Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "A Native Spirit, Inside the Beltway" by Patricia Leigh Brown (©2004 by The New York Times Company).

Ethnobotany is the study of how plants are used in particular cultures.

When Donna House, a Navajo ethnobotanist, steps gingerly through the barbed wire fence into her backyard—a former alfalfa field along the Rio Grande now brimming with native plants framed by a distant mesa—there is a sense of homecoming, of reunion, of land returning to its origins. So it is, too, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where House is the guiding force behind a landscape of cornfields, meadows, forest and wetlands—complete with 3,500 specially introduced ladybugs—outside the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian.

In her career as an ethnobotanist, House, who grew up on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, has served as a translator of sorts between "the people" (or the Dineh) and the outside world. A traditional "old school" Indian, as she sometimes jokingly refers to herself, as well as an environmental scientist, she has worked for or consulted with the Nature Conservancy, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Navajo Nation and others, helping to protect rare and endangered plants that have cultural, as well as ecological, significance. "Recognizing the diversity of plants is no different than recognizing the diversity of people," she said.

Along the way, she often bridges the gap between the native world view—in which human beings and nature are interrelated, and all plants, animals and mountains and other landforms are sacred—and the more scientific one, pollinating a deeper understanding between them. Her home ground, or habitat—a word she prefers to landscape—stretches far into the horizon, to the cottonwoods along the river presided over by the steep, rocky mesa. "A landscape is not dynamic," she said. "A habitat is a place where beings come to life."

These fields were farmland until House, much to the consternation of some of her neighbors, dispensed with the alfalfa and roses, "allowing the memory of the land to return." The globe mallow, prized by the Navajo for its medicinal applications, came back. So did the sunflowers, used for millennia by the Navajo to treat prenatal infections. The Navajo have also fashioned the hollow stalks of sunflowers into bird snares and flutes and boiled the seed hulls for a dark-red dye. The seeds themselves are used for soup.

To the Mall's polite formality—its "tulips all in a line," in House's words—has come a contrasting presence: a wetland visible from the Capitol sprouting cattails, wild rice and about 1,440 waterlilies. Visitors meander past a meadow of buttercups, panic grass and other Potomac Valley plants and a somewhat surreal field of corn, tobacco, squash and other crops. Massive boulders, shipped from as far away as the Northwest Territories, echo the curvaceous form of the museum building, its rough-hewn limestone surface meant to recall a cliff face sculptured by the wind.

To acquaint herself with the Middle Atlantic region, House consulted fellow botanists, but also set out on the Potomac River in a canoe. In a sense, she has served both as a botanist and the conscience of the landscape, guiding the planting to reflect both the museum's collection—which includes artifacts like a 2,000-year-old Paiute duck decoy made of bulrushes—and Indian beliefs and values.

House frequently receives calls at odd hours from tribes worried about endangered plants. During her eight years advising the Nature Conservancy about conservation on Indian lands, House worked with the Tohono O'odham (the Papago) in southern Arizona, on whose lands grows Kearney's blue star, a wildflower that in the late 1980's federal botanists declared the rarest plant in Arizona, believing that it was down to its last eight specimens. A few years later, House showed a picture of the plant to Jefford Francisco, now the tribe's natural resources technician, and he thought he recognized it from the days when his father took him deer hunting. House traveled with him to the shady canyon of his childhood memories, where they found scores of blue stars. "They knew more about their ecosystem than I did, no matter how much I read," she said of the tribe. "Elders know the birds, the paths the animals take, the plants. A lot of knowledge you can't find in a library."

She was overjoyed recently to discover that a great blue heron had arrived on the Mall and was perched on a dead cypress trunk in the museum wetland. Ducks were feasting on the wild rice, somewhat to her chagrin, and the dragonflies were soaring four stories high. It is a habitat— "one little quark," she said, "in the huge galaxy of the native world"—coming to life.