White Pine in Time and Place

Abstract

In recent years, Western herbalists, often of settler descent, have contended with a lineage of appropriation and their ongoing relationships with Native plants, communities, and land. Critical—and hard to find—are stories of botanical circulations that foreground the dynamics of circulation, pluralism, and colonialism in which appropriation can be understood and its lessons applied. This article offers one such story. White pine was—and is—an important medicine within Indigenous Ojibwe medical traditions. As such, it was studied and written about by ethnobotanists working in close relation to Ojibwe communities in the early twentieth century. Such circulations took place amid land allotment, industrialized logging, the devastation of pine forests, and the marginalization of botanic practices. Situating stories of white pine in Indigenous, settler colonial, and herbal studies, this article argues that long histories of Western herbalism illuminate botanical appropriation as a settler logic with important consequences for present-day herbal practices.