Native American Herbal, Plant Knowledge

l Blueberries -- Economics of commercial blueberries for Native people.

Read above this sub-section and below it. Return to series menu page and find

out about Big Casino.

RESEARCH TOOLS

BOOKMARK each of these databases. You cannot readily switch from one to another.

American Indian Ethnobotany Database--At the University of Michigan. Almost 4,

plantnames, uses for food, medicine (the emphasis), fiber, and utility. Botannical names

work best, but common can be used (no Indian names) as searchterms. Result will be a

list of articles, reports, and books by ethnographers and occasionally tribal

organisations, most not readily available. But for serious researchers, a start. You must

take notes. A bug in the software will save pages of hundreds of retrieved cites only as an

"empty" searchform. This is certainly a nuisance. This database ius a citator, but its

contents include secondary sources such as PhD theses, so you cannot always find

pointers to primary sources mentioning the plants, and secondary sources do not give

the date at which the info was collected, nor by whom.

The 4 AGIS databases are the project of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's research

section, programming created by the Genome Informatics Group. Dr. Jim Duke, the only

aggie who has much interest in Native plant uses (ethnobotany) who actually works with

Native elders is one of the sparks of this project; his job was ended by Congressional budget

cuts. It's not clear how this will affect the big ethnobotany database, which was a

work-in-progress that does not appear to have a high U.S. goverment priority. It is very

usable now, with 3700 plants, but much more could and should be added, both in data

content and programming for effective use. For now, it is the most powerful tool available

to Native Plant Uses researchers. These aggie databases appear to have been inspired by the

U. Mich one, and then to have gone beyond to try to prepare native plant data in ways

parallel to the way the research labs do for agricultural plants.

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AGIS Medical Plants Native American DataBase (MPNADB)--Similar to the U.

Michigan database, but with the money and resources of government agencies behind it,

the database is a more powerful searcher on the 3700 plants it contains. Data sources are

the same oldish reports. But the additional AGIS ethnobotany databases make the

combined, cross-refencing databases very powerful.

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AGIS: Database: FoodplantDB: All classes top--This database works the same as the

medical one, but now draws on literature references made to tribal uses of food plants.

You can go at it by tribe, by plant, by author, by some term for food-in-general (fuzzy

searching; wildcards). You can't go at it by nutrient.

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AGIS: Database: PhytochemDB--Here's where we can (someday maybe) find out the

nutritional (and other biochemical) components of any plant in the databases. Start by

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Native American Herbal, Plant Knowledge

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