Welcome Heidi Bohan author of The People of Cascadia

This week Heidi Bohan will be joining us to answer our questions about ancestral skills, the native people of Cascadia, and much more.

There are up to four copies of her book The People of Cascadia up for grabs.

Heidi herself will be popping into the forum over the next few days answering questions and joining in discussions.

From now through this Friday, any posts in this forum, ie the ancestral skills forum, could be selected to win.

To win, you must use a name that follows our naming policy and you must have your email set up in Paul's daily-ish email..

The winner will be notified by email and must respond within 24 hours.

Her website is http://www.heidibohan.com/default.htm

Posts in this thread won't count, but please feel free to say hi to Heidi and make her feel at home!

Hello Adrien,

Thank you for facilitating this.

Good Day Heidi,

I look forward to reading a copy of your book. How many of the illustrations are from Hilary Stewart's book "Cedar"? Did you ever get to meet Hilary?

Regards, jay

Hello Heidi,
\
Thanks for this chance to ask questions and learn from you here.

I am wondering about acorns and oak trees here in the northwest. We are in Oregon and I believe the oaks on our place are the Oregon White Oak. We only just
moved in here about a month ago, and there is so much to learn about this property... These oaks are very large and have an incredible beauty and energy to them- and
I was wondering about the ancestral uses of their acorns. THey also get these incredible lichen blooms now that we are in the foggy wet winter and I am thinking that these
also must have some very interesting and specific historical uses.

Here's a picture of one of them.

thanks!

Becky

Hello Heidi and welcome!
I looked at your blog and saw the poi making (I grow Taro too).
But I thought it was fermented, and I still look for a recipe!

I am very fond of ethnobotany (know François Couplan's book, he is French)

And I am so glad to discover a forum I did not know before here!

Thanks for sharing your info.
Be well
Matt

Welcome and thanks for sharing your time. Do you ever attend the Rabbitstick or Wintercount primitive skills gatherings. They are an excellent chance to remember how life once was. They also give you a realization of how little we do need. They have altered my way of thinking as much as the PDC I attended.

Hello Heidi,

I am so fortunate to be living within walking distance to Mission Trails Regional Park, here in San Diego. Coastal Live Oaks are abundant throughout the park. The Kumeyaay depended on its acorns as a food source, as well as its bark and leaves for medicine. Down by the water one can see the grinding rocks that were used to grind the acorns. Such a beautiful, protected area rich with history! Do you have any experience with using the bark or leaves of these trees for medicinal purposes?

Best regards,
Gail

Being half NA and half Hispanic, I learned much from my grandmothers on the old ways of doing things....but....you can always learn more from others from their ancestral skills. Wonderful to find a book on the subject and I am sure will be a must read in my future.

Welcome, Heidi!

I sure enjoy your book and all your illustrations. In fact, I showed the illustrations to my mom, an art teacher, and her eyes lit up. Then she promptly shared your book in her class.

So besides inspiring me to want to learn more wildcrafting, you're also inspiring artists!

Thank you.

welcome to the forums heidi!

Thanks for the welcome and I look forward to doing my best to answer your questions in the next few days.

I can already see there is a lot of diversity in the questions so this should be interesting. Jay, thank you for your question about my drawings. I drew over three hundred drawings during the first three years of developing this book and I thought of Hilary Stewart often during that time, understanding why she chose pen and ink as a medium for her book as well. I still have yet to meet her though I'd love to someday, I am a very early fan of her book Cedar. I drew all of the pen and ink drawings in my book as well as a few of the watercolors, and there are also some historic paintings and photographs as well by others for which I clearly give credit. I hope you enjoy the drawings as I feel they are at the core of the book.

Becky, you are lucky to be living with Oregon White Oak, Quercus garryana, also called Garry Oak up here in Washington, where it also grows. They really are beautiful, special trees. It was a favored food source, perhaps not as much of a staple in other parts of the world, because it is unpredictable for harvest quantities year to year, but certainly an important source of starch. There are varying accounts about how it was processed traditionally, but the most common in Western Washington is that it was boiled in the shell then put in pits in the ground where the winter rains would leach it of bitter tannins. There have been acorn leaching pits found in archeological sites in Western Washington which confirm these accounts. When taken out during the winter it was a delicious snack food. I've also been told that fresh or dried acorns were just chopped and put directly into stews and soups without processing. I look forward to the ‘mast’ years (like this year was) to harvest many acorns to process, using cold water leaching, into acorn flour which I use primarily for baking. Acorns could be an amazing resource for foraging pigs as well. There is a very cute story about how raccoon got his stripes related to stealing acorns from an acorn pit. The wood, especially the burls were also favored for making the bowl for mortar and pestles. Oak galls make a great ink in combination with soot and walnut hull. The bark is very tannic so would be good medicine for healing sunburns, relieving poison oak and other skin conditions. Those are the things that come to mind when I think of Garry Oak, one of my favorite trees, though I have to travel to harvest from ones in our area.

I look forward to more questions and discussions, thank you.

Xisca,

Regarding fermented poi... my experience is that poi is sweet when first processed as we did, then slowly begins to ferment, which is still edible but less desired. I believe it just naturally begins to sour. I only had the one experience with it while in Hawaii however, I'm sure there is much more to learn about poi as with all traditional foods. I'm a big believer in fermented foods in the diet so i'm always looking for traditional sources. Here in the Northwest fermented fish oil was a primary fermented food.

Heidi said : "I look forward to the ‘mast’ years (like this year was) to harvest many acorns to process, using cold water leaching, into acorn flour which I use primarily for baking. Acorns could be an amazing resource for foraging pigs as well. There is a very cute story about how raccoon got his stripes related to stealing acorns from an acorn pit. The wood, especially the burls were also favored for making the bowl for mortar and pestles. Oak galls make a great ink in combination with soot and walnut hull. The bark is very tannic so would be good medicine for healing sunburns, relieving poison oak and other skin conditions. Those are the things that come to mind when I think of Garry Oak, one of my favorite trees, though I have to travel to harvest from ones in our area."

Heidi, can you please elucidate on this 'mast' year? I do not know what this means. I am intrigued! I read your answer to my husband and we both were very exctied to know more about these very magical and lovely trees on our property. We are revelling in finally having our own place and having it be more magical and wonderful than we could have wished for... I am also wondering if the acorns can be fed to our chickens and ducks (we do not have pigs as yet, although we re talking about bringing them in to help with a massive blackberry invasion at the top of the property). I do note that I hear many small creatures around the areas under the trees at night. I imagine we are not the only ones who are drawn to the acorns. We use an electric paddock system of fencing for our birds and were just talking about moving them under a small grove of three of these trees near the house - the clay soil here is very mucky, but under these trees there is a nice thick layer of organic matter and duff which makes it much easier to traverse in these wet winter months than on other parts of the property. I wonder if the chickens and ducks will like the acorns too.

Thanks again for your very fascinating response! We are so loving learning more each day about our new home.

Becky

So I ran the winner picker app in the forum software and the winners are ...


Rick Roman
and
Xisca Nicolas


Congratulations Rick and Xisca!

I sent you an email to ask for the email address of the person that first referred you to Permies.com. That person (if qualified) will also get a copy of the book.

I am very far away from that climate...
I would like someone else to get it, someone living in the north west and who will make a better profit of it...
I better feel in the permaculture logic like this...

Hopefully my name will come out another day for a more general book (I relied on Internet appart from 2 Australian books, and do not even have a book about permaculture ideas!) or about RMH or chicks or tropical permaculture...

Or should I swap?
Anyone who need this book and would not need one of his/her books?