devil's club & hudson bay tea (AKA lessons learned from bears)

i'd written about traditional chinese medicine in application essay for med school, but little did i know i was going to experience traditional medicine of a completely different kind -- native american, namely Tlingit, medicine.

you may or may not already know that i live with 3 other guys, a middle-aged landlord, a hobbit-like student my age who walks around barefoot in the snow and talks to himself incessantly, and a Tlingit native student (i'll identify as NH) in his late 20's who has his own tattooing business in his bedroom. an interesting mix for sure, but so far it's worked out (minus maybe one incident which Fuzz knows about).

but anyway, after half the house and some of my clients had been sick this past week, i was feeling a little under the weather yesterday. NH quickly offered to brew me some "indian medicine," which turned out to be two plants that he had picked himself in Juneau: devil's club and hudson bay tea. i was rather alarmed at the words "devil's club," which, not unlike its name, is a very common plant that "conveniently grows everywhere that you want to put your hands on in the forest," as a friend once said. he meant it as an insult, because devil's club looks like this and if you're hiking off-trail in the forest (which people do a lot) and happen to slip, the first thing you would want to grab would always be the devil's club's thorny bark, which would immediately become dislodged in the flesh of your hands. i couldn't help but wonder how a plant as ubiquitous as dandelions and prickly as the devil be of medicinal value? but apparently, the natives learned to use devil's club from watching bears: NH said that a long time ago during hunting, when a bear was speared in the back but did not die, it immediately pulled out devil's club from the ground and rubbed the juices from the ends on its wound.  nice to hear that bears are cute AND smart ;)

anyway, so NH added a handful of both devil's club and hudson bay tea (also called labrador tea and looks like this) to a ton of boiling water and boiled the concoction for ~30 minutes, and the aroma became refreshingly earthy, like the scent after a rainstorm. interestingly, i later found this description of hudson bay tea online (selling for $8/packet):

"Hudson Bay Tea...grows everywhere at a certain latitude, and prolifically in Southeast Alaska. It is even known to grow in China. It is a delicious brewed tea, equal in flavor or bouquet to any fine tea in the world.  Hudson Bay Tea has healing and soothing properties. Be careful not to drink too much at a time, because it is also a soporific (it will make you go to sleep)! Mixed with devils club, together they make a tea that tastes like the earth in its purest form."

sounds accurate enough.  i can't vouch for any "soporific" properties though, because after drinking a cup or two, i felt as energized as having drank two cups of coffee.  but maybe not, for i ended up sleeping for 11 hours, and there was no hint of a cold when i woke up.