When we say a culture "used plant medicine," we tend to picture a single remedy: a leaf, a root, a brewed cup with a job to do. But that picture is almost always too small. Across Indigenous cultures, plants were not isolated products with labeled uses. They were threads in a much larger fabric of subsistence, trade, kinship, ceremony, and place — knowledge accumulated over generations and held by communities, not catalogs. The academic field that studies this relationship is called ethnobotany, and the longer you sit with what it has documented, the harder it becomes to talk about "plant medicine" as if it were a thing you could simply extract and shelve.

This is a piece about that larger fabric: how Indigenous and traditional plant knowledge was built and transmitted, why ritual and community were inseparable from it, and what modern science has — carefully, and not without ethical debt — learned from studying it.

What Ethnobotany Actually Is

Ethnobotany is the interdisciplinary study of the relationships between people and plants: how cultures use, manage, and perceive plants for medicine, food, religious use, materials, and clothing. According to Wikipedia's overview of the discipline, the idea was first proposed by the early-twentieth-century botanist John William Harshberger. The field's modern profile owes a great deal to Richard Evans Schultes — often referred to as the "father of ethnobotany" — whose Amazon expeditions beginning in the 1940s brought sustained scholarly attention to Indigenous plant knowledge.

What makes ethnobotanical knowledge distinctive is its form. It is typically an accumulated, place-based body of practice passed orally from one generation to the next, without a written system. A review in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine describes exactly this: knowledge "orally passed from generation to generation which led to the development of the traditional health care system." That same oral character is why the authors stress the urgency of documenting this knowledge "before it is permanently lost."

Knowledge as a Communal and Ceremonial Inheritance

The single most important thing to understand — and the easiest to flatten — is that this knowledge lived inside communal and ceremonial life. It was not a standalone commodity.

Consider the Blackfeet, whose traditional plant use is documented by the U.S. National Park Service at Glacier National Park. The NPS records that "Knowledge of traditional plant use has been passed from generation to generation," and that plant uses were "sometimes revealed to worthy individuals through visions, dreams or as a gift from a spirit guardian." Gathering itself was not a transaction; according to the Park Service, Native peoples gathered plants "with social and religious ceremony" and consumed them "in a preservationist and prayerful manner."

"Knowledge of traditional plant use has been passed from generation to generation... Plant uses are sometimes revealed to worthy individuals through visions, dreams or as a gift from a spirit guardian." — National Park Service, Glacier National Park

The scale is worth pausing on. The NPS notes that the Blackfeet "made use of at least 185 species of plants" across food, medicine, materials, and ceremony — camas, bitterroot, serviceberries, and chokecherries among the foods; lodgepole pine for shelter — and tended ceremonial tobacco gardens. "Plant medicine," in other words, was one strand inside a web that also held nutrition, construction, trade, and spirituality. Pulling a single use out of that web and calling it "the medicine" would misrepresent how the knowledge actually functioned.

Different Peoples, Different Knowledge

There is a strong temptation, especially in marketing and pop culture, to collapse hundreds of distinct nations into one generic "Native American" tradition. The knowledge is contextual rather than universal, and the historical record itself warns against flattening it.

The NPS makes the point directly in its account of Ojibwe ethnobotany at Voyageurs National Park: "Like all cultural practices, the use of plants varies with location and time period and is also influenced by those participating in the practices as well as by those recording the information." That last clause matters. Even the record of a practice is shaped by who was watching and writing. The Ojibwe — who, the NPS notes, had moved into that region "by the early 1700s" — used plants "for food, medicine, ceremonies, and raw materials" in ways specific to their place and time, not interchangeable with the practices of peoples a thousand miles away.

Respecting that specificity is now built into how some federal sites present this history. The ethnobotanical garden at Lewis and Clark National Historical Park displays plants used by local native peoples "such as the Clatsop and Chinooks for food, medicine, and textiles," and asks visitors to "approach nature with the traditional NW tribal values of respect, gratitude, and reciprocity." The framing is deliberate: reciprocity, not extraction.

What Modern Science Learned — and Owes

Traditional plant knowledge is not a museum piece. The World Health Organization reports that 170 of its Member States have reported on the use of traditional medicine, and the Smithsonian, citing the field, reports that "up to 80 percent of the world's population relies on herbal medicine as a primary source of healthcare" — a figure that reflects accessibility and cultural continuity, not an endorsement of any particular remedy's effectiveness.

And some of that knowledge has demonstrably seeded modern pharmacology — through rigorous chemical isolation and clinical testing, not through traditional use alone. The WHO points out that "over 3 500 years ago, bark from the willow tree was used as a pain reliever," and that willow bark later became the basis of aspirin; it estimates that "around 40% of pharmaceutical products today draw from nature and traditional knowledge."

The most celebrated recent example is artemisinin. As the WHO recounts, Tu Youyou isolated this antimalarial compound from sweet wormwood, following a lead drawn from traditional Chinese medical literature — work recognized with the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The WHO also names the Madagascar (rosy) periwinkle, hawthorn, foxglove, star anise, and wild Mexican yam among plants that contributed to medical breakthroughs, including the "childhood cancer drugs vinblastine and vincristine" and contraceptive pills.

The throughline in every one of these stories is the same: a plant known traditionally became a medicine only after scientists isolated specific compounds and tested them. Traditional knowledge pointed the way; it did not, by itself, certify a cure.

Knowledge-Holders, Not Sources

Ethnobotanists increasingly insist that Indigenous communities are expert collaborators, not raw material. As UC Berkeley's Thomas Carlson told Smithsonian Magazine:

"The traditional ethnobotanical knowledge from these indigenous cultures is responsible for many of the drugs that we have today." — Thomas Carlson, quoted in Smithsonian Magazine

Carlson also notes that "local indigenous communities are tremendously knowledgeable in ecology and plant identification." That reframing carries obligations. The field now openly grapples with the ethics of using Indigenous knowledge — including, as Wikipedia's survey of ethnobotany notes, "intellectual property rights and equitable benefit-sharing arrangements arising from the use of traditional knowledge," along with concerns about biopiracy. Learning from these traditions is not free; it comes with duties to the people who built and still hold the knowledge.

A Necessary Distinction

It would be easy — and dishonest — to let an essay like this drift toward implying that anything sold as a "plant product" inherits the legitimacy of these traditions. It does not. A whole plant used within a communal, ceremonial, reciprocal knowledge system that took generations to build is categorically different from a modern, isolated, concentrated compound. The two are not interchangeable, and ancestral use of one plant in one culture says nothing about the safety or value of a chemically distinct extract sold today.

That distinction is not abstract. Take 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH), a compound associated with the Southeast Asian kratom plant — a plant with no part in the North American traditions described above. In July 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration described 7-OH as "a concentrated byproduct of the kratom plant" that is "increasingly recognized as having potential for abuse because of its ability to bind to opioid receptors," and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary stated that "7-OH is an opioid that can be more potent than morphine." The FDA recommended that the DEA — which holds final scheduling authority — schedule it under the Controlled Substances Act, an action the agency framed as targeting concentrated 7-OH rather than natural kratom leaf (as reported by Food Safety News).

The honest framing is a contrast, not an analogy. The fact that ethnobotany has, on occasion, led from traditional plant knowledge to real medicines — aspirin, artemisinin, the periwinkle alkaloids — does not transfer to 7-OH. Those drugs earned their place through isolation and clinical testing. 7-OH is a potent, concentrated, kratom-derived compound that is chemically and pharmacologically distinct from traditional kratom leaf; its safety profile is still under study, the FDA has specifically flagged it, and its legality varies by state. It is not a traditional medicine, and no purchase connects anyone to Indigenous heritage. (For its part, Favor'd Alkz publishes third-party lab COAs as a matter of testing transparency — a business practice, not a health claim.)

Why It Still Matters

The reason to study why Indigenous cultures used plant medicines is not to mine the past for product copy. It is to understand a profoundly different way of relating to the living world — one in which a plant is known through place, story, ceremony, and community over generations, and in which knowledge carries obligations to the knowers. Modern science has gained real medicines by listening to that knowledge. The least it owes in return is to keep the credit, and the obligations, where they belong.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice; nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Products discussed are intended for adults 21 and older. Laws governing kratom and 7-hydroxymitragynine vary by state and locality — check your local regulations before purchasing.

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