Foraging with Silvermoon LaRose

Silvermoon LaRose’s knowledge of Indigenous foods and foraging could fill volumes—and her ancestorial knowledge is interwoven in the foraging methods she has learned from generations before her. LaRose, a citizen of the Narragansett Tribal Nation and assistant director of the Tomaquag Museum, is a storyteller, writer, and a knowledgeable teacher who offers classes in foraging and utilizing native plants. She says she does not have a green thumb and therefore relies on Mother Earth to cultivate for her so she can provide food and medicine for her family.

Safe and successful harvesting—knowing where to harvest (locations are kept secret as a protective measure); how to properly gather (to ensure sustainable regeneration); and when to prepare the bounty (some plants become poisonous in different seasons)—is what she learned from her relatives and it’s what she imparts to her children. In a four-generation succession, important traditions have been saved and carried on.

While I visited over cups of tea with LaRose and her mother, Starr Spears Mars, both mother and daughter happily shared their ample wisdom regarding dietary resources found on Narragansett tribal land. They often finish one another’s sentences and are equally enthusiastic about gathering traditional food and maintaining Indigenous foodways. In testimony to their shared knowledge, collected food items are perched around the kitchen, including mushrooms, blueberries, sassafras root and more.

FIRST GENERATION: GRACE BABCOCK BROWN SPEARS

Mars explains that her mother (LaRose’s grandmother), Grace Babcock Brown Spears, supplemented the family’s food budget with subsistence foraging, hunting and fishing. She says they gathered out of necessity, but now the family does so to provide tasty nutritious food alternatives. Spears’s home was a wellspring of oral history and traditional knowledge. In the multi-generational setting, young people (naturally curious) listened and took everything in, building their own memory banks to convey to the next generation. “[My grandmother’s home] is where a lot of my memories come from, where my information came from,” says LaRose. “I can contribute to conversations now because I was in multi-generational settings as a child and remember oral history being passed on traditionally [from multiple voices].” She is concerned over the scarcity of community gathering in this way. Without the passing of traditional knowledge, she believes, Indigenous people become colonized. Also, that Native diaspora threatens the connections to land and place.

SECOND GENERATION: STARR SPEARS MARS

Access to the places Narragansetts have traditionally gathered food and medicine is getting harder. Mars says, “Without access to our traditional lands, how do we continue to teach another generation?” Worried that protection should be given to areas where Indigenous resources continue to thrive, she notes that many plants used for food and medicine are becoming scarcer.

Many Narragansett people do not forage as a hobby but to survive, according to Mars. To supplement income, many people go clamming and oystering; they drive around and sell to people in the community. Mars says this is how her family subsisted. “Getting a bushel of crabs really helps to feed a big family, as does shooting squirrels, turkey, deer and rabbits.” Many of the places we would go to hunt and gather are no longer accessible, she says. “Once my son went to harvest some wild oysters and was told he could not take them because someone else had rented the water!”

So much is changing, but families still manage to practice traditional ways. Mars uses dried winterberries with the leaves to make a medicinal tea to help relieve menstrual pain; she says it is also useful for treating an upset stomach and relieving headaches. Another of Mars’s favorite natural medicines is nettles, which are good for arthritis. Adds LaRose, “I don’t know how she did it, but we’ve got nettles—out of nowhere we have nettles growing in the yard—plants God has brought over to give to her.”

THIRD GENERATION: SILVERMOON LAROSE

Both Mars and LaRose see mushrooming as an important tribal community activity in which many families participate—and are even known to be competitive. LaRose says, “When my mother was growing up, they did not always have meat to eat, so Hen and Chicken of the Woods mushrooms provided a delicious healthy meat alternative.” She continues, “Today, our Nation also competes with specialty mushroom foragers—it has become increasingly popular as a hobby. What they should know is that is this is a primary food source; we’ve been eating mushrooms for thousands of years. We collect and preserve mushrooms as a food staple and use them to feed our families.”

Medicinal plants, including birch polypore, common mullein and elderberry are important staples as well. Although mullein is not native, it has been used widely in tribal communities for hundreds of years. LaRose says, “Mullein tea with honey saved my life.” During the early days of Covid before there was widespread knowledge of the illness, LaRose displayed all the symptoms, but with no health insurance, she had to rely on traditional medicine. “Mullein tea was the only thing that helped to clear the mucus and calm my cough,” she says.

Birch polypore is one of Mars’s favorite traditional medicines that she passed on to LaRose—it’s supposed to be good for your immune system. It also works like nature’s Band-Aid by stopping bleeding and works as a natural antimicrobial. The mushroom helps to clean infected wounds, supports faster healing and helps reduce scarring. Its tea can be used internally to promote healing.

FOURTH GENERATION: SILVERMOON LAROSE’S CHILDREN

Of her children, LaRose says, “I want them to build their own relationship with the outdoors, to be able to walk through the woods and identify things.” The first lesson she teaches children is how to identify sassafras trees. With distinct leaves, they are easy to identify—and plentiful, so finding them is easy, too. That positive reinforcement helps to spark interest and from there children are taught how to make tea from the leaves and roots and to understand that food is medicine.

Once they are confident to identify plants, how to safely use them and to share, they will always be able to take care of themselves and others, says LaRose. Knowing how to gather food and make medicine provides an important connection to their ancestral land, their history and homeland.

LaRose gets excited when her children spot forageable items on their own without her prompting. They’ve gained confidence knowing the traditional ways and they’ve shared that at school with teachers and classmates. One of LaRose’s proudest moments was when her son was eight years old and he came running in with a handful of Black Trumpet mushrooms that he had found all by himself. He knew what they were, harvested them, and excitedly delivered them to her. He was triumphant and happy and it made her happy, too. She knew then that he “got it”—he could properly identify edible foods and harvest them; the successful passing on of knowledge to the next generation.

Wanda Hopkins, a proud mother of three, has offered her Native voice in classrooms, churches and at cultural events for more than 30 years. She has served as a Narragansett tribal councilwoman and is a member of the Native American Advisory Council at the University of Rhode Island, where she is working on an MA in English.