Every plant has a story, and every story has its roots. So much of our plant knowledge comes from ancestral teachings, and we must work hard to ensure it is not lost. LoriAnn Bird is one such individual who ensures that we don’t forget this wisdom from our plant elders.
If you haven’t already met this beautiful person and powerhouse of a woman, I want to introduce you to my dear friend, LoriAnn Bird. She is a Métis herbalist and educator, residing in the unceded and stolen lands of the Coast Salish Peoples.
I want to say that I’m LoriAnn’s biggest fan, but I know she has a whole line-up of people who just think she’s amazing. I’ve known LoriAnn for many years now, and I am thrilled that she is Garden Therapy’s herbalist mentor.
For many of our herbal guides, LoriAnn has brought her own wisdom and indigenous teachings to tell us more about the power of these medicinal plants.
Her new book, Revered Roots: Ancestral Teachings and Wisdom of Wild, Edible, and Medicinal Plants comes out next spring, and it’s available for preorder now.
Revered Roots is going to be one of the most important books on my bookshelf. In it, LoriAnn weaves Indigenous teachings as well as her own stories and lessons to go in-depth about many different wild plants and how to deepen our relationship with Mother Earth.
Today, I want to share a little bit about meeting LoriAnn and how we can use this knowledge from our plant elders in our gardens and healings today.
Meeting LoriAnn
Many years ago, I had contributors writing articles for Garden Therapy. In one such post, there was a misidentified photo. This prompted LoriAnn to leave the most beautiful and loving comment to let us know there was a mistake in identifying this wild plant.
Intrigued, I followed the link to her website and was instantly impressed.
I contacted LoriAnn to thank her for her comment, and we started an email exchange. Soon, I started attending her talks since we both lived in the Vancouver area. Imagine that!
At a workshop LoriAnn did at VanDusen Botanical Garden, I realized what an amazing teacher and source of information she is.
That talk was on salve-making and was meant to be a DIY workshop on how to take plant medicines. LoriAnn handed out notes, which looked like journal entries with little drawings and side notes she had handwritten. It was a tapestry of sharing the information rather than linear or sequential.
To start the workshop, LoriAnn asked everyone to introduce themselves. There were 35-40 people in this circle, all sharing a little story about themselves and why they were there. The introductions took over an hour.
As everyone spoke, LoriAnn would interject a little story and encourage us to connect as a group. About halfway through, I started to get stressed out about time. But I just took a deep breath and allowed the process to happen.
I realized that this was the point of the workshop—to bring people together to talk about plants and healing, not salve-making. In the end, we only spent about half an hour on the actual salve-making. What truly touched me was the storytelling and how this large group became a community in one session. That’s when I really felt the beauty of indigenous teachings and LoriAnn.
The Honour of Being a Reader
Over the years, I’ve gone on many walks with LoriAnn, often just the two of us. I remember one such time when she looked at the trees and said, “This tree doesn’t have any community. It is planted alone. All these trees are planted too far from each other. I’m going to call the city.”
I mean, what a force she is! Our community is so lucky to have her. She shows such love and cares enough to phone the city to try and get that tree to have its own community. Who does that? What an amazing person!
I’ve written a couple of books for Cool Springs Press, and when they asked me if I knew anyone who would write a book, I wholeheartedly recommended LoriAnn as an author. I know that for her, writing the book was an enormous process and included a lifetime of learning.
I’m honoured to have played a small part in the book by doing some content editing. I read every word of Revered Roots, sitting deep with the messages. There were times I just sat in awe at some of the stories in it.
The book has that same level of storytelling that LoriAnn does in her workshops. She put those thoughts into paper and worked with an amazing set of editors to create a beautiful book.
I encourage everyone to preorder Revered Roots to learn about the wild, medicinal plants and all the stories and history LoriAnn has graciously shared. There’s so much in there to learn and feel inspired.
I now want to pass things off to LoriAnn, and allow her to speak about her book and language in her own words.
A Conversation With LoriAnn
You talked with me about how important it is to write with emotion and connection. Could you tell me more about your thoughts on the limitations of the English language and how you addressed that when writing this book?
Limitations (definition: a limiting rule or circumstance, restriction, constraint, hindrance, etc.) would be one word to describe my interpretation, my experience, and my recall of my school memories.
When I was young, I sat and listened to stories with my family. Nothing was spoken publicly, only privately, of our Metis past. A few years ago, I learned that my grandmother, Mary Campion, spoke the native language of Cree.
Back in the 1900s, Metis families told the Canadian government Indian agents that their children spoke French to protect them from being taken to residential schools. Learning this truth explained my resistance to learning English while I was in school. I didn’t get to choose my native language of Cree; I felt robbed, hurt, and somewhat rageful.
The reclaiming of our individual ancestral history, language, and awareness led me to inquire and write about in Revered Roots what language is, and how it might inform us to expand our worldview and reclaim this deep interconnection and interdependence, an intrinsic kinship woven between people and plants that reaches back in time.
In Revered Roots, I invite you to discover and honour the native languages that shape our responsibility to foster and reciprocate the gifts of life. This exchange is a mutual flourishing within our diverse family of species.
My spirit of inquiry into the English language revealed to me terminologies of ‘trickery’, ‘the confusing rules”, and the ‘legalization’ of words with more than one definition that can lead to miscommunication.
Modern English is a young language formed around the 1500s, full of contradictions and nouns, giving ‘everything’ a name. It is a language of science, breaking everything into pieces or parts.
I wondered how we might respond differently to our home when we speak the language that comes from the lands and waters we reside on. Native language is like singing a song full of truth, verbs of action, and guidance.
How do you see Revered Roots being used by the reader?
I have so much love for witnessing our collective kin, communing, being still, listening to the forest songs, brother wind, our relatives the ones-that-fly, and so much more. I wanted to share their story and how much they love us too.
I hope you scribble in the book, add notes, doodle, draw more details, collect seeds, research, find recipes, share stories of your discoveries, and pass Revered Roots on to friends, family, and your children.
About LoriAnn Bird
LoriAnn’s book, Revered Roots, is available for pre-order now, releasing in March 2025.
LoriAnn Bird is a mother of two daughters and a storyteller who educates about wild, native, and medicinal plants. Her heritage is a blend of many cultures from Turtle Island and Europe that weave her unique heritage. She loves exploring the connection between people and our More-Than-Human-Kin, the plants that offer many teachings. Such plants growing everyday spaces, opening our perspective, and our immediate surroundings take on a new relationship as we see the wealth of untapped life-giving, ecological gifts that are given.
LoriAnn leads folks of diverse backgrounds in reconnecting to Mother Earth’s wisdom in various workshops that she offers.
You can find LoriAnn on Instagram and on Facebook.
More Teachings from LoriAnn
