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Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings
Mary Siisip Geniusz has spent more than thirty years working with, living with, and using the Anishinaabe teachings, recipes, and botanical information she shares in Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask. Geniusz gained much of the knowledge she writes about from her years as an oshkaabewis, a traditionally trained apprentice, and as friend to the late Keewaydinoquay, an Anishinaabe medicine woman from the Leelanau Peninsula in Michigan and a scholar, teacher, and practitioner in the field of native ethnobotany. Keewaydinoquay published little in her lifetime, yet Geniusz has carried on her legacy by making this body of knowledge accessible to a broader audience.
Geniusz teaches the ways she was taught—through stories. Sharing the traditional stories she learned at Keewaydinoquay's side as well as stories from other American Indian traditions and her own experiences, Geniusz brings the plants to life with narratives that explain their uses, meaning, and history. Stories such as "Naanabozho and the Squeaky-Voice Plant" place the plants in cultural context and illustrate the belief in plants as cognizant beings. Covering a wide range of plants, from conifers to cattails to medicinal uses of yarrow, mullein, and dandelion, she explains how we can work with those beings to create food, simple medicines, and practical botanical tools.
Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask makes this botanical information useful to native and nonnative healers and educators and places it in the context of the Anishinaabe culture that developed the knowledge and practice.
Geniusz teaches the ways she was taught—through stories. Sharing the traditional stories she learned at Keewaydinoquay's side as well as stories from other American Indian traditions and her own experiences, Geniusz brings the plants to life with narratives that explain their uses, meaning, and history. Stories such as "Naanabozho and the Squeaky-Voice Plant" place the plants in cultural context and illustrate the belief in plants as cognizant beings. Covering a wide range of plants, from conifers to cattails to medicinal uses of yarrow, mullein, and dandelion, she explains how we can work with those beings to create food, simple medicines, and practical botanical tools.
Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask makes this botanical information useful to native and nonnative healers and educators and places it in the context of the Anishinaabe culture that developed the knowledge and practice.
344 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2015
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About the author
Mary Siisip Geniusz
1 book12 followersMary Siisip Geniusz is of Cree and Métis descent and an oshkaabewis, a traditionally trained apprentice, of the late Keewaydinoquay. She holds a master’s degree in liberal studies from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and has taught university courses on ethnobotany, American Indian studies, and American multicultural studies.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
September 3, 2017
Best book about plants I've read, even including identification guides. Don't settle for something that just gives you a name and uses; this book has stories about plants and cares about them. It also includes some good moral values and you will probably find a lot of your beliefs about plants de-colonized as you read this book. Love the author, her voice, her humor, and her mentor Keewaydinoquay.
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February 27, 2021“Sphagnum moss has been a very important part of the lives of our ancestors because of its amazing ability to hold water. A piece of dried sphagnum will soak up and retain twenty-five times its own weight in water. And it can then be squeezed out, and it will do the same thing again and again... This ability has made sphagnum invaluable to our people as a diapering material, as a dressing for severe, bleeding wounds, and for use as a sanitary products for women’s periods... It was gathered and dried in the same manner as the moss dried for infant diapering material, then it was left in the Moon House for use by the family’s girls in their menses...
When Keewaydinoquay was a girl, many women of Minis-kitigaan whose Moontime had come still jumped into their canoes and paddled over to Women’s Island, a high island that is very close to Minis-kitigaan in the Beaver Chain of islands in the middle of Lake Michigan. They stayed there for the full week to ten days on their monthly cycles. Kee said she envied the girls of her acquaintance who got a week’s vacation from work every month. She said she often walked her girlfriends down to the shore and waved them off as they paddled to Women’s Island... Kee thought that in the old days, it probably was the only time a woman was spared from her family obligations and really had a chance to just be herself and pursue her own thoughts and interests. She said she knew women who made beautiful homes for themselves to use as Moon Houses, filling them with their favorite crafts and personal treasures.
...The use of sphagnum moss as sanitary products actually kept women from joining the Christian church in the early missionary days. If a woman became a Christian, she was given a bag of rags and was told to use those instead of sphagnum. Kee said the idea of using cloth for such a purpose actually kept women out of the church for two reasons. First, the idea of using cloth for such a purpose must have seemed almost sacrilegious to women who had to spend long, hard labor producing the textile material... Second was washing a used cloth is just a lot more unpleasant work than tossing a used piece of sphagnum into, or leaving it to rinse in its own, in a convenient stream.
Kee said the Church was opposed to the use of all plants in Native culture because of the fact that our people gathered natural materials with prayer, and the Christians taught that such prayers were examples of pagan superstition and idol worship. Kee said the Christians just did not understand that all that was necessary in our ways was to be grateful for the gifts Creator gave us. She always said one could say any prayer one liked over the plants when one picked them. One could say, ‘Thank you, Mother Mary, for this gift,’ or any other prayer that fit into one’s concept of religion or reality. She said all that really was important was just to say, ‘Thank you’ and to be grateful.”
When Keewaydinoquay was a girl, many women of Minis-kitigaan whose Moontime had come still jumped into their canoes and paddled over to Women’s Island, a high island that is very close to Minis-kitigaan in the Beaver Chain of islands in the middle of Lake Michigan. They stayed there for the full week to ten days on their monthly cycles. Kee said she envied the girls of her acquaintance who got a week’s vacation from work every month. She said she often walked her girlfriends down to the shore and waved them off as they paddled to Women’s Island... Kee thought that in the old days, it probably was the only time a woman was spared from her family obligations and really had a chance to just be herself and pursue her own thoughts and interests. She said she knew women who made beautiful homes for themselves to use as Moon Houses, filling them with their favorite crafts and personal treasures.
...The use of sphagnum moss as sanitary products actually kept women from joining the Christian church in the early missionary days. If a woman became a Christian, she was given a bag of rags and was told to use those instead of sphagnum. Kee said the idea of using cloth for such a purpose actually kept women out of the church for two reasons. First, the idea of using cloth for such a purpose must have seemed almost sacrilegious to women who had to spend long, hard labor producing the textile material... Second was washing a used cloth is just a lot more unpleasant work than tossing a used piece of sphagnum into, or leaving it to rinse in its own, in a convenient stream.
Kee said the Church was opposed to the use of all plants in Native culture because of the fact that our people gathered natural materials with prayer, and the Christians taught that such prayers were examples of pagan superstition and idol worship. Kee said the Christians just did not understand that all that was necessary in our ways was to be grateful for the gifts Creator gave us. She always said one could say any prayer one liked over the plants when one picked them. One could say, ‘Thank you, Mother Mary, for this gift,’ or any other prayer that fit into one’s concept of religion or reality. She said all that really was important was just to say, ‘Thank you’ and to be grateful.”
June 25, 2017
I loved this book. I read Mary Siisip Geniusz's "Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings" cover-to-cover in just a couple days then immediately re-read it. I expect it to be a reference that I keep on my bedside table or in my backpack for years to come. Highly recommend this book to anyone interested in plants, herbalism, ecology, or ethnobotany.
January 23, 2022
I like books that resist classification, and this is certainly one of them. It is a work on botany, but also an ethnography, history and memoir. It features a wonderful fictional dimension as well. To speak about plants as family and friends, to speak in a language in which “gender” does not refer to male and female, but rather to animate and inanimate, that credits rocks and waters and trees with personalities and relationships, can bring a reader up short, make her appreciate dandelions and not dismiss them as annoying weeds. It can make her appear to herself at best ungrateful, but worse, an ignorant, stubborn oppressor.
This book is a collaboration among three generations of Ojibwe women: the grandmother, Keewaydinoquay, who had absorbed both her tribe’s understanding of plants and their relationships to people to the point of becoming a lecturer on the subject at the University of Wisconsin; her daughter, Mary Siisip Geniusz, who wrote this text in an effort to get Keewaydinoquay’s teaching down on paper, and Wendy Makoons Geniusz, Mary’s daughter, who edited her mother’s manuscript, added notes and bibliography, and saw it through its fairly recent publication.
The Ojibwe are Anishinaabe, a cluster of tribes living mainly in the Great Lakes Area of North America, speaking related languages and largely sharing an understanding of the way human beings best grasp their position, obligations and possibilities — including understandings of the way the world came to be. This book is profoundly wise in specific ways, including quite detailed recipes for turning plants into medicines to relieve pain and disease, using them for food and also enjoying them, alert to their appearance, smell, sound and taste. This should of course always happen after having given thanks for the opportunity to do so.
Beyond the very concrete, immediate clarity, the book is also a subtle, firm assertion of an aesthetic position, a way of being in the world that addresses all human sense perception with understanding and humility. Written in graceful, engaging English, inclusive of both European and Latin as well as Anishinaabe names, it is enormously generous, setting out to acknowledge, consider, and ultimately get beyond conflicts that persist among humans ultimately dependent on their natural environment.
This book is a collaboration among three generations of Ojibwe women: the grandmother, Keewaydinoquay, who had absorbed both her tribe’s understanding of plants and their relationships to people to the point of becoming a lecturer on the subject at the University of Wisconsin; her daughter, Mary Siisip Geniusz, who wrote this text in an effort to get Keewaydinoquay’s teaching down on paper, and Wendy Makoons Geniusz, Mary’s daughter, who edited her mother’s manuscript, added notes and bibliography, and saw it through its fairly recent publication.
The Ojibwe are Anishinaabe, a cluster of tribes living mainly in the Great Lakes Area of North America, speaking related languages and largely sharing an understanding of the way human beings best grasp their position, obligations and possibilities — including understandings of the way the world came to be. This book is profoundly wise in specific ways, including quite detailed recipes for turning plants into medicines to relieve pain and disease, using them for food and also enjoying them, alert to their appearance, smell, sound and taste. This should of course always happen after having given thanks for the opportunity to do so.
Beyond the very concrete, immediate clarity, the book is also a subtle, firm assertion of an aesthetic position, a way of being in the world that addresses all human sense perception with understanding and humility. Written in graceful, engaging English, inclusive of both European and Latin as well as Anishinaabe names, it is enormously generous, setting out to acknowledge, consider, and ultimately get beyond conflicts that persist among humans ultimately dependent on their natural environment.
August 19, 2025
I've never even been to the Midwest or the Great Lakes but this book was so extraordinarily fascinating. It seems difficult to find a well-researched, authoritative, authentic ethnobotanical treatise on Indigenous ethnobotanies, so I was very pleasantly surprised when I started reading this treasure. The noted similarities between Anishinaabe ethnobotany and West Coast, European, or other ethnobotanies placed the teachings in a context that inspired curiosity about my own region's ethnobotanical history, and allowed me to begin to understand how plant-human interactions might compare with related species in other parts of the continent. It has also made me realize just how fucked we're all going to be in the impending apocalypse. Finding, IDing, processing, and collecting these herbs to stave off the plague and radiation poisoning is gonna be real hard work, believe it or not, and frankly I do think we will have to take off our heels and lashes if we stand any chance. Until I read this book, I didn't even realize that many of the common weeds growing all across the country can be potentially life-saving medicinals. If you are cool you should read this book I could not recommend more.
July 11, 2021
This has become one of my favorite plant books! My favorite plant books are the ones that balance discussion of scientific research and chemical constituents with ethnobotanical and medicinal uses, topped off with a healthy dose of mythology and folklore. This is definitely a book that delivers on that! This book is an overview of the way plant medicine is approached in Anishinaabe culture followed by a deep-dive on around 30 plant genuses. I live on unceded Tewa land, which is a bioregion very different from that of the Anishinaabe, so the majority of the plants catalogued in this book are plants that I've never seen before. This book is definitely not the most practical for me, but I think that speaks even higher of my love for it!
Mary Siisip is both a part of a lineage of traditional Anishinaabe healers as well as an academic scholar of ethnobotany. This book is framed at the intersection of multiple ways of seeing the world, born at the integration of western and indigenous science, what is sometimes called "two-eyed seeing" (after the Mi'kmaw concept, Etuaptmumk).
Lineage is a huge theme of this book. This book was clearly a labor of love, for her teacher, Keewaydinoquay and her family, Wendy Makoons and Annmarie. Wendy Makoons, Mary Siisip's daughter and the editor, is a scholar and teacher of the Ojibwe language and her touch was clearly felt in the dedicated attention to the Ojibwe language. I feel extremely grateful to have learned the Ojibwe names for all of these plants. I mean, what a treasure! To put the cherry on top, Annmarie's botanical illustrations were clear, detailed, and absolutely textbook-worthy, which were a tremendous help in learning to identify plants that were new to me.
Mary Siisip is both a part of a lineage of traditional Anishinaabe healers as well as an academic scholar of ethnobotany. This book is framed at the intersection of multiple ways of seeing the world, born at the integration of western and indigenous science, what is sometimes called "two-eyed seeing" (after the Mi'kmaw concept, Etuaptmumk).
Lineage is a huge theme of this book. This book was clearly a labor of love, for her teacher, Keewaydinoquay and her family, Wendy Makoons and Annmarie. Wendy Makoons, Mary Siisip's daughter and the editor, is a scholar and teacher of the Ojibwe language and her touch was clearly felt in the dedicated attention to the Ojibwe language. I feel extremely grateful to have learned the Ojibwe names for all of these plants. I mean, what a treasure! To put the cherry on top, Annmarie's botanical illustrations were clear, detailed, and absolutely textbook-worthy, which were a tremendous help in learning to identify plants that were new to me.
March 5, 2021
This is another slower read for me, but well worth it as it is wonderful to get into the tales behind indigenous plant medicines. If you liked Braiding Sweetgrass, you'd appreciate this one, too.
June 13, 2025
A beautiful, resonant collection of stories that the author and her family use to offer teachings about plant medicines and human relationships with our Elder Siblings. Meegwetch! 🌱
March 20, 2019
Wow the things I learned. I can't wait the snow to melt so I can try some of the things I learned from this book. Well written, easy to understand, full of personal stories, handed down tales and useful information and recipes.
April 18, 2022
I hadn't heard the term ethnobotonist, however it is the study of how a culture or region makes use of their indigenous plants.
This collection is the work of Mary Siisip Geniusz, who apprenticed and worked alongside Anishinaabe medicine woman Kee for more than thirty years.
This is a collection of stories, recipes and teachings grouped by plant.
Although you can read it cover to cover, it is probably best used as a reference and taken along in your backpack on forest hikes.
Seeing the plant and then reading about it is probably more akin to how these teachings work best, actually in the field, when you come across cattail, mullein and horsetail.
Reading inside, chapter by chapter, isn't half as much fun.
This collection is the work of Mary Siisip Geniusz, who apprenticed and worked alongside Anishinaabe medicine woman Kee for more than thirty years.
This is a collection of stories, recipes and teachings grouped by plant.
Although you can read it cover to cover, it is probably best used as a reference and taken along in your backpack on forest hikes.
Seeing the plant and then reading about it is probably more akin to how these teachings work best, actually in the field, when you come across cattail, mullein and horsetail.
Reading inside, chapter by chapter, isn't half as much fun.
May 2, 2020
I absolutely LOVED this book! I wrote an entire article on its contents, but for the purposes of a brief review here, I ought not have been surprised that similar herbs were used the same way as similar herbs in Western medicine (old and new world plants). The best part was the actual teaching of herbal medicine in the tribal lands near the Great Lakes region of the USA - it occurred through storytelling; exclusively as far as I could tell! The stories also showed their worldview and cosmology which had much to do with their relationship with the plants and really, the natural world. Highly recommended!
January 6, 2024
I don’t think I’ll ever read another ethnobotany book as excellent as PLANTS HAVE SO MUCH TO GIVE US, ALL WE HAVE TO DO IS ASK. The storytelling aspect is very helpful in learning about plants and their relationships with people, and will help me remember what I’ve learned. The recipe section is so enjoyable to read through as well. There is plenty of caution from the author when working with plants, and this is not recommended for novices. I feel completely unqualified to forage, but I very much enjoyed learning about the benefits and dangers of plants.
April 7, 2025
Beautifully written with amazing storytelling. It's pretty life-changing knowing how plants truly are a gift. They can heal us and give us so much. I highlighted so many parts of this book. The Anishinaabe teachings are to be cherished and appreciated and I definitely will look differently at all plant beings. I highly recommend this book for any plant enthusiast who wants to further their knowledge.
July 4, 2025
I had the wonderful fortune of listening to this book on audio. This was truly an excellent format because I was able to hear how so many beautiful words that are unfamiliar to me are correctly pronounced. Many times during this book I had strong emotional reactions and felt very viscerally grateful for these teachings. This is certainly a book I will be purchasing to cherish in physical form and share with those around me.
May 30, 2023
What a beautiful world we have, that takes such good care of us and offers us the opportunity to care for it in return. Be mindful of the non-human people around you, and remember their needs as you move through the world. Miigwech to the Anishinaabe scholars, and of course the many plants, for sharing this knowledge with me. 🤍
September 17, 2020
Absolutely brilliant. Highly recommend to anyone living in the Midwest and are looking to deepen their understanding of Native Peoples if this land and reciprocal relationships with plants. Also, it beautifully highlights the power of storytelling as a way to honor plant relatives.
June 8, 2024
This book was great. I listened to the audio but want to buy the actual book. There is history, recipes, stories and so much more. Braiding Sweetgrass is the more well-known book and this is equally as well written.
June 17, 2024
This is such a good book about plants. I really appreciate the story telling style of writing when it comes to talking about plants and found this delivery of information really helped the information stick. This will be a resource for me for many years to come.
August 30, 2025
I found this book shortly after I was put in charge of a dog-safe herb enrichment garden.
It feels like a cousin to Braiding Sweetgrass and The Other End of the Leash. I’ve read it twice and I think I’m due for another go round.
It feels like a cousin to Braiding Sweetgrass and The Other End of the Leash. I’ve read it twice and I think I’m due for another go round.
December 5, 2025
Informative and practical, but also poetic journey through plants of the Great Lakes region that offer healing and nourishment to humanity. Will be recommending to all my Michigan people, as well as trying out some teas and other recipes in my own home.
December 24, 2019
The absolute best book I have ever read on plant medicines, and I have read plenty of very good ones over the past 40 years.
January 21, 2021
One of the best books I have ever read on herbal medicine. I love the writing style and the beautiful teachings all throughout the book. I HIGHLY recommend!
March 10, 2021
I loved this book. It's written in a genuine way, with a great mix of the traditional teachings and teachings on plants. It was a straightforward read, understandable for those of us just learning.
August 16, 2021
Weaves plants and science and stories and tradition together so well. I will refer to this one again and again.
October 5, 2021
An amazing collection of stories and wisdom
April 7, 2022
funny and warm, full of heart and good information.
made me more affectionate towards plant I had overlooked or disapproved of ("weeds")
made me more affectionate towards plant I had overlooked or disapproved of ("weeds")
July 12, 2023
This isn't your beginner herbalism book, but a book to read about one woman's beautiful relationship with herbs and herbalism. Part memoir, part herbalism, excellent excellent excellent.
August 22, 2023
Lots of great storytelling and goes in depth of medicinal plants.
December 15, 2023
So much wonderful information, will keep this book in mind for future reference.
January 18, 2024
A plethora of knowledge ♡ must read. Great stories of nanaboozhoo & recipes too! ♡
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews