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“Up here [on Mount Revelstoke], I feel full of energy! Something about the mountains!”

Dr. Mary Thomas, June 2004, tape #1, courtesy of Chief Ron Ignace and Marianne Ignace

In July 1994, my friend and graduate student Dawn Loewen and I travelled to Mount Revelstoke with Secwépemc Elder Mary Thomas. Dawn was studying scwicw (yellow avalanche lily, Erthryonium grandiflorum), documenting Mary’s knowledge of this precious Interior Salish root vegetable. As a child, Mary had harvested scwicwbulbs with her Elders. Although it grows lower down in some places, Mary recalled scwicw growing most abundantly in the mountains, including Mount Revelstoke. With pétse (hardwood digging sticks), her family would dig the bear-tooth-shaped bulbs in the summertime, after flowering. They selected the largest bulbs—those up to 8–9 cm long, from multiple-flowered plants—and carefully removed the small “whiskers” (cormlets) from the bulbs, replanting these, along with the smaller bulbs, to sustain the populations. The harvested bulbs were generally wilted, left out for a few days, to increase their sweetness, then strung onto t’swállten (Rocky Mountain maple, Acer glabrum) bark to dry, for later pit-cooking.

As we drove up the mountain, through meadows covered with wildflowers—paintbrushes, arnicas, lupines, and many more—Mary recalled the times her family travelled there by horseback, camping en route and harvesting their scwicw and other foods such as skwakwína (“mountain potatoes,” Claytonia lanceolata). Smiling broadly, Mary reminisced:

This place brings back memories…. I can remember as a little girl running, hopping, skipping, jumping through all these beautiful flowers…. When the food, especially the [mountain] potatoes—that was one of the diets through the winter, and they had to collect a lot of that…. They collected the …scwicwand skwakwína, down below. When that was finished our people came up to the plateaus. They hunted up here, they picked wenáx (huckleberries, Vaccinium membranaceum), they gathered more avalanche lilies and spring beauties, [to be] brought down to the valley and stored for winter.

As we wandered along through the spire-shaped melanllp (subalpine firs, Abies lasiocarpa), she continued:

The children were taught to respect and appreciate Mother Nature. And when you breathe in this cool mountain air, you can imagine sleeping out here in open air—we just had a little lean-to…. Even now you can smell… that melanllp, …the beautiful boughs…. And every time you smell that beautiful smell of Mother Nature’s creation, you appreciate it, you love it, you’re a part of it…. Today, we very seldom come to these areas where there’s a lot of beautiful flowers yet. Hopefully we can preserve and maintain this for the generations to come.

Mary spotted two more of her favourite medicinal plants along the roadside: kíkwa (mountain valerian, Valeriana sitchensis), and ye7út (Canby’s lovage, Ligusticum canbyi), also called “Indian marijuana.” Its valued roots were formerly smoked for relaxation, or held in the mouth to alleviate congestion: “I remember watching [my dad]—he’d take his pocket knife and scrape [the root] like a powder and mix it with his tobacco.” They would always leave the ye7útroot end in the ground, for regeneration.

“The old people would say medicines that grow up in the high mountains… have more strength than the ones… down below. Because… you’re closer to the mountain, … the clear air, with all the water fresh from the snow—it made the … plants more powerful.”

Dr. Mary Thomas passed away in 2007, and I still miss her. My deepest thanks also to Dr. Kukpi7 Ron Ignace, Dr. Marianne Ignace, and Dawn Loewen.

Feature Image: Dr. Mary Thomas, right, and (then-master’s student) Dawn Loewen, on Mount Revelstoke, 1994. Credit: Nancy J. Turner, 1994.