This article was originally published on the Oregonian/OregonLive, and shared on Underscore News.
The tiny, fuzzy white-and-purple flowers tilted toward the sun, flecked with raindrops in the gray morning light. Sara Thompson, spokesperson for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, gasped and suddenly broke away from the interview she had organized to kneel beside a small wooden planter.
These little flowers—called Tolmie’s cat’s ear, Tolmie’s mariposa lily or calochortus tolmiei—had transported Thompson through time.
As the rest of the group—the two people in charge of the tribe’s native plant nursery and this reporter— gathered around Thompson, she told the story: Every Memorial Day growing up, her aunt would take her to tend to the graves of her ancestors. In doing so, they would find and pick cat’s ear flowers to make tea, she said. It was one of her most cherished memories.
“It just took me back,” Thompson said, apologizing for the interruption. “Cat’s ear, I haven’t seen it in forever!”
The little fuzzy flowers are just one of dozens of native plants grown on a 35-acre parcel of land in the foothills of the Coast Range, a property that that once operated as a Christmas tree farm but now houses the Grand Ronde tribe’s Natural Resources office as well as a 14-acre restoration site and the small native plant nursery. The nursery is officially known as the “native plant materials program,” but the tribe also calls it tatis haws, which means “flower house” in the Chinuk wawa language.
Jeremy Ojua, supervisor of the nursery, said the project started in 2014 and has slowly grown since then. As the tribe has acquired more of its ceded lands, he said, it has also worked to restore those areas into more naturalistic landscapes. At the nursery, native plants are cultivated for transplant not only to tribal lands but also public lands, through partnerships with agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.
“It’s a beautiful symbiotic relationship,” said Dan Klug, cultural resource specialist for the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. “If the nursery can grow these plants and propagate them, and we collect the seed, we can redistribute that in restoration areas in state parks.”
Klug, who oversees cultural resources for state parks in the Willamette Valley, said the parks department has worked with the Grand Ronde tribe on restoration projects at Tryon Creek, Milo McIver, Wapato Access Greenway, Champoeg, Silver Falls, and Willamette Mission state parks. At Champoeg State Park, which the department sees as an early success story, the tribe helped burn and restore a stretch of prairie near a group campground.
Originally a Kalapuya village site, the state park land also served as a camp for fur traders and was the site of Oregon’s first provisional government. Later, it was transformed into one of the first farms in the Willamette Valley, Klug said. The state parks department is now interested in restoring the land to its pre-colonial state, and park officials are actively seeking tribal partnerships.
“State parks is an oasis within developed areas. The idea is we’re in a new era of restoration and that’s restoring these landscapes,” Klug said. “When you heal the land, you heal the people.”
Plants from tatis haws have also been transported to restoration areas inthe Siuslaw National Forest, a stretch of federal forest land along the central Oregon coast. Sarah Kaufman, a wildlife biologist for the forest, said the primary goal in these areas is improving habitat for pollinators, like birds, bats, and insects. Native plants can act as “stepping stones” that aid those creatures as they move across the forest landscape.
“It’s the little things here that make the difference,” Kaufman said. “Each plant holds a different skill and a different attribute that they contribute to the system of resiliency of a forest.”
Many of the native plants grown at the Grand Ronde nursery are not cultivated anywhere else, she said, and including those plants in the forest’s restoration areas adds diversity that goes a long way toward helping rebuild the natural landscape following fire, logging or other disturbances. Increasing the diversity of voices on the land is another important part of the partnership.
“I really enjoy working collaboratively with the tribes and allowing the voices that were here first have a say in the management decisions that should be happening across the land,” Kaufman said.
In the past few years, the Grand Ronde nursery has been feeling out its mission, Ojua said, increasing its capacity to serve both the land and the tribal community, buoyed by grants and partnerships with organizations such as the Institute for Applied Ecology and Greenbelt Land Trust. In addition to plants for landscaping or restoration work, the nursery’sbeds contain several first foods including camas and wapato, and ceremonial plants such as tobacco, which are harvested or given out to community members to plant in their own yards.
“Everything in these beds are all traditional foods,” Ojua said, pointing to a group of planters containing camas lily, fernleaf biscuitroot, wild carrot, and slenderleaf onion. “They all still grow around here, but they also like to grow in an open meadow, for the most part, and most of that’s been sucked up for farmland and hazelnut orchards.”
Having a source of traditional foods, even if ceremonial or educational, has been an important point of connection for the Grand Ronde community.
Joseph Ham, who works as Ojua’s assistant, said he remembers growing up learning the names of plants in Chinuk wawa, a ancestral trade language that the tribe has made an effort to retain. As a child, he said he would go out to pick wild strawberries with his grandmother, who spoke the language and taught him a few words. Today, children can learn those Chinuk wawa words as they tour the nursery, where they also get a hands-on education about the plants.
“There’s so many seeds planted of kids having those personal relationships from an early age,” Ham said. “I see now the preschool kids that come, they have a lifetime relationship with the camas especially.”
It wasn’t that long ago that this kind of cultural knowledge was endangered, he said. From the tribe’s inception at the end of the Rogue River Trail of Tears to the forced re-education in government-run boarding schools and the 29-year termination of the tribe’s federal status, generations of tribal members have grown up without the resources to learn about their culture, or the freedom to do so.
Now, things are different, Ham said. Kids not only learn about important plants like camas, they get to see, feel, and experience the life cycle of the flower throughout the seasons.
“I’m seeing that it’s like they have ownership of it, and they care a lot from an early age,” Ham said. “Kids are going to grow up and they’re always going to know that that’s their truth.”
Camas flowers were once so prolific in the Willamette Valley that the green hills became seas of purple in the spring. Now, the flower is found in sparse patches, many of them cultivated by hand. When the Grand Ronde nursery started, it only had a few small beds of the flowers, but now its planters are bursting. Ojua said the program has distributedsomewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 camas bulbs over the past decade, slowly re-seeding the landscape.
The camas revival is a fitting metaphor for tatis haws. The nursery, which started as little more than an idea, has become a go-to source for the acquisition and cultivation of Northwest native plants.
“We’ve had a really fruitful relationship with the tribe,” said Clay Courtwright, Columbia district manager for the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. “They’re great partners. They understand the environment both from the western science perspective but also from the traditional tribal perspective as well.”
At the Siuslaw National Forest, Kaufman said the Grand Ronde tribe’s nursery is actively increasing diversity of the forest by cultivating native plants that nobody has tried to grow before. “They are going to be the front runners of identifying protocols of doing that successfully,” she said.
As tatis haws continues to grow the Grand Ronde tribe has said it will continue to find new ways to spread not only the plants but the education and cultural messages as well.
“It’s doing just like a plant,” Ojua said of the nursery. “It’s putting out its seeds and slowly growing and spreading.”