Native America's Pharmacy on the Prairie

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For countless generations, Native Americans have used the plants around them for food and medicine. It has been reported that the various tribes on this continent used more than 1,000 species of plants for food alone. With good reason: The native plants are nutritious, rich in vitamins and minerals, and many are excellent sources of protein.

Native people weren’t just sitting around their lodges, holding their sick stomachs, nursing terrible headaches and waiting for a drug store to finally open in their neighborhoods. They needed look no farther than the surrounding prairie and woodlands for help in healing the pain, wounds and infections that are an inevitable part of being human.

Much of the collective wisdom about these healing plants was lost with the devastation of the native tribes. Oddly, it has become more common for us to look to the forests of Central and South America when considering the medicinal potential of plants.

But now, a devastating loss is occurring to the ecosystem itself as assaults degrade, fragment and destroy North America’s prairies and natural woodlands. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, urbanized area in the United States has doubled since the 1970s — a loss of about 20 million acres. The Sierra Club reports that an astounding 400,000 acres of rural land are being bulldozed every year to make way for housing subdivisions and shopping malls.

The potential loss is stunning: Only a fraction of the world’s plants have been surveyed for biologically active compounds, and many of these have been analyzed for only one type of compound, such as anti-tumor agents.

Many prairie plants in North America are just now being studied for possible treatment of cancer and heart disease and for their immune-stimulating properties, needed in the fight against viruses such as AIDS.

Gardeners and others who care about the useful plants have a role to play in stopping the devastation, preserving as much of the wild as possible, and restoring and recreating lost ecosystems wherever possible, even if that means simply planting small, wild gardens right in our own back yards. A bonus is that a whole pharmacy of medicinal plants might again be found in our back yards, just as our Native American antecedents found them.

Many of the plants in this article are uncommon or rare and should not be taken from the wild. Also, many of these plants are poisonous if used incorrectly. For more information on the use, cultivation or preservation of native plants, please see Sources. This listing is extended from our published print version, and those included only in the Website version are indicated with an *.

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