cordero-lamb: i think there really is something to using the medicines that your ancestors have been using for a really long time. i think our bodies remember a lot, not just trauma. i think our bodies remember medicine. i think our bodies remember knowledge. i think they remember places. >> one of the most dangerous aspects of the new drug addiction is that the drugs abused are legally sanctioned, mass-produced, and available everywhere. cordero-lamb: that whole idea--"if it's more expensive, it's better"-- that is really something that we've brought into our whole mindset as western consumers. you spend more money on it, surely it will work better, a if you take twice as much of it, it'll work even better, so we've got this "bigger, better, faster"

mindset going. then you look at allopathic medicine, "allo" means against and "pathic" means disease or problem, pathogen, so it's a combat-oriented system of medicine. allopathic medicine definitely has its powerful points. it's got its superpowers. i can't sew your arm back on. i can't fix your heart once you need veins replaced, but i can certainly show you how to never need it in the first plac announcer: this program was made possible in part by a grant from anne ray foundation, a margaret a. cargill philanthropy. cordero-lamb: yeah. here we go, so the medical name is salicinum. this is just--yeah. "the discovery of salicin is claimed by buchner of germany

and fontana and rigatelli of ity, but m. leroux of france deserves the credit of having first accurately investigated its properties" because no one used willow bark before these guys. ha ha ha! ooh, this is a really important plant. if you smell it-- mia: ooh, that smells nice. cordero-lamb: yeah. that's a respiratory medicine of the highest order. mia: mm. ah, i love it. cordero-lamb: but, yeah, you dry it. you make a tea out of it. if you have an upper-respiratory or lower-respiratory infection, it just makes you breathe easy. it's so nice. it doesn't cure it, but it relieves the symptoms a lot. this is yarrow. mia: oh, oh, i've been seeing this. cordero-lamb: yeah. this is good medicine. it stops bleeding. it's a hemostatic.

ooh, pitcher sage. it has a really crazy smell, another happy smell. oh, wild ginger. mia: oh, my god. cordero-lamb: isn't that lovely? mia: ooh, yes. cordero-lamb: like, ahh. this is another cool plant. it's a good lymphatic drainage plant. oh, this is apache plume. it's a desert plant. isn't that pretty? the desert section is a whole 'nother story. santa barbara county is pretty unique. our mountain range is east-west-facing. you've got this transverse mountain range and then an east-west coastline right at this parallel that makes it a mediterranean climate, and the coastal fog is caught by the mountains, so the intense heat of the central alley pulls all the moisture from the ocean, and then it just stops over sta barbara because the mountains are right there.

the botanical diversity is just off the hook. it's a special place. our ancestors had to be master horticulturalists. ha ha! the santa barbara narrative is, long ago when the indians used to live here, they had a really nice life, but they didn't work much, and then the missions came and enlightened everyone and saved them, and then diseases killed them all. everyone died, end of chumash, "isn't santa barbara beautiful?" and that's kind of how it goes. i mean, if you're in grade school, that's kind of the message you get, and so people are still regularly very surprised to meet chumash people. it's a very different stor and it doesn't start with the mission. i wanted to come here to the santa barbara botanic garden because it's california native

plants, and our story, the syuxtun plant mentorship collective, starts here. i was hired here in 1996 just as an education program assistant. i was already very, very interested in plants, but i didn't know formal botany. i knew that my ancestors had had a system that was as sophisticated. with the genocide of the missions, a lot of that knowledge had been completely wiped out. we started to lose it when the western diet and western medical system came in. we're urbanized people, so it wasn't easy to do once we lost our land base, so i knew we had to start somewhere, and i was just intensely curious about the plants. i'm down in santa barbara 7 or 8 times a year to share what i know with my family and our syuxtun plant mentorship collective, which was founded in 2016. it's not just me teaching. there's quite a few knowledgeable people in

the group, and we share what we know together. we'll go and tend, look at the plant, see what it needs, and whatever that plant is doing right then, we follow its lead and give it what it needs. mia: every time i went up to the mountains with my husband, i would look at something, and i'd be like, "it's something special, but i don't know what that is, but it's got to be special. i need to know what that is," so in talking to my other cousins, we all were like, "well, we need julie." all the things we want to know, julie knows and can share that. cordero-lamb: we're so much a part of this landscape that to remove us from the landscape actually causes the plants to suffer, which is the opposite of what sort of the american environmental ethos has been, which is don't touch anything. it's pristine, you know? no humans here allowed. mia: but it's this relationship that we need to build. it's about the soil that it lives in. how are we taking care of that soil for our medicinal plants that we need?

what animals are feeding on those plants at this time? cordero-lamb: how do we go in and listen to what the plants need us to do as part of an ecology, and not just, "oh, we're going to go use a bunch of stuff. we're going to go get the products that we need. we're going to improve our nutrion and our health." curran: historically, the pharma industry has gone t into the natural world to look for unique compounds that have some health benefit. if you're in the pharmaceutical industry, your intention is to come u with a new compound, some new entity, whether it's a small chemical or a protein, some new drug that can deliver a health benefit, that can treatr cure a disease, and that you can sell foa profit >> relax. try the fastest relief known. doctors prescribe mot. the sooner you take it, the better you'll feel. curr: aspir's a eat example where the native american groups have use this willow plant for pain and other issues, and eventually bayer,

one of the first pharma companies, in the late 10s, they isolated some chemicals from this plant, and they found the active component that actually delivered this pain-alleviation effect, and then that became aspirin as we know it. cordero-lamb: "braconnot procured it by adding subacetate of lead to a decoction of its bark, precipitating the excess of lead by sulfuric acid, evaporating the colourless liquid which remained, adding near the end of the process a little animal charcoal previously waed, and filtering the liquor while hot," or you can just make tea. think it's 1880, "the united states pharmacopeia," and it's this great, big, thick book, and it's all plants and minerals, eh, mercury and arsenic and stuff like that, but mostly plants. every one of

those plants was learned from a traditional person practicing indigenous medicine, either in europe or scandinavia or russia or united states or mexico. as so as the american medical association is founded, that pharmacopeia went from this great, big, thick book to patent medicines, and they were things like mercury, cocaine, definitely isolated compounds, not whole-plant medicine anymore, so you're seeing this really strong move against "untrained physicians," so, in other words, people who were in control of their own food and medicine and childbirth. it wasn't a profession. it was just something that was handed to you down the family and controlled by the community, and that's the key word here, is "control" because you can't make money outf something you can't control. you can't ma money out of something that you can't patent. curran: when you start looking at plants and naturally

occurring chemicals, big pharma's always going to be thinking about what's patentable, what can be patented. in general, you can't patent nature. you can't patent a natural compound, which is why what the pharma industry often does is, they'll pursue a naturally occurring compound, but then they'll modify the structure so that it's sort of their own private modification, so to follow the scientific path, to move from a novel chemical in a plant all the way through this clinical pipeline to an approved drug, you have to think in an incredibly reductive way. you're reducing a plant to a single compound, and then you want to see how thatompound engages with your cell biology, with your physiology in theuman body. that's incredibly reductive. cordero-lamb: and we can talk about plants, but that's just a small part of this whole picture of getting outside western dichotomies, western binarys where not only are

things split into two, but one half is given higher value than the other, so male over female or white over brown. we're trying to get past that, and the best teachers are these plants. [birds chirping] well, i'm so happy everyone's here. this is a perfect day for a gathering. our land is hurting. we're hurting. we need to heal. our land needs to heal, and we can't do it separately. it has to be together, so we're here to help our land. our land is here to help us. with that, i would love to get us together in a circle and say thank you to the land and thank you to everybody that's helped us access that land and get out in it.

[indistinct conversation] cordero-lamb: everything's so much bigger the last time we came through. it's really nice. oh, yeah. the poison oak's much bigger, too. ha ha ha! oh, look at the roses. oh, they're doing great. most rose-family plants--andt's a huge family--are gentle astringents, just really good for intestinal mucosa issues, when you need to tighten and tone. your mucosa starts here and ends on the other side, and so everything that's going on from that point to that point can really benefit from something like rosehip tea, which also has a lot of vitamin c in it. rose is huge. strawberries are roses. raspberries are roses. blackberries are roses, so anytime you see those, those are mildly astringent plants that you can use in really similar ways, so--but this one's ours.

hemlock. this plant is so toxic that if you pinch the leaves and touch your tongue, you will go to the hospital. >> hmm. cordero-lamb: do you guys remember that little willow that we pruned? look at it. >> yeah. whoa. cordero-lamb: ha ha ha! says, "oh, good. here comes those nice ladies with their clippers." owens: i remember when that was just a little, tiny sapling. cordero-lamb: yep. ha ha ha! owens: we kept thinking, "well, that tree is not gonna make it, you know? it's a wetland plant, you know?" cordero-lamb: and then we came along with our clippers and said, "we love you so much," and it's like, "eh," and it went "bwaah!" ha ha ha! does anybody remember what i said about willow bark? willow bark's one of those ones you learn about when you rst start learning plant medicines. >> the aspirin? cordero-lamb: yes, exactly. >> you have toothaches? cordero-lamb: yeah. toothaches. yeah. it's incredibly bitter,

but it works. yeah. it did. i don't want to do a whole lot here today. i want to get up for the elderberry and also see if we can find some black sage, but this plant is now telling us, "nice work." ha ha ha! "i have lots for you," and i don't think we should overlook that hospitality, so if we don't get a little bit today, i would love it if people from the collective could come back while i'm gone. [indistinct conversation] cordero-lamb: look. they're pretty. they're really similar. they're both salvias, and they both have really strong antibacterial qualities, but for me personally, when i'm trying to kick an oncoming cold or a flu, the leaves are best. you can also use the flower heads, but i like to leave flower heads behind so that they'll seed. dogbane's better for... mia: how beautiful is that? cordero-lamb: fantastic. >> oh, we make it the same way? cordero-lamb: yeah, exactly the same way, with the vast fibers

on the outside of the... look really closely at the flowers. they're super fancy. >> they're upside down. cordero-lamb: yeah. isn't that cool? >> wow. that is cool. does it smell good? > i don't think so. casmali: i think often there's the necessity of, like, reimagining things to come to a new reality, and i think there's an opportunity in california specifically for the return to what we've always done as a way to move forward. cordero-lamb: yum. hwah! have you ever had these? >> no. i don't know. cordero-lamb: the most sour thing. >> hmm. mm. [indistinct] cordero-lamb: yeah. ha ha ha! see? see where the base of the plant is, right down in there? >> oh, yes.

cordero-lamb: we're kind of working out from there... >> ok. cordero-lamb: so the first stuff we'll go after is the dead stuff... >> ok. cordero-lamb: and just get in there and start clipping back just the dead stuff, and then we'll go after the live stuff. it makes the plants more water-efficient, so if you do it on a big scale, the water that's coming through the waterways is more abundant, and the groundwater is more abundant. the plant's trying to support the whole thing, not just its live parts. it's trying to support its dead stuff, too. when all of that's gone, so much less water is used and then also just makes thelant healthier, which makes the plant produce more flowers, which makes more food for bees and birds and us, so it's a win-win all the way arod. we'll put the brush right here in a pile. i'll start chopping up that because we use it for mulch around the bottom of the plant when we're done.

owens: if you don't do habitat restoration and you don't care about the natural landscapes, you'll find that we lose our biodiversity. we don't know what we're losing in biodiversity when we wholesale destroy native landscapes. previously, it had looked like this landscape here, which is, you know, 95% black mustard, a european annual that was introduced. it took about 5 years to turn that into this, but this is a much more diverse environment with about, oh, i'd say, 20 different plant species. we've flipped the ecology around from being, say, 95% nonnative to 95% native, and it looks to be successful.

[indistinct conversation] owens: what she's doing, in some ways, is kind of opening up spaces in between the plants, which is actually ecologically really valuable for the animals that like roaming around in our restoration sites, and we've seen rabbits and bobcats and coyotes, and having passages in between the plants are especially good for birds. birds like to hide under plants and then come out and forage and then run back under if there's any danger.

cordero-lamb: this is what everyone needs to be doing on this planet. this is it. we've got this planet. we need to be participating in our ecosystems in a knowledgeable, wise, and far-seeing way. that's medicine. that's the whole picture of medicine. we're trying to do things from a regenerative mindset, and one of our members was like, "you know, i feel like my clippers are a magic wand. it's like this is the only thing i bring with me, and i can do so much good. it feels amazing to know that i belong here." i hear that kind of thing, and, like, that's what we all need. that is a huge part of traditional medicine, is belonging somewhere.

that was really fun. >> i like this table. cordero-lamb: that's a eet doggie, but you're silly. you're just a sweet puppy. juda: you, too. alluju: juda? juda: yes. this is my daughter anji. anji, this is alluju. >> how's everything? how are the twins? hi. it's good to see you. how's everything? how's malik? >> here. we should move. cordero-lamb: i say, "syuk-a-tun." you say... mia: "syux-tun." cordero-lamb: syux-tun, syux-tun. syux-tun. i've always heard it was syuk-tun, but it's close. it's in there somewhere, but that's the village name. mia: there's so many reasons why we needed to do this, and the only thing we could think of not to do this was our lack of access to some places. that's our one obstacle. cordero-lamb: yeah.

mia: how can we overcome that one obstacle to make this happen for all these multitude of reasons? cordero-lamb: right. even if you do own a nice parcel like this one, you can't grow enough of our medicinal plantsere to serve a commuty. you have to have whole ecosystems for that, and even the ttle slices that we have aren't enough to serve an entire community, but it is enough to teach a community... mi yeah. cordero-lamb: so we decided that, sinctraditional ecological knowledge is held as a collective, as a community property, that it should be called the syuxtun plant mentorship collective. mia: oh, that's so funny. cordero-lamb: it smelled so good all of a sudden. we're gonna do just our standard simplest 3 things with these guys. we're just gonna save out the really pretty stuff for tea and nd it with the string over there, get it ready for drying, and then with the other two, we'll cut some up into this bowl and tincture it, and then we'll cut some more up into the bowl and put it in these for oil. let me just start handing you nice stuff, and you guys can start tying it up.

[indistinct conversation] cordero-lamb: i do this a lot at home with, like, herbs. >> ha ha ha! >> yeah. >> yep. i had... cordero-lamb: so one of my favorites is oregano. >> oh, yeah. cordero-lamb: so we're gonna do exactly what we did before. we're gonna band some. this'll be oil, and this'll be tincture. the oil is for external use. these will be mixed purple sage and [indistinct], and those will be just [indistinct], and you just cover them in olive oil, and then, since it's a fresh plant, it'll keep making, like, vapor inside the jar because you have to keep it out in the sun. you cap it up really tight, and you let it stay warm in the sun, and then every day, you come out with, like, a cloth and just wipe all the condensation off the inside of the jar and then wipe it all off the top of the jar and then cap it again,

and after about two months of being out in the hot sun, it's a full-strength, infused oil. when it's done, i have, like, a big--one of those jelly drainers, you know, and i pour the whole thing into there and let the oil go through, and then when it's all dripped through by itself, squeeze it really hard, and that cloth is fine enough that no little bits get through, and then that's an infused plant oil, and with that, you can make really powerful antibacterial salves for wound treatment. you can make lotions by mixing oil and water together at the right temperature and consistency. there's all kinds of things you can do with infused oils, and they're really helpful. when is the last time you sat at a table with 15 or 20 of your closest relatives and worked on something like that for several hours? that's where we get to sit and just really be ourselves. that feeling, i

didn't know how much it would change all of us when we started. that "sitting around the table" feeling of connecting with each other and the plants and making sure they're used properly, that may be the most healing thing that's happening in our community right now, and the plants are supporting us. they're there for us in the same ways that they were there for our ancestors. that does something to you that's very medicinal, very, very healing. mia: when you think of western medicine--opioids being, like, that quick fix to pain--our medicines are not a quick fix to a symptom. our medicines are nutritional. you have nutritional value to our lives and are part of our cultural eating habits that we're trying to reestablish. cordero-lamb: if you're gonna

get really into pharmaceuticals today, a lot of those people will also tell you that sickness is extremely profitable and wellness isn't so much. r medical tradition and in tibetan medicine and in chinese medicine and in every kind of herbalism in the world where it's community-approached medicine, it's not a combat-oriented mentality. it's a "from the soil up" mentality. in traditional medicine and traditional health care, you are strengthening the organism from the ground up. a lot of really good herbalists will talk about herbs as almost being like surgery. it's like these are rare and precious, but that's not the first line of defense. i'm especially careful to tell people, we're not replacing western pills with indigenous pills or even indigenous teas. it's not a switch. it's an approach, and the approach is to care for the organism through food first and

then if you get it really bad cold, elderberry syrup. if you get a boo-boo, put on some white sage salve or whatever you need, so that's the first line of defense. that's the pharmacopeia. announcer: this program was made possible in part by a grant from anne ray foundation, a margaret a. cargill philanthropy. exçñ#

oggccccc'''''' ladies and gentlemen, a member of the cree nation, stop-it-at-the-source campaigner for 350.org, please welcome clayton thomas-muller. [applause] what s up, everybody? [cheers] yeah, yeah. first and foremost, [native words] i want to acknowledge in a good way the indigenous ancestors and indigenous people living here in these beautiful lands,