Customer Reviews

Plains Apache Ethnobotany

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Julia Jordan studied the ethnobotany of the Kiowa-Apache tribe in Oklahoma while a student at the University of Oklahoma. She established a remarkable rapport with the tribal members, mostly the women. This enabled her to learn from the actual practitioners the ways in which they remembered fast-dissapearing uses for the endemic plants. This kind of research is seldom published, but 40 years later, it is the only research of this kind in existence. The book was brought up to date on plant names and locations, and is also well-written and a pleasure to read.

Research anthropologist Julia A. Jordan presents Plains Apache Ethnobotany, an in-depth study and reference of how the Plains Apache native people of North America used more than 110 plant species in food, medicine, and rituals, and material culture. Traditionally a hunter-gathering tribe that engaged in trade with its neighbors, the Apache's abiding connection with wild plants is exhaustively documented through fieldwork and interviews conducted with elders of the Oklahoma Apache Tribe in the mid-1960s. The text is studious yet accessible to readers of all backgrounds. A handful of black-and-white photographs illustrate this thoroughly comprehensive reference and resource, highly recommended for ethnobotany and Apache tribe Native American studies collections.