The Sting is the Medicine

“Don’t touch the nettles!” my mom said as we walked along a gravel trail in the hills of southern Ohio. She pointed to the sides of the path, where plants with serrated edges overflowed into the opening, straining towards the unscattered sunlight. Of course, this piqued my adolescent curiosity - I mean how bad could they be? Probably about seven years old at the time, even then I had a rebellious edge. I slowly drifted behind, out of my mom’s sight, and brushed my hand cautiously against the leaves. Though at the time, I vowed to never touch those nasty plants ever again, that jolt of pain and all those red little bumps were my first dose of a sacred medicine, the beginning of my relationship with nettles. 

I never would have believed that at 26, I’d be living in Montana in a home of straw and clay, eating a steady diet of roadkill deer, goat’s milk, and nettles - yes, nettles - now I harvest those plants my mother warned me of, barehanded and joyful. That first sting must have sent the medicine deep, enticing generations of ancestral memories to boil to the surface, nudging me to remember things long forgotten by my family. But I grew up mostly surrounded by people who have forgotten that they even forgot anything, entirely unaware of the Indigenous beauty that was cut away and dismantled through long, violent colonialism in Europe. I had very few reference points that could help me put myself back together again, to explain that unshakeable longing instilled into me by those nettles. Slowly, as I moved deeper into the work of Indigenous food sovereignty, spending more and more time on the Land, and more time alongside Indigenous people, it became increasingly clear just how thoroughly my ancestors had been de-Indigenized, how much had been taken away. But no moment has shown me more than that day at the Glacier Peaks Casino, on the Blackfeet Nation.

I was at the casino, eating catered fettuccine alfredo (very traditional), after a day at a Blackfeet-led conference on caring for the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem. We had been invited to have dinner with people from the Kainai Ecosystem Protection Agency as they did some planning for their upcoming conference. There were multiple conversations going on around the large, circular table, but I was only listening to one. Two Kainai elders, long-time friends who grew up with one another, were laughing and telling stories. But I couldn’t comprehend anything that they said. They were speaking to one another in their first language, Niitsipowahsin, the Real Speak, the Blackfoot language. With no intention of doing so, they absolutely shattered that tender place in my heart with their beautiful speech. I felt like I had been given a new map layer, exposing the next step on the path back to my own ancestors. I couldn’t walk any further without my language, without carrying my ancestors with me. 

I started learning Gaeilge, the Irish language, not long after that day. Many of my ancestors, at one point, spoke a Celtic language. Though I am an amalgamation of many different lands, languages, and stories, it is Ireland that first called me back home, with its relative cultural intactness compared to other places my ancestors come from. As I started learning Gaeilge, I also started spending more time visiting with my grandmother, the keeper of my family’s stories - a brilliant genealogist who has gone back to Ireland several times to piece them back together. This spring, I knew it was time for me to go back to Ireland, not having visited since I was 14. I couldn’t bear immersing my life in Gaeilge any longer without being with her in her living context. I started to plan a trip to the Gaeltacht, a predominately Irish speaking area of Ireland, and I knew exactly who I wanted to bring with me. 

Before long, I was harvesting nettles from the hedgerows as my grandma and I made our way to the Connemara Gaeltacht, hands covered in those familiar red bumps. My grandma had just turned 80, and we were celebrating with two weeks together in Ireland. I proceeded cautiously along the narrow rural roads as my grandma told me the stories of her past genealogy trips with her sister and recounted the lives of our ancestors before they emigrated in 1865. The stories were punctuated, of course, with frequent reminders to drive on the left side of the road and stay closer to the center line. We watched the Land swiftly change as we passed through Galway, and moved west onto the peninsula. Rich farmland faded into famine walls and blanket bogs, and English faded into Gaeilge. We had made it to the margins, one of few places where our ancestral seeds, our language, our culture, could still sprout and be renewed, a place where the nettles abound.

In 1652, the British commonwealth’s Act for the Resettlement of Ireland gave Irish-speaking Catholics to the East of the River Shannon two choices - to go to hell or to go to Connacht. Thus began a decade-long era of forced relocation of poor Irish farmers to clear Land for English settlers, pushing them west to places like Connemara, places less desirable to the empire - no doubt a blueprint to be used later on Turtle Island. Just as they do up against the rocky mountain front on the Blackfeet Nation, ancestral ways, though fragmented from centuries of colonization, have survived in the far west of Ireland. 

As the sun set and my grandma retired to her book and a cup of tea for the evening, I went out to the pubs of Connemara, where old men, weathered from years on the sea and a long life on the margins, spoke thick-accented Gaeilge well-beyond my comprehension. I began to talk with the man next to me, asking him about his life out on the peninsula and what the Irish language means to him, soon the stories started to flow like pints of stout. At midnight, it was only me, him, his friend, and the bartender, all three of them grew up in this village with Gaeilge as their first language. They told me about how when they were young, they were not allowed to speak the language in school, about the punishments they received. They told me about the hemorrhaging of children from the village, seeking work in far off cities as their traditional lifeways continue to be consumed by modern “progress.” They spoke eloquently about their love of their Land, the language, their families, but just as equally they sat in the darkness and the pain. Soon, my own ancestral pains - the sharp sting of displacement, of loss, of forgetting, sitting right beside theirs at the bar. The pain and the medicine were bundled together as one, a ray of sunlight bursting through the seemingly impenetrable clouds of my ancestral amnesia, leaving a window to see through that vast blue sky above me. Indigeneity, that love of Land felt deep in the bones, flowers in the words of one’s ancestral language, creating an unmistakable and increasingly rare scent of something entirely natural and real. 

Stomachs full of nettles and eggs, my grandma and I drove south to County Cork for the next part of our trip and arrived at the Skibbereen Heritage Center, not entirely sure what to expect. With a smile, the middle-aged man working at the front desk greeted us with a thick Cork accent and began to tell us a bit about the featured exhibit, which was focused on the famine. He asked where we were from, then upon hearing that we were from overseas, without hesitation he said “well, welcome home!” and told us a bit about the heritage center. As we walked through the exhibit, we learned that nearly ⅓ of the population of Skibbereen died from 1845-1852, making this rural town the epicenter of starvation during the famine. We listened to stories about the mass grave sites scattered across the area, the brutal conditions of the British workhouses where starving people would come for rations (one of which still stood directly across the street), and why we should call this time “The Great Hunger” rather than “the Famine.” From 1845 to 1852, while nearly 1 million Irish people starved to death, 75% of the food being produced in Ireland was being sent to England. Potatoes were not the only food available, but they were the only food that many poor, rural Irish farmers had access to after centuries of the Indigenous food system of Ireland being pillaged by the British settler-colonial economy. The island, once 80% forested, had been inconceivably altered, but along the hedgerows, in the margins, the old foods still flowered, the nettles still grew. Together, my grandma and I read historical accounts from families who stayed alive by going back to their ancestral foods, digging mussels and harvesting seaweed along the strand, harvesting nettles from the ruins. I was shattered once again. The pain and the medicine hit me all at once - I was overcome with that ache in my bones, the genetic memory of my ancestors, the displacement, the generations without our languages, the forgetting of our stories, the overwhelming gratitude that my ancestors lived, that I get to live, that I get to have nettles in my stomach, to listen to the old men speak Gaeilge in the pub, to listen to elders speak Niitsipowahsin at the casino. Nettles are the reason that I’m here. Regardless where our People are from, our ancestral foods carried our families through hungry times. To me, it seems that these hungry times were likely the fertile ground for the cultivation of a critical Indigenous understanding of the way that life is transferred through the ritual act of eating, at the expense of another’s life. A daily accruing of debt to our Mother, debt that we will never fully repay, but a debt that we can strive to lessen by harnessing that precious lifeforce so beautifully that our daily existence becomes an offering back to her.

In a time of wild “foodie” culture, where recipes for blanched nettle pasta doughs and other culinary experiments proliferate and signal a remembrance of this often ignored and maligned plant, we must too remember the ways we have long been physically, culturally, and spiritually interwoven with them. Our ancestral languages, stories, and practices are the greatest medicine for the alienation of settler-colonial modernity, but we have to be willing to face the sting, to confront generations of forgetting with the bold act of remembrance, to grieve the violent de-Indigenization of our ancestors that has left so many of us across the ocean from the bones of our People. Nettles are the medicine desperately needed to revitalize the arthritic joints of our spiritually and culturally impoverished modern world.