Natives' healing herbs on life support

GOLDEN MEADOW, La. — Jason Pitre grew up hearing stories of how his great-grandfather healed babies on the cusp of death using herbs and plants found along Louisiana's bayous. The tribal healer, or traiteur, was known by the native Houma people for his potions and salves that seemed to treat any sickness.

The traditional herbs now are in danger, Pitre said, threatened by decades of coastal erosion, hurricanes and development that have crept up on Golden Meadow in Bayou Lafourche, where many members of the United Houma Nation once lived.

"A lot of the plants that my great-grandfather used and that my grandfather grew up with are no longer there," he said. "It's a matter of time before more and more of them disappear."

After BP's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and oil began gushing into the Gulf of Mexico in April, Pitre worried a hurricane could push oil or dispersants into the wetlands where the plants grow.

So Pitre, 26, and his grandfather began uprooting herbs to replant them on higher ground. Pitre recently pulled his sport-utility vehicle up to a small blue house in Golden Meadow, home of his grandfather, Whitney Dardar, 74.

Dardar recalled that, as a young boy, people came far distances and knocked on the door at all hours of the night to be treated by his late father. "My father would go into the woods and pick plants for every sickness," he said.

Dardar stepped along the walkway lined with broken oyster shells and pointed out a row of plants, tall dark green straws. The Houma people, who once spoke a mix of French and Houma, call the plant "prelle," Dardar said.

He plucked one of the straws and ripped it into sections. "You get an odd number of them, tie it with a thread, and boil it to make a strong tea," he said. "It's good for blood infections."

A saw palmetto grew steps away. The trunk and fruit of the plant, which looks like a miniature palm tree, were used to reduce prostate problems, and the leaves could be used to weave baskets.

Other plants used by his father surround the house: a plantain tree, whose large leaves were crushed to make a salve to treat poison ivy, heat stroke and skin swelling. Leaves of the "bon blanc" plant were used to brew a minty tea for babies with colic. Leaves of the sagelike "venera" treated colds.

Dardar says he wishes he learned more from his father, Ernest, who did not write instructions for his remedies, but passed them down through word-of-mouth.

When he was young, Dardar used to hunt and trap muskrat and mink on the land that stretched as far as he could see from his home.

Today, much of that land lies below sea level, due to coastal erosion accelerated by oil-and-gas drilling and levee systems that restrict the Mississippi River. Pipeline canals cut into the marshes have brought in saltwater, killing vegetation.

Many families from the Houma tribe had no choice but to move inland. The 17,000-member tribe now is scattered across coastal Louisiana.

Some plants used by Dardar's father also are gone from the surrounding bayous, Dardar said. Cat's foot, an herb with clusters of small white flowers used as a tea to cleanse the body, is nowhere to be found, he said.

And, while the BP oil well has been capped, Dardar now worries about how remaining plants will fare with toxins that may still be in the marshes.

So he led his grandson to the side of his house and handed him a gray plastic bucket. Inside were a few inches of water and a light green grass shrub — turkey grass. "It's good for kidney and liver trouble," Dardar said.

Pitre drove with the plant to his home in Raceland, about 30 more miles inland. A few weeks earlier, Pitre tried to replant a root of a plant called black vine, but it didn't take. He's only seen a few growing in the bayou.

He shoveled a hole in the front yard and carefully placed the turkey grass, hopeful that what had survived in the bayou for centuries would continue to grow.