Holly's Haida Trick

Mike’s friend Holly was at the cabin for dinner. Holly is Haida and her family has been here, living on and with the land, for thousands of years. To contribute to our project, Holly is teaching us about her family’s relationship with the earth- how they cultivate their sustenance, which roots are medicinal, where to find the best bark for weaving, and how to cook some fantastic meals.

Holly was doing just that- cooking us a fantastic meal. She wrapped a fresh-caught wild sockeye salmon in young skunk cabbage leaves with lard and salt, and put it in the oven. She made a relish to go with the salmon from canned octopus (which she harvested and canned last year), onions, tomatoes, and spices. She boiled a pot of pickled sea asparagus (some of this year’s harvest), and opened a can of jalapeno-pickled bull kelp for us to munch while she cooked.

At 9:00pm the 6 of us sit down, hungry and chatty, to this amazing feast. John, never the shy one, cuts himself off a sizable slab of salmon and asks if it’s skunk cabbage wrapping is edible. Holly’s answer is, innocently, “I like it, but you probably won’t”. Of course what John hears is, “I double dog dare you to try it”. So John boldly rips off a chunk of skunk cabbage and starts munching away, masticating the cabbage thoroughly before gulping it down. Holly chuckles, and rips herself off a piece.

Just as John remarks that it isn’t so bad, Trip wonders aloud, “I heard you weren’t supposed to eat that stuff—isn’t it called skunk cabbage for a reason?” John shrugs, Mike grins, and we keep eating.

Three bites later, John calmly sets his fork down, gets up, and pours himself a glass of water. We watch him, curious, as he sits down with his water, until he admits his mouth is burning. Not a spicy food burn, he says, but an actual pain that he likens to what it might feel like to drink a cup of fiberglass dust. Holly takes another bite of her own cabbage, and swears her people have eaten the cooked skunk cabbage leaves forever. Must be a white person ailment, she teases.

We ensure John’s throat is not swelling and that he has no other red-flag symptoms, and John adds baking soda to his water, much to the amusement of the rest of the table. I know he is not exaggerating; only serious pain would keep him from eating the feast on the table. The scene is comical- John, sipping on baking soda water, his untouched salmon in front of him; Holly, perplexed but amused by his reaction; Mike, grinning furtively; the rest of us stifling our laughter only long enough to eat our dinner.

When Mike has taken his last bite, he stands up, wanders over to his bookshelf, and returns with “Food Plants of the Coastal First Peoples,” a comprehensive guide to plants on the northwest coast. He looks up skunk cabbage in the index, and calmly recites its entry.

“From the Arum family. Skunk cabbage was rarely eaten by the coastal First Peoples in British Columbia”

He has to pause there and wait for us- even John- to stop laughing. Then he continues,

“But in western Washington, the Quinault roasted and ate the leaf-stalks, the Cowlitz steamed and ate the flower-stalks sparingly, the Twana ate the young leaves, and the Quileute and Lower Chinook ate the roots. None of these groups prized any part of the skunk cabbage highly.”

Holly, with a look of satisfaction, points out that indeed the plant was eaten, and the Haida must be among those that eat it. Mike skips down the page and comes in, with impeccable comic timing,

“The Haida considered the plants to be poisonous and recalled instances of children dying after eating the leaves”

And we lost control, all of us. I had tears rolling down my cheeks, Trip almost spewed his drink, and even John was laughing so hard I think he forgot about the pain for a moment.

Mike then read aloud what, as an ecologist, he knew all along. “Skunk cabbage, like many members of the Arum family, contains long sharp crystals of calcium oxalate. If any part of the skunk cabbage is put into the mouth, the crystals can become imbedded in the mucous membranes and provoke intense irritation and burning.”

His ailment sufficiently diagnosed, John endlessly torments Holly for tricking him. Eventually the pain subsides enough to eat his salmon, now cold on his plate. He stresses that it does not matter, as he has lost the ability to taste. “What a shame”, holly prods, “it was delicious”.

If John had not already cemented his reputation as audacious and good-humored, he has certainly done so now. And we can thank him, both for the tear-inducing comedy hour, and because, at the cost of his sensitive taste buds, we all got to learn something new about local plants and native customs.