-long strips.

Among the students was Rachel Wheatley, who returned for a second year after discovering how much she still wanted to learn.

“My grandmother did a lot with plant medicines. My great-grandmother did too,” Wheatley said. “I just have this overwhelming urge to learn more and more.”

Since joining the program, she said she has learned about the medicinal uses of stinging nettle, milk thistle, Jerusalem artichokes, and jewelweed. She said interest in the classes continues to grow, particularly among women in their 20s through 50s. But finding a teacher has not always been easy.

“Some people are very willing to share their knowledge and pass it on so it doesn’t die out,” Wheatley said.

Other elders, she said, may still carry fears rooted in the residential school era, or worry about what could happen if they shared what they know.

A group of women gather around a tarp and begin stripping bark off white willow branches. The bark will be turned into a liniment.

Evolving traditions

Jimerson said rebuilding that knowledge also means acknowledging that Indigenous traditions have never been static.

White willow, for example, isn’t native to New York state; it was brought over by European settlers during the 1700s. Rather than ignoring non-traditional plants introduced over time, Jimerson said she encourages students to understand how they fit into today’s ecosystem and what role they can play alongside long-established medicinal species.

“It’s not looking at invasive species negatively,” Jimerson said. “It’s asking, ‘What are they doing on the Earth that other plants used to do?'”

That perspective resonated with Kawisentha Lazore, who joined the mentorship program this year. She said she wants to continue building on medicinal knowledge taught to her by her grandmother — and eventually pass it on to her children.

“We already lost so much,” Lazore said. “I want to continue and try to learn more for them. I don’t know how else to learn besides going out, harvesting and asking questions myself.”

New growth from a white willow branch.

By the end of class, the women have filled brown paper bags with willow bark. Each student leaves with enough to make a batch of medicine at home, along with Jimerson’s directions on how to prepare it.

Jimerson said she hopes the students leave with something less tangible: the confidence to introduce the medicine to someone else.

“When our mothers get interested in things, those values become instilled in the whole family,” she said. ”It exposes our children to it much earlier.”

David Escobar is a Report For America corps member. He reports on diversity issues in the Adirondacks through a partnership between North Country Public Radio and Adirondack Explorer.

Image: From left, Kaniehtine LaFrance and Ronni Sunday prune branches of a white willow tree along the shore of the St. Lawrence River. (David Escobar/New York Public News Network)