Ila Hatter

Partial Transcript: I’m Ila Hatter and I’ve been teaching for over 30 years. I’ve lost count of how many years that I’ve been teaching about edible and medicinal plants. And I just love being in Appalachia. And this was where my ancestors started out, so it’s just been something that I never expected - to be teaching as a profession, because I was a commercial artist for some 27 years. But my life was always learning about plants, and you know, with my parents and grandparents teaching me as most of us do. But my folks had been through two world wars and a depression, so they knew definitely how to forage. And how to hunt and fish, and so I grew up in that kind of family where it was, you know, that part of the lifestyle. And never expected that I’d be teaching it in all these years, but it’s been great to do and wonderful to be able to pass on the knowledge.

Partial Transcript: Well, One of the memories that I have is going out with my mother and finding a patch of horsemint, which is a relative of the Bee Balm, and she said that growing up that they used to gather that and put it in the henhouse to keep the lice off the chickens. But it also made a great tea, that they would use it as something for colds and flu as well. So it worked for a lot of different reasons. And then one of my very earliest memories - I was very young, probably about 4-5 years old - and then we were out in the property that my father used to have out on the lake. And we had found Mustang Grapes, which I assume is some type of a muscadine, but that’s what they’re called is Mustang Wild Grapes, standing on the hood of the car and picking grapes, and taking them home and standing on a chair and helping my mother make jelly out of them. Which I’m still doing that today, so that kind of set me up for what I do now. That’s what I’ve been doing all week is making jam and preserves, so (laughs). With whatever I’m finding, so…. Yeah, it was just, you know like I said part of the lifestyle. I didn’t have baby sitters. I went out with – went out to the deer blind, and you know, learned to shoot when I was very young, and you know, could bring home rabbits or whatever was needed. So it was, you know, it’s just the way I grew up with what they taught me. They felt like, you know, in my lifetime that things might change, that there might be another depression. Who knows what might come, and that they were old parents and they felt like if they weren’t around when I was grown that I might need to know how to survive and how to provide for my family. And that’s exactly how it has come to be.

Partial Transcript: I found that a lot of children are afraid of the woods, and are afraid to go out in the grass. They’ve been held inside for so long that they really, you know, don’t like walking in the woods. And if you teach them that it’s friendly, if you teach them what’s out there and how things are, and if you know their names, you know, it’s just like not knowing people in the neighborhood – if you don’t know their names, you can’t greet them. So if they know the names and they know what they’re for, then they take a walk in the woods and it’s like “Oh, there’s Mullein!” or, you know, “Here’s Sorrel!” so they realize that there’s friends around them. And, you know, with so many species of plants and things that we read about that are going extinct, you know, we don’t preserve what we don’t love, and if we don’t know it then how can we love it and preserve it. So it’s important to keep that going. So I’m glad that it is getting spread actually, more and more.

Partial Transcript: That’s very true. Yep. I have a program that I do, “Mother Nature’s Secret Garden: the Harvest that You Didn’t Plant,” and I do that a lot for garden clubs because there’s so many things out there that you can provide as food for the family before you’ve even planted a seed! Dandelions are probably one of the most nutritious things you can put on your plate. Every part of it is useful. So I always leave a place for it in the garden, let it grow and get bigger. And of course in Europe, it’s a favorite vegetable. And people come here and they find an Ortho commercial going “Get rid of the dandelions in your yard!” and they’re going “What?! What! Why would you do that?” So we have Italian and French dandelions in our markets, you know, anything that sells natural and you know whole foods and organic vegetables, and you’ll find dandelion greens. And of course, they’re hybridized and they’re much larger than what we see here, but …. There was a botanist in Ohio that did a Dandelion Festival and a contest for recipes, and I submitted one for “Dandeoli.” And I was putting it up there for the recipe cook-off, and it ended up in his book on dandelion recipes. So one of the reasons why I won was that one of the ingredients in it was ramps from North Carolina – one of the strong onion-garlic family (laughs). And so it was pretty tasty actually!

Partial Transcript: Well, one of the things that I teach, and I have in the hand-out, is the Rules of Foraging, and that’s that you pass by the first plant because First, another plant or animal may need that, and Second someone coming along behind you may need it also for their family, and the Third one you want to make sure that it propagates so that it will be there next year when you come back for it. Then the Fourth plant you can collect and you know that there will be a colony for the coming year. I had that on one of my videos, and my Cherokee neighbors were watching it. He turned to his wife and said, “We ought to do that!” Because they’d lost a bunch of that over the generations, you know, about the stewardship of the land. The elders still know it, and many of them are teaching it to their next generations, but that is, of course. The indigenous tribes were here for thousands of years and still had plenty of resources, you know, for any generation to partake from. But it didn’t take long, for the western people from Europe to come over here and begin destroying it, not realizing how they had lived. But I think we’re relearning it now; I think we’re beginning to come together in the cultures and understand that we just have the one planet. We don’t want things to … We’re seeing things disappear, and I think we’re beginning to take notice. I think … It’s about time! (laughs)

Partial Transcript: Yes, as I say, “Don’t take the first plant.” And there is a belief that the plant that is going to give itself up to you as food or to make medicine with kind of waves at you – it kind of stands out, you know, in some way. In times when I’m collecting.... oh and also you have to have your Indian name. You have to have YOUR Indian name and know the name of the plant to address it and ask it. You ask it properly if it’s the one you come to for medicine or food. You let it know. And then you also have a gift. If you don’t take sage or tobacco or something…. if it’s a really special plant, like ginseng, you give it a gift – an exchange of your energy for the plant that’s going to give itself up. If you don’t have that, you can use the spittle on your finger and rub the stem of a plant, or a piece of hair – anything of you that you can give in an exchange. And of course, there’s the thing that when animals put the curse of illness on man and plants provided the antidote, they said that one of the curses was that if the deer was not properly thanked so that its spirit could go with the rest of its tribe, then arthritis would fall on the hunter. (Laughs) There must have been a lot of disrespectful hunters ‘cause there’s an awful lot of arthritis around!

Partial Transcript: when my husband, being half Cherokee, he added to the grace. He was a retired minister so he had beautiful long graces sometimes. (I’d say, “Wait a minute! Ready to eat!”) But he would always add in their gratefulness for the plant tribe, the two-leggeds or the four-leggeds, whatever was on the table when he would give thanks for the actual food that was there, you know, for them giving their lives that we might live. That was, I think, part of being grateful for what we have. And I think you have more respect when you do that rather than just saying it’s nice that we’re all sitting around the table and having this good food to eat, but actually thinking about where did it come from, you know, is important. And I think that’s always the way that the indigenous tribes have been. Because, you know, it was hard work the way that they had to hunt and fish and, you know, the long time it took for harvest. And so they also had various rituals for the harvest time.
They had a special ritual at harvest time called The Green Corn Ceremony. And it was giving thanks – which a lot of people do. Various cultures have that.
One of the things that I remember that Gramma Mandy Swimmer taught us was that – the first ear of corn that was brought in, you don’t blow on it. If you do, then the rest of the corn is going to blow down, and so wait for it to cool or you cool it somehow. So the first ear of corn is always cold – you never blow on it – because they believe that you’ll lose the rest of the corn. So I follow that.

Partial Transcript: Oh, absolutely! There’s the old saying that we have from one of the chiefs that we are a thread in the fabric of life; that we are all connected, and we’re finally understanding that in recent times. We’re understanding how much we are all affected by things – everything around us. So what we do ….
I remember a scene in “Dances with Wolves” where the Chief just couldn’t understand – not just couldn’t understand, but was sickened by the buffalo hunters, by what … they had taken the trophies, you know, they had taken the skins and left the meat. And there was more than they could possibly have consumed anyway. And he couldn’t understand the people that would do that, you know, it was just beyond comprehension. So I’m sure that was true of all the tribes that the white man met. You know, they had that ... “There’s plenty here; we can take all we want!” And that’s not the way it was for generations that they had been raised. And they couldn’t understand a culture that couldn’t understand that.

Partial Transcript: Hmmm. Well, I think so many of the stories were explanations as best they could to a younger generation. All the stories about animals: “How the Possum Lost the Hair off His Tail”, and all kinds of things like that in the stories about the origin of medicine itself … And I think that was …all of their teaching was by story-telling and/or hands-on. And they would also determine what skills a child had and would send them to someone who could hone those skills, whether they were going to be a homemaker or a hunter or whatever. And questions that children had about different things, whether it was insects or the moon or whatever, they had a story, an explanation. And nearly always there was a moral to it, which was a teaching of how to use that story. And then they would realize how that was beneficial in THEIR lives. It gave them a way of understanding maybe sometimes the emotions they had. I think that had a lot to do with how they were raised and, as adults, how they were thinking about the world around them. They were always told that “the animals are our teachers;” that that’s how they learned, and that the nature of different animals gave them a way of living their lives.

Partial Transcript: I’m hoping that we’re telling the right kind of stories to our children. We’re watching what they’re watching – because that’s important. That came out on the news today about how certain things are available today for kids to find things that they shouldn’t be finding at certain ages. And so parents should get involved in the visual information that they’re getting because they’re bombarded by so much. I mean, even a baby in a car seat driving down the road is processing more information than most of us ever did growing up because we weren’t in cars going places and there’s more out there – passing by the window – that they’re seeing. So they’re getting a lot more information that sometimes we don’t realize that they’re getting. So I think it’s important that, for one thing, that we get them outdoors. To try to find ways to get them involved in the outdoors and I think one way is knowing what’s around them. You know, like what I teach about knowing the names of plants, what their uses are, and how friendly they would be, and if we’re ever hungry or away from home or whatever, that this is how they would survive.
So there are a lot of survival skills which teach independence for one thing. You know, allows them to be in control of something. You know, “Everybody is always controlling my life! Well, I have control of …” So some of that information is useful to them, like, if a friend is injured, they know to go get a plant and make a poultice and can help their friend over some pain, and give them, you know, a teaching of compassion. Then they know and are not just terrified, like “What do I do?” but they know how to help. So I think a lot of those things are important and for parents to be more involved in their children’s lives, you know, connecting them with nature. We have a whole book written about “Nature Deficit Disorder” which is really true. And as a species in this environment, we need to get reconnected. So that’s what I try to teach, as best I can.

Partial Transcript: One of the things that I remember early on, it was in church camp, and we had to go out and find our secret spot – some special place. And we would be there for the morning and then go in for breakfast. We would break with song and go in for breakfast. We didn’t call it meditation – we would call it that now – but it was just, you know, a quiet time. And I remember there, realizing the connectedness. I could see the clouds in stones and figures in the clouds, and I could just sense the Spirit all around, in everything – it was organic. And that was one of things – we were supposed to write letters to our future selves, and that was one of the things I wrote about. How would I explain to people that we are connected; that everything is connected; that there is a Wisdom that is in that Spirit, and that everything has a spirit and we’re just one of them? And that everything reflects everything else and that it is an important part of life to understand that. Whether you’re talking about a Higher Power or God or whatever, you know, it’s just a fact of life – of Nature – of the world that we live in. And that’s what I wanted/hoped to teach. I had no idea how it would happen, but it did eventually. I think Wisdom was all around me, and I just absorbed it. Really.

Partial Transcript: I remember one thing that Gramma Mandy taught my husband when he first was staying with her over in Cherokee. She had a garden out in front, and she took him outside, and she said, “Do you see these Corn People? They’re saying “Skis’dela! Skis’dela! Help me! Help me!”
She said, “Here’s the hoe. Would you go help?” And she got him hoeing the grass from around the corn. But for her, them’s some Peoples. Them CornPeoples say “Help me!” That was one thing we never forgot. So for all of us, the Elders particularly, anything like that, that’s the Tree People, the Corn People …. So that’s one of the stories that I remember vividly from Gramma telling Jerry about. He said, “Yeah, she got me into hoeing the corn, but that’s alright.” (laughs) I love the way that she put it.