Correct! All animals and plants face extinction. Flora and Fauna are more scientific names for “plants and animals.” All can become extinct, even we humans. The following is a common enough extinction story of the Indigenous Peoples to share across political boundaries that plants, animals, and once … Indigenous Peoples who did/do not recognize the new “rules.” Native Americans had no conception of an individual’s right to own land, property. They did share a spiritual “God touch” to their hearts (most likely 50/50 like people today) and a concept of Beauty. They believed that the Great Spirit exists, even in Ethnobotanics. They also practiced the art of war.
Ethnobotanic is not necessarily just food, shelter (botanic) or medicine (that’s when you see “botanical.) Consider the Rhododendron. Native American People’s use of beautiful flowers is/was also the same as it is today in all cultures: decorative. Chief Sealth used sprays of flowers to present his son slain by the Chimakum, tied into a canoe set high in a Big Leaf Maple tree along the Green River, the City of Seattle’s only river. Chief Seattle’s real name was Sealth. He never learned the English language, nor could he write or read. He spoke Lushootseed, his father was Suquamish, his mother Duwamish and lived closely to the other Salish groups around the Salish Sea (now Puget Sound) … but not the “clickers,” the remnants of another language group that lived for 1,000s of years across the Sound in the Port Townsend area. The 2 language groups (Puget Sound Salish and Chimakum, the latter related to the Quileute and Hoh thought by legend to have been swept inside the Sound by a monster tsunami in pre-colonial times) had constantly warred. Why? It certainly wasn’t over property rights as neither group believed any people owned the air, wind, water or land. (Ownership of land, property rights, was the most striking conceptual difference between the pioneers and Indigenous Peoples.) The Chimakum and Duwamish dislike for one another was, no doubt, magnified greatly by the inability to converse with one another. Chimakum’s closest language relatives (Hoh and Quileute) lived across the Olympic Mountains on the Coast. History is not clear as to who was behind the raid initiated by Chief Seattle, who supplied him the weapons, or who supplied the transportation across the Sound.
The courier typewritten description of a Maple grove above describes a Stillaguamish cemetery along a River into which the waters of Bonhoeffer Botanical Gardens’ flow. If one was to visit those Maples today (Big Leaf’s may reach 300 years of age), what would you not find there?
Native Plant, Animal, & Peoples’ Lens
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