Project Coordinator:
Sarah Wolfe

 

We are working with a plant collection from the Saint Francis Indian Museum. The museum director during the early to mid 1900’s was a man named Father Eugene Buechel. In the 1920’s he collected 263 local plant types. Not only did he collect a plant sample, but he documented the plant’s Latin name, family name, English name, Lakota name and the habitat, date of collection and location of each example. Our objectives are to update, complete and further his work for the first one hundred plants. Andrea Jolene Martinez and Willow Marshall have been assisting me as interns from the start of this project, recently Willis Dickson Jr. and Shawn White Hawk have joined the crew. Together, we will be collecting data about each plant through online research, literature, and ethnographic work. The ethnographic work is a vital piece of this project; what our grandmothers and grandfathers have to teach us is necessary information for us to seek out. We will also be conducting fieldwork with the intention of locating each plant in the general area where Father Buechel collected the museums example. We will be mapping and photographing each plant. The final product will be a CD Rom data base, containing the learned information about the plants, photographs, and maps.