Dr. Luschiim Arvid Charlie’s one-storey house sits at the end of a long, curving driveway on the Cowichan Reserve near Duncan, B.C., on Vancouver Island. With its faded brown wooden slats and chartreuse moss blanketing the roof, the home blends chameleon-like into the surrounding forest of Douglas fir, willow, cedar, maple, grand fir, and western hemlock.

An angled ramp twists around the home’s exterior, a testament to Charlie’s bad knees. “For the last two years, I’ve been kind of stuck in this chair,” Charlie says, leaning back in his living room recliner, a green blanket keeping him warm. A lack of knee cartilage – from wear and tear, Charlie suspects – has immobilized him. “Back in the day,” recalls the 79-year-old, “it was nothing to go 15 miles up over that mountain, down the other side, catch a deer, and climb 15 miles back up with the deer on my back. Most of the deer were around 140, 160 pounds. Some would be around 180 pounds, but those were rare,” says Charlie, who is better known among the Coast Salish people as Elder Luschiim.

The forest has always been a place of sustenance and nurturing for Charlie – as well as a classroom. As a toddler, his namesake and great-grandfather Luschiim took him for walks, pointing out the trees and plants using their musical Hul’q’umi’num’ names, such as sxwele’ulhp for willow, or qaanlhp for arbutus. By the time he was four, Charlie was helping feed his 11 siblings by gaff fishing: spearing chum salmon while his sister hung onto his waist to ensure he wasn’t dragged into the water. By six, he was hunting. “Us youngsters, we’d go and get whatever we needed, whether it be food or medicine.”

There is growing awareness that such traditional Indigenous knowledge of food and medicine can enhance modern science. Charlie’s new book, Luschiim’s Plants: Traditional Indigenous Foods, Materials and Medicines, records Indigenous knowledge of the natural world handed down through generations. The book is co-authored by ethnobotanist Dr. Nancy Turner, a distinguished professor emeritus in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. Turner first met Charlie in 1999 at a Cowichan field workshop. In 2005, the pair decided to record Charlie’s vast store of botanical knowledge, detailing the many uses for trees, fungi, seaweed, flowers, bulbs, and bushes. Such vegetation is used to treat maladies like infections, coughs, colds, burns, thrush, asthma, and cancers. The book also records which plants are used as diapers, deodorizer, shampoo, and food. “I’ve been working with Indigenous knowledge-holders for over 50 years and heard many stories about the effectiveness of different medicines and how they’ve cured people of tuberculosis or other infections,” says Turner, who interviewed Charlie, photographed plants, and provided the book’s scientific nomenclature. “There are many ailments that we humans suffer from that are well looked after by Indigenous medicine.”

Completed in 2020, Luschiim’s Plants was released in September 2021 by Harbour Publishing. By December, it sold out, and it is now in its second printing.

Charlie estimates that he can recall four generations’ worth of knowledge from both sides of his family, including from his father, Simon Charlie, a renowned carver and medicine man. He also learned about traditional medicine from his mother, Violet, who had tuberculosis. Cowichan elders would bring her medicine gathered from forest plants. The elders would regularly change Violet’s medication, otherwise the “sickness would get used to what we were giving her,” says Charlie. This medical principle, called antimicrobial resistance, describes how micro-organisms like bacteria and viruses develop resistance to treatments like antibiotics – a huge challenge facing Western medicine today.

Close observation of the world around him, including animal behaviour, also contributes to Charlie’s trove of medical knowledge. For example, he discovered the healing and antibiotic properties of the qaanlhp, or arbutus tree, when he spied a wounded deer being helped by another. This deer chewed qaanlhp leaves, then spat the masticated mass onto its herdmate’s injury. Afterwards, the injured deer ran off into the forest, Charlie writes.

He intentionally left a great deal of information out of the book – knowledge that is sacred or ceremonial. “Masks and other secret objects are things that are only shared with people who are worthy of knowing this information,” he says. In some cases, medicines must be prepared by a highly skilled Indigenous healer to avoid poisoning. “If you give too much knowledge to the wrong people, they might make a disaster of it.” Charlie, who received an honorary doctorate of letters from Malaspina University-College (now Vancouver Island University) in 2007, is also circumspect about releasing the secret healing properties of some plants, in order to deter exploitation and commercialization by non-Indigenous people.

Charlie hopes his book will provide alternatives to conventional drugs and insight into new medicines for common scourges. Many traditional medicines, says Charlie, are just as good as conventional treatments, “and some of them better.” Increasingly, medical faculties across Canada agree and are adding Indigenous health curricula and specialized training for student physicians to better serve First Nations communities.

For Charlie, the book is simply a way for him to share his “everyday knowledge.” But he hopes it informs people, and encourages them to explore the forest and realize the importance of observation. “If we’ve lost the ability to be observant, we’re lost in the world.”