The aroma of Alaskan wildflowers fills the air in a corner of the Dena’ina Wellness Center in Kenai. Tia Holley is a traditional wellness consultant at the clinic. She pulls dried yarrow flowers from a bag and sets them on a table sprawling with essential oils.
One by one, half a dozen people walk up to the table and grab an empty glass vile. They use little droppers to infuse the oils with yarrow, filling roller bottles with a headache relieving concoction.
The class was part of a twice monthly winter workshop hosted by the Kenaitze Indian Tribe that highlights the medicinal uses of local plants. Holley says yarrow’s healing abilities go beyond just relieving headaches.
“There’s a lot of different things we look at when trying to promote traditional knowledge and preserve those traditional practices,” she said.
Holley says yarrow's medicinal use goes back to ancient Rome, when soldiers used the wildflower on the battlefield to stop bleeding. The Dena’ina people also have historically used the plant to mitigate pain and sickness.
Kenai’s Rena Wiseman is no stranger to the wellness center’s native plant workshop. Like many other attendees, she has a full journal of local plant information and healing recipes from past wellness center classes.
“You never know about the world, you need to know how to survive," Wiseman said. "In my head, I always imagine ‘What would happen if we weren’t able to go to the store? What would happen if we weren’t able to hunt and buy stuff?’”
Although she’s not Dena’ina, Wiseman has familial ties to Native tribes in Michigan and Canada. She says foraging and learning about the medicinal uses of plants is part of her identity.
“We need to know how to hunt, how to fish, how to grow things, how to survive off the land," Wiseman said. "A lot of us, we lost that over years of colonization."
And, remembering Indigenous traditions is part of the reason Holley says she organized the workshop series in the first place.
“When people start making the plant medicine, some people start remembering the things that they made when they were younger," Holley said. "A lot of our elders were disconnected from practicing the traditional use of plants.”
Workshop attendees also made tea from willow bark at that afternoon's class. Holley says that can relieve headaches, too.
