Forest as Pharmacy
/By Shannon Prince, produced by Out There Podcast
Re-released on September 23, 2021
Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting
WILLOW BELDEN: Summer is over, and if you’re anything like me, you could probably use something to look forward to.
One of the things I like to daydream about is travel. And if you’re the same way, you might be interested in a podcast called Out Travel the System.
Out Travel the System is one of our sponsors. It’s brought to you by Expedia, and its mission is to inspire and inform about travel. That can mean anything from building your bucket list, to taking concrete steps to take that next trip when the time is right.
The podcast finds people who are passionate about travel — including a commercial airline pilot, a woman who travels pretty much year-round, and a man who wants to have visited every country in the world by the end of this year. Out Travel the System is available wherever you get your podcasts.
(Out There theme music begins to play)
Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.
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We all have our reasons for going outdoors. Some people turn to nature for an emotional reset. For others it’s about rising to a challenge. Maybe you go to find yourself…or lose yourself.
For Shannon Prince, it was a little different. For her, going out there was about holding onto memories from generations past — about making sure beautiful traditions aren’t forgotten.
Her story takes us from Houston, Texas, to the remote meadows of Outer Mongolia, and explores the surprising things that can happen on a personal level, when we attempt to preserve a way of life that’s slowly disappearing.
This story first ran a couple of years ago, but if you’re new to the show, you might not have heard it. And if you’ve been with us since the start, I think this is a story you’ll enjoy hearing again.
I’ll let Shannon take it from here.
(soft music begins to play)
SHANNON PRINCE: When my grandmother was a little girl, her brother accidentally chopped her head open.
She’d been playing close to where he was splitting wood, and she got into the path of his axe. My grandmother managed to stagger to the house where her own grandmother, Missouri, lived.
Missouri saved her from bleeding to death, and closed her head back up by sealing the wound with ashes from the fireplace. For the rest of my grandmother’s life, a fine gray tattoo of cinders was embedded in her brow.
(music fades out)
As a woman whose background includes both African American and Cherokee heritages, I come from peoples who have rich relationships with the natural world. In Cherokee thought, “plant” and “medicine” are practically synonyms. If they were circles on a Venn diagram, there’d be no space illustrating plants that aren’t pharmaceutical. Our traditional stories teach us that there’s no such thing as a non-medicinal plant — only plants whose medicinal purpose we aren’t aware of.
Growing up, I knew all this. I knew that out there were things that could save you — that could become part of you. I learned how to use plants to do everything from ward off a cold, to keeping smallpox from causing male sterility. Nature, for me, was something that could literally get under your skin and remain forever.
And yet...I only knew a fraction of what my grandparents knew. For them, the forest was like a pharmacy. For me, it’s more like a medicine cabinet.
(gentle, folksy music begins to play)
I grew up in Houston, Texas where Vietnamese-Cajun-fusion restaurants and acclaimed museums were prevalent, but forests where I could spend long hours wildcrafting were not. Instead of focusing on herbalist practice, my childhood was filled with horseback riding, piano, dance, golf, tennis, and figure skating lessons. My sister and I went to school, my parents ran their own business, and when my mother brewed us Cherokee tea, it was so that we’d all have the strength to continue our busy suburban lives the next day.
(music fades out)
My family’s ecological literacy had been slipping away for generations. My great-great-great-great grandmother on the Cherokee side, Grandma Sallie, was kidnapped as a teenager. Her kidnapper was a Texan plantation owner who forced her to be a concubine. Sallie lost everything, from her family to her traditional homeland to her freedom. And then she lost her bioregion — the local botanical treasury that she had been taught to make use of from childhood.
It was Grandma Sallie who taught Missouri her practice. But Cherokee medicine is site-specific, and they didn’t live in the Cherokee homeland anymore. That meant they didn’t have all the right plants for their herbal medicines. Already, the apothecary had shrunk.
(quiet music begins)
You might expect that Missouri would have passed on everything that Sallie taught her to my grandmother. But here’s the thing about Missouri — the day she saved my grandmother’s life was the only day she was ever kind to her.
You see, my grandmother was a Black native with skin the color of pecans. Missouri was colorist. She had adopted the colonizers’ white standard of beauty. As a result, she never formed a close relationship with her granddaughter, and the intergenerational sharing of knowledge dwindled even more.
So by the time I came along, there wasn’t as much left to teach me. Imperialism had shrunk my family’s cultural wealth the way a financial crisis erodes your bank account.
(music fades out)
I realize that I’m blessed to be in the possession of the knowledge that I have, but still...it’s like, have you ever been to a gourmet restaurant where you’re served a series of exquisite but tiny dishes, and you leave with your appetite whetted instead of sated? That’s how I feel about my ecological knowledge. The remedies that I know make me ravenous for more.
But it's not just ravenousness I feel, but urgency. What if, one day, my own granddaughter comes staggering, ailing, to my door?
(soft music begins)
Because I feel my own cultural loss so keenly, I’ve always been drawn to peoples whose traditions are intact and robust. So, during my senior year at Dartmouth, I applied for a fellowship to go to Outer Mongolia.
I felt this inexorable pull to the country. I had read that if Genghis Khan were to come back to contemporary Mongolia, he’d barely feel any culture shock. He’d find that his people were still living in yurts, still dressing in the same beautiful robes that their ancestors had worn 900 years ago — even still using horses as a means of transportation. Sure, nomadic Mongolians often transport generator-powered flat-screen TVs on those horses, but they revere their way of being and carefully choose which outside influences to integrate into their lives.
But their culture wasn’t as stable as it seemed.
(music fades out)
During the twentieth century, Soviet domination led to socialism. The socialists were fanatically atheist, and religious expression was commonly punished by death. The problem was, every aspect of Mongolian culture was and is inflected with religion — especially its sustainability practices.
Mongolians ask the spirits of the animals that they hunt for forgiveness. They consider certain places spiritual and thus off limits for uses like livestock grazing. They believe that plants and rivers are not objects to be exploited, but animate beings whose souls must be treated with reverence.
But passing on their spiritually-derived values to their children was like loading a gun and giving it to a toddler to play with. Under socialism, Buddhists, many of them monks, were exterminated. And other people were slaughtered for their animistic faith. I met a man whose father had been murdered right in front of him when he was a child simply because the father had been suspected of being a shaman.
For nine hundred years, Mongolians had proudly taught their sons and daughters their way of life. But after all those centuries, many made the heartbreaking decision to stop. It was the only way not to get killed.
(quiet music begins)
Mongolia had a democratic revolution in 1990, and by the time I was graduating from college, it was nearly twenty years into freedom and actively trying to restore its culture. I saw a people currently in the same state that my own ethnicities had been in centuries before — their culture pummeled by repression, and I felt drawn to them somehow.
It’s like this: think about the intangible thing that you cherish the most — maybe it’s your religion, or literature, or a recipe that’s been passed down from generation to generation. Now, imagine a future in which your descendants have never even heard of that thing that you treasure. Imagine that when you said “Jesus” or “Moses,” they just cocked their heads to the side and wrinkled their noses in confusion. Imagine if they said, “Shakespeare? Never heard of him.” Imagine a tomorrow in which your children’s children wouldn’t recognize a plate of spaghetti Bolognese, or a bowl of ramen, or a slice of babka.
I’m that child.
(music fades out)
I couldn’t travel across time to antebellum America and advocate for my own peoples, but I could travel across the world in the hopes of playing a small role in keeping another folk from facing the same fate as my own.
(hopeful music begins)
What I wouldn’t be able to give to my own descendants, I might be able to help my contemporaries give to theirs.
So, I went to Siberian Mongolia to collect oral history. I would use that oral history to write a reference book for the people of the region. There were individuals — many of them elderly — who had knowledge that they’d kept to themselves during socialism. They now wanted to disseminate that knowledge. An ethnography would allow them to do that.
(music continues for a few notes and then fades out)
Siberian Mongolia was like no place I’d ever seen before, a cross between the Swiss Alps and the old west.
(ethereal music begins)
There was so much open land that it almost gave you the unmoored feeling you get when you’re at sea and no coast is in view. What at first looked like telephone poles, turned out to be hitching posts. And at night, there were so many stars that the sky seemed more white than black.
Growing up in Houston, which is America’s fourth largest city, I’d delight in identifying constellations at night, but you couldn’t do that in Mongolia, because the stars made the sky look as though a salt shaker had been knocked over. I thought, “Who knew that the heavens looked like this?”
(music fades out)
While I was en route to the communities where I would do my fieldwork, I stopped to attend Naadam — the Mongolian festival of archery, wrestling, and horseracing. People sitting in the bleachers with me would caress my cheeks and run their fingers along my cornrows. I was the first Black person many had seen outside of television.
And I was struck by their appearance, too. Each woman seemed more beautiful than the last. At one point, I noticed a lady in her early sixties. Her face looked as though it had been sculpted by the same artist who made the bust of Nefertiti. That one, I resolved, is the most beautiful of them all.
WILLOW: Hey, it’s Willow. We’ll hear the rest of Shannon’s story in a moment. But first…
I want to take a moment to talk about sleep. Studies have shown that if you lose just one hour of sleep, it can take you four days to fully recover. And prolonged sleep deprivation can lead to serious health conditions.
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Pachamama is one of Out There’s sponsors, and they are taking a modern, holistic approach to sleep support. Their Sleep Well gummies are made with CBD, CBN, and a micro-dose of melatonin. Plus Elderberry extract.
In case some of these things are new to you, CBD and CBN are compounds produced by the cannabis plant. When they’re paired together, they create a powerful sleep aid.
Melatonin is something that can help ease your body into a relaxed, sleepy state. And elderberry is great for boosting your immune system.
The Sleep Well gummies are 100% THC-free, so you won’t get high from them.
If you want to get a good night’s sleep, and support your immune system, head over to pachamamacbd.com. You can get 40% off your order with the promo code OUTTHERE. Again, that’s p-a-c-h-a-mama-c-b-d-dot-com, promo code OUTTHERE.
And now, back to the story.
SHANNON: Work in Mongolia was quite the experience. In between interviewing people, I rode Khalkha horses over the steppes, I let baby reindeer suck my thumb — I even ate nearly raw goat intestines in blood sauce.
A lot of the knowledge that Mongolians wanted to preserve was ecological. I was told that people should cover their heads when milking yaks as a sign of respect to the animals. I learned that slaughtered livestock were to be honored by being careful not to waste any part of them — hence my meal of goat intestines and blood.
I learned that when you harvest plants, you should only pick flowers on cloudy days, and, even then, you should never take all the flowers in a patch. That’s to ensure sustainability.
(cheerful music begins)
In Europe, edelweiss are threatened with extinction, despite the fact that many countries protect them by law. In Mongolia, edelweiss are managed through traditional practices, and they’re all over the steppes.
I was learning so much new wisdom, I could feel myself growing, the way you can feel your muscles burning with nascent strength when you work out. Yet, much of what I heard also echoed teachings from my own cultures. I’d find myself nodding vigorously as I took notes, all but crying out “Amen” as though I were in a church pew.
Part of Mongolia’s allure had been its exoticism, but actually being there turned out to be like visiting your childhood home. There was this pleasure of realizing that, as different as this place was to me, it was also tinglingly familiar.
(music fades out)
As I traveled from nomadic camp to camp by horseback and hitchhiking, I eventually ended up at a collection of yurts and log cabins. As always, despite being a stranger, I was welcomed into one of the homes for salty yak-milk tea and bread. And there inside was the breathtaking woman from the sports festival.
She was married to a man named Basbaish, who is a traditional healer so renowned for his plant-based medicine that medical professors come from Europe to learn from him. I remember sitting outside in a meadow with him, as he taught me to fold paper into origami-like containers that would hold the pharmaceutical he was making.
His medicines could contain blends of as many as 50 to 70 ingredients — all plants he’d collected from the meadows or byproducts of humanely killed animals. One plant being endangered, a single herb going extinct, and the remedy couldn’t be manufactured. Out there, he taught me, was a treasury of things that we could use to care for ourselves, but only if we, in turn, cared for the environment.
(quiet music begins)
He and his beautiful wife, whose name was Marusia, absolutely doted on me. Once, as I was falling asleep, I opened my eyes to find Marusia ever so gently stroking my cheek. I fell in love with them right back.
But despite the atmosphere of warmth and affection in the camp, it was clear that something was wrong. While everyone else in the family hunted and sheared the cashmere goats and played volleyball, Marusia spent most of her time resting in bed.
Eventually, privately, one of her 11 children explained: Marusia had terminal cancer. She had had chemotherapy, but wasn’t in remission. When it got to the point that Western medicine could do nothing more for her, Basbaish brought her home from the hospital.
She didn’t have much energy, but Basbaish’s potions gave her a good quality of life — she played with her grandchildren, had heartfelt talks with her adult kids, and spent sweet, quiet moments with her husband. His medicine was potent enough to keep her in this world, yet gentle enough that she could enjoy being here.
(music fades out)
I would learn that cancer was becoming more common as foreign gold-mining corporations came to Mongolia. In the excavation process, they used things like arsenic that got into the water supply and poisoned people. Socialism had threatened the lives of Mongolians a generation before, and capitalism was threatening it now.
(soft music begins)
When I learned of Marusia’s diagnosis, something my relatives always warned me about traditional medicine came to mind. Everytime anyone told the story of my grandmother getting her head chopped open, they would warn me that I must never try the ash cure today. They told me that in our era, there was so much pollution, that the wood ash would poison you to death.
I knew that my own environment was toxic, but learning that Mongolia’s — which seemed so pristine — was as well, was a brutal shock. I felt like someone who had learned that her spouse had cleaned out her bank account and disappeared. I’d come to the country with a sense of urgency. Now, I wondered whether I was already too late.
(music fades out)
That evening at dinner, I watched Marusia’s granddaughter toddle around and babble.
When she’d pause, Marusia would furrow her brow and pretend to respond solemnly in baby talk. And I just remember thinking, this little girl won’t remember Marusia. She will forget her just as completely as she adores her.
I excused myself and rushed outside. I didn’t want the family to see me cry. But it felt as though someone had jammed an envelope opener into my heart and was forcing through its seam. I thought, ‘Compose yourself. You’re going to be here awhile. You can’t go to pieces every time you’re around Marusia.’
(solemn music begins)
When I came back inside, Basbaish had begun his after-dinner ritual of treating his wife.
And, all of a sudden, something occurred to me. Have you ever had that feeling when it’s like the narrator of your life story whispers in your ear and gives you a hint as to how the plot should unfold? It dawned on me that, just maybe, I had something to offer. I told Marusia and Basbaish that sometimes I performed a special type of massage on people in pain. I offered to do it for Marusia.
(music fades out)
I don’t know if what I do has a name. I don’t even fully understand how it works. I did know that the worst thing I’d used this sort of massage on before was arthritis. I’d never attempted it on someone suffering the pain of cancer. But that log cabin at the end of the world where a woman was tiptoeing away from her life was somehow a place of hope, a place where it felt as though a half-comprehended remedy could just maybe work.
(music begins)
I sat beside Marusia on her bed and began the massage. Basbaish, her kids and grandkids, and my interpreter passed in and out of the house as I concentrated. I prayed for her while I worked and, at one point, the two of us found ourselves all alone in the house. I closed my eyes, lay my head on her shoulder, and gathered up all of my love for her, trying to send it directly into her body. Then I felt her head rest upon mine.
Eventually, my interpreter wandered back into the cabin. She gasped when she saw the two of us nestled together like that. Through my interpreter, Marusia expressed that she was better. Then she gave my interpreter two more words to translate. The first one, “Sainaa,” I recognized — it was the Mongolian name I’d been given. The second word was “daughter.”
(music fades out)
For the rest of my time in Mongolia, every chance I could, I visited Basbaish and Marusia. I started calling them Aw and Ej — honorable father and honorable mother. I went home.
Basbaish and I had a routine. He’d treat Marusia first and then gesture to me with a grand sweep of his arm, teasingly announcing, “And now, I pass you on to my colleague.” Then I’d go sit beside Marusia and give the massage.
We were so hopeful during those visits, but that hope had a salted caramel tinge of sadness. I remember sitting beside Marusia on her bed after one of our massage sessions, holding her when she stated with such conviction, “I’m going to live.” But she was crying when she said it.
(somber music begins)
About four months after I met her, Marusia passed away. I had just returned to America. I felt like a sand mandala, like the elaborate paintings that Tibetan monks labor to create for weeks and weeks, just a few grains of sand at a time, only to ritually destroy them.
I’d longed for my lost traditions, and Mongolians had shared theirs with me. I’d ached for my stolen heritage, and a family had installed me in their own lineage. And now, the matriarch at the heart of it all was gone.
(music fades out)
Processing it all, I was reminded of a traditional Cherokee story. In the tale, humans inadvertently kill the daughter of the sun. A group then journeys to the west, to the afterlife, to resurrect her. They hope that if they can restore her life, her mother, the sun, will start shining again.
The group is told that when they get to the afterlife, they must catch the daughter’s ghost in a box and then, no matter what, they must not open that box until they’ve returned east again.
You know what happens, of course. If the humans had managed to wait until they were back east, they could have restored the sun’s daughter back to her original form. But they can’t wait — they can’t resist opening the box early, and when they do, the sun’s daughter is transformed. She’s not in her original form. Rather, she’s turned into a bird who flies away.
(hopeful music begins)
To me, the moral of that story is that change is irreversible. That we can never make things exactly what they once were or perfectly restore them to how they should have been. We can’t summon back our dead. But there’s a difference between acknowledging that we cannot turn back time, and believing that we can’t come back from tragedy.
Mongolia didn’t make me the person I would have been if the Mayflower hadn’t landed, or the slave ships hadn’t anchored on the west coast of Africa. But it gave me this: one day I will teach my own granddaughter that once, wood ash could be used to seal the deepest wound. And then I’ll have to tell her that this is no longer safe.
(music fades out)
But I’ll be able to add that there’s another way to heal injury. I’ll tell her that she can brew a tea from Rhodiola quadrifida. I will tell her that this medicine comes from our people — from our Mongolian people. That it comes from the land of her grandmother Marusia.
(piano music begins)
WILLOW: That was Shannon Prince. She’s a writer and attorney based in New York. Her new book is called Tactics for Racial Justice: Building an Antiracist Organization and Community. It’s a book aimed at people who want to end racism, but may not know how. And it gives you the tools you need to help create a more just world. I have a link to that book in the show notes, and if you’d like to order a copy, you can get 20% off with the promo code FLY21. That’s F-L-Y-21.
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Coming up next time on Out There…
You’ve heard of thru-hikes, and cycling across the country. But what about long-distance skateboarding? We’re going to bring you a story about a woman who tried to outrun her demons by skating all the way from Maine to New Jersey.
MOLLY ANNE: It was one of those times where you, like, you just don't look back. Like you just decide, and you don't look back, and you do it. And you don't think about it...but if you miss that moment, you're not going to do it.
WILLOW: Tune in on October 7 to hear that story.
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Thank you so much!
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A big thank you to Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Lauren Rubin, Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, and Deb and Vince Garcia for their financial contributions to Out There. If you’d like to make a financial gift of your own, go to outtherepodcast.com and click support. All gifts go directly toward paying for the stories you hear on this podcast.
(Out There theme music begins to play)
If you’re new to Out There, check out the “Best of Out There” playlist. This is a collection of some of our favorite episodes of all time — and it’s a great introduction to the range of stories we do on the show. You can find “Best of Out There” on Spotify, and at our website, outtherepodcast.com.
That’s it for this episode. Our advertising manager is Jessica Taylor. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Cara Schaefer is our print content coordinator. Our interns are Melat Amha and Tanya Chawla. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.
We’ll see you in two weeks.
(theme music ends on a last whistling note)
