By Kirsten Mowrey
Cool wind whistled through the white pines, bringing the first hint of winter on this early September day. I was west of Chelsea, visiting the Great Lakes Herb Faire. The Faire provides classes for herbal and naturopathic practitioners and students, shared ceremony, and time for community meeting. Successful since it began in 2014, the Faire draws herbalists from around the country to speak and present, but its focus remains the Great Lakes region, its plants, and practitioners.
Since its inception the Faire has been held at Cedar Lake Outdoor Center, on the west side of Chelsea, only a ten-minute drive from Interstate 94. Tall white pines and mature deciduous forest surround wood cabins separated by green lawn, and connect to a wildflower-edged lake. I parked and was immediately greeted by Colleen, one of the many volunteers who make the Faire happen. She checked me in, gave me Caitlin Potere’s beautiful Faire guidebook, and sent me over to the Pavilion —the largest white tent of many—where people in layered clothing sat in folding chairs. A fire burned nearby, welcome on the cool morning, and other participants sat around it. All was quiet except for the high-pitched voices of children over the hill and the day’s keynote speaker, Margi Flint, at the front of the tent.
Workshop leader jim mcdonald (4th from left) with some of his students.
Flint appeared as one might imagine an herbalist: long white hair to her waist, loose and flowing, with scarves and tunics layered over leggings, and sturdy lace-up boots. Her practice is in Massachusetts, and along with running her clinic, Flint has taught at Tufts Medical School. She is one of the elders of the profession, and her speech—aptly titled “Lessons from an Elder Earth Momma”—exhorted her colleagues to persist in the face of challenges. She related an anecdote about her first time teaching at Tufts. She was aware that she was moving in a different sphere from the usual, and knew the limits and legalities of herbalism, since only physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners are allowed to diagnose and prescribe medication to patients. Given this, she had titled her course “Herbal Treatments for Organ Systems.” However, when she got to Tufts, she saw that the sign on the door said “Herbal Medicine.” The audience laughed as she said, “Everyone knows who we are. Herbs are the people’s medicine.” She concluded her talk by saying, “Stand in your power, stand with the plants, share the love.” After the applause the audience gradually dispersed, but there was no need to hurry. My schedule listed a comfortable forty-five minutes before my next chosen session: “Marketplace, Silent Auction/Mingling.” No rushing was necessary. All my other conferences required hustling from event to event, like being in high school, leaving no time to make a contact, follow up with a speaker, or continue an interesting conversation. Moving to a human-dictated, not technologically-based pace, was part of the pleasure of the Faire, and conveyed respect, dignity, and a welcoming atmosphere throughout my visit.
At the fire I met Nia Aguirre, a naturopath who works at Castle Remedies, in Ann Arbor, and her friends and colleagues Helen Kociba, from Midland, and Rebecca Culley-Healey, from Fenton. All three have attended the Faire since its inception. I asked how the Faire has changed since the first year. Kociba replied that the first year was “fun and exciting, but they have more speakers now, more clinical classes, all the bases.” Culley-Healey agreed, noting that they have nailed down the details and that it runs more smoothly. All three agreed that community is the draw for them and is what keeps them attending, in addition to the spiritual and ceremonial aspects.
I drifted from tent to tent observing the courses. In the Pavilion, Guido Masé, from Vermont, lectured on “Herbs for Cognition, Focus, and Brain Health.” Guido was direct, intense, and a fast-paced speaker, with a PowerPoint presentation full of slides featuring brains, brain scans, and data. He talked about the clinical protocol for concussion, stroke, and dementia and contrasted that with a wellness protocol for function and performance. His presentation would fit seamlessly at any university medical school. In the yurt, clinician Maria Noël Groves, from New Hampshire, also used PowerPoint with anatomical slides and data on the topic of “Herbal and Natural Support for Thyroid Health.” While the Faire is open to the public, both of these courses were aimed at professionals treating patients, rather than for the purposes of self care or learning about the herbs themselves. For those classes, I moved on to a smaller tent where local herbalist and Faire co-founder jim mcdonald (who prefers lower case letters when writing his name) was talking with Friday’s keynote speaker, Althea Northage-Orr, from Chicago. On the table in front of them they had a variety of tinctures—herbs preserved in alcohol and typically administered by drops—all for use as nervines. Nervines are herbs that affect the nervous system, either by toning, calming, or relaxing. Northage-Orr picked up a tincture, read the name, and lectured on how she used it while the sample was passed around for people to smell, taste, and note its effects for themselves. Jim added his knowledge, and then he picked an herb and the cycle began again. People have taught each other this way about the uses and dangers of herbs for thousands of years, and in rural communities in Africa, Asia, and South America they still do. According to Kew Gardens’s 2017 State of the World’s Plants report, at least 28,187 plants are documented for medicinal use for humans.
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Down by the lake, the members of Abby Artemisia’s class on fall foraging stood along the lake’s edge, taking notes as she stroked goldenrod flowers. From North Carolina, Artemisia wears the essentials I saw others wearing here: long pants, long sleeves, lace up shoes, and a knife sheathed at her waist. The sky cleared and sun shone down on her as she recommended goldenrod in fall as the antidote to ragweed allergies. People scribbled in notebooks, asked questions, and discussed their own applications.
Moving back to the main tent, I observed the kids’ tent in passing. Participants in the “Natural Building for Kids” class ran in and out of the forest and carried limbs, flowers, and branches back to the lawn. A half dozen triangle-shaped lean-tos appeared on the grass in stages, decked with goldenrod and asters, and occupied by their small creators. Daniel Stone, from West Bloomfield, watched over the kids as he has all five years, though his wife, Tina Stone, is the herbalist. He pointed out how free the kids were, playing well with one another. I never heard a cry of distress coming from the kids’ tent the entire time I was at the Faire, though their voices were audible throughout the marketplace and class area.
In the marketplace, Brooke Sackenheim, of Sovereignty Herbs, of Ohio, prepared for her kids’ class, “Secret Blend”—a combination scavenger hunt and mystery tour—while chatting with her neighbor, Ginny Denton, of Linden Tree Herbals in Ann Arbor. The Faire, said Sackenheim, “…is the best conference. It’s not only local, it's like a family reunion. It’s very welcoming here—herbalists are different, this kind of local and regional thing makes you feel less alone.” Denton agreed, adding that,“There are many different herbalists, yet we are all in a similar mode here.” That mode could be described as one of respect for the natural world. In her lyrical book Braiding Sweetgrass, botany professor and Potawatomi citizen, Robin Wall Kimmerer, offers essays on the intersection of science, indigenous wisdom, and plants. I saw many people strolling with copies of the book while at the Faire. One essay, “The Honorable Harvest,” tells of Kimmerer’s asking permission of wild leeks to pick them for her dinner, demonstrating the approach of showing respect to the spirit of the plant, taking only what is needed, and feeling gratitude for the gift given. She wrote, “One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world.” Another essay, “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” explores the different worlds revealed by the Potawatomi and English languages. English, like many European languages, often uses gendered nouns, whereas Potawatomi uses a framework of animate or inanimate being. Kimmerer gives this example: “Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say ‘What is it?’ …But of apple, we must say ‘Who is that being?’” She explains “…in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.”
Relating to the world as full of living beings, and offering respect and relationship rather than utilitarianism and self absorption, created an atmosphere of gentleness, kindness, and compassion that was tangible at the Faire. While I didn’t hear anyone explicitly articulate Kimmerer’s words, I could feel the attitude of that worldview and a corresponding physical reaction: my shoulders softened and the tension in my abdomen eased. It wasn’t only I who noticed. When I spoke with Esstin Niganobe McLeod, an Anishinabe herbalist from Ontario and three-time Faire teacher, she said that she “…likes the atmosphere and the direction the organizers are moving—taking better care of our health and the land. It’s been there but never a forum before.”
Two weeks after the Faire, I met with Anna Fernandez and Marcie Nido, two of the many volunteers who make the Faire reality. Fernandez, along with jim mcdonald, is one of the founders of the Faire. Her biography in the Faire guidebook describes her as “a mother, herbalist, home birth midwife, and RN.” She was working on a farm in Oregon when she discovered herbalism, through a book by Penelope Ody.
Fernandez said, “I became fascinated and began using comfrey, then hawthorn, and it snowballed from there.” She taught herbalism at a Washington state music festival for a time, until she returned to the Midwest, settling in Chelsea. Fernandez had a vision of recreating her Washington experience. One day she was out running and came across Cedar Lake. “I thought, ‘This is the place,’ and I went home and called jim that day and he said, ‘Yep, let's do it.’ He called in some of his people, and everybody was interested right off the bat. And almost everybody is still part of the organization.”
The group meets monthly around southeastern Michigan to plan the next year’s Faire, and having observed the enthusiasm between Nido and Fernandez, I can only imagine the energy of the whole group. The two women hugged and chatted about Faire details before we resumed the interview,and continued outside afterward.
Nido, who manages the vendors, came to herbalism through her own health issues. At one point while in college, she was on twelve medications. With the assistance of a chiropractor, she weaned herself off them, changed her diet while working at Oakland University’s farm, and then became fascinated with herbs. At twenty-eight, Nido is the same age as many Faire attendees, and I asked her what the attraction was for her age group. “Everyone is seeking a deeper connection with nature,” she began. “Also, a lot of people have had health issues themselves, or close family members with health issues, and traditional medicine isn't doing the trick for them or they want something gentler. It’s also really fun to learn about plants, and it’s also [a good fit with] DIY self-sustainability culture. I think that's really a major draw.”
Fernandez said her vision for the Faire has always been threefold: education, connection, and community. The first year, she said, “I lost a lot of sleep. Financially it was on me—if we didn’t get enough people, we had committed to the teachers, what about all the food?” That first Faire drew 225 people and offered classes for adults and kids Saturday and Sunday only. The fourth year, the Faire added Friday intensive classes, allowing four-hour deep dives into a topic. This year the Faire added “tween classes,” for herbalists between eleven and fifteen years old, and sold out early, capping entry at 350 participants. Now, Nido said, “We come in knowing—what did we do last year?” Fernandez continued that sentence with “…what do we want to do differently? We all came out of this year with a thousand ideas for what to do next year, within our own little role of expertise. We're still trying to—we’re never going to perfect it, but still trying to manifest this original dream.”
Fernandez holds tight to that original dream of community. Remembering her own early, lonely days as an herbalist she said, “Creating this place where people can go back to Ohio and say, ‘I met six people from Ohio that are studying herbal medicine. Let’s get together our little group and continue studying, learning, identifying plants, and being with the herbs.’ We have such a crazy history of herbal medicine in this country, and we have such a long way to go to build that back up—we’ll never be able to get it to where it was prior.” I asked her for a definition of “crazy history.” She replied, “Twofold: losing so much of the indigenous knowledge, and—within the European community—burning women at the stake for knowing anything about herbal medicine and midwifery. I would definitely have been burned at the stake. That’s the beauty of Ayurveda and Chinese medicine…that it's an unbroken history within their cultures. There's so much wisdom, and it seems more accepted and integrated into those cultures because there wasn't that disruption. We have a lot of work to do to get comfortable with the plants again, trust them and learn from them, grow them, gain trust.”
Themes of community, connection, and education go beyond the Faire to the region itself. Sackenheim had said to me that part of the appeal was that “people crave…ritual and ceremony, but for Europeans, unfortunately, we’ve coopted others and are enamored of others’ rituals.” Aguirre had also mentioned that the spiritual and ceremonial aspects drew her. This year’s opening ceremony on Friday evening was led by Panoka Walker, an herbal healer of Anishinabe descent, who led a water ceremony and invited all to “figure out what your water address is.” Additionally, each year the Faire hosts a silent auction to benefit the community. This year the auction raised $2,000 for MackinawOde, an indigenous-led group peacefully advocating for water protection at the Mackinac Straits and the shutdown of Line 5, an Enbridge—owned pipeline running under the Straits. Relationships are never one way, Kimmerer’s work reminds us; they are always reciprocal.
I asked Nido and Fernandez what the future holds for their community. Some challenges face the Faire. One is they have more interested participants than Cedar Lake can accommodate. They also have no way to accommodate wheelchairs. Various ideas have arisen, including holding winter courses or other seasonal classes, but taking time away from everyone’s lives isn’t always possible. Nido hopes that “…everyone will start incorporating herbalism into their everyday life, even if it's just one or two plants. Just start to get to know the plants and form a deeper connection with the earth.” Both were inspired by the kids’ classes and the future community they may help to create. For example, Guido Masé came from Vermont to teach, yes, but mainly because his ten-year-old daughter wanted to see friends from last year. Fernandez’s vision is based in Great Lakes imagery. “I want the Herb Faire to be a tossed stone that has many ripples that just keep going out. So many conferences that are similar to this are popping up all over the country. Those ripples are all going to meet and there's going to be coverage for anyone who's interested; they’re going to reach out and find their community.”
Next year’s Great Lakes Herb Faire will be held September 11-13, 2020. You can find more information on Facebook (Great Lakes Herb Faire), Instagram (@greatlakesherbfaire), or on the web at greatlakesherbfaire.org. MackinawOde can be found on Facebook under “Heart of the Turtle.”
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