Rooted Medicine

by Clemon Dabney III, PhD

Here in the North, autumn is a season of good work and good medicine. The leaves flame out, the air sharpens, and we bring in what we tended all summer: food, stories, and teachings. As a person with Choctaw heritage, fall harvest isn’t only about filling bins; it’s a time to restore balance with the land and with one another. The Choctaw and other southeastern relatives call it the Green Corn time—a season of renewal, reconciliation, thanksgiving, and re-commitment to shared responsibility. In Choctaw communities, this cycle has always paired the practical (planting, weeding, drying, storing) with the spiritual (clearing grudges, setting intentions, giving thanks). The point isn’t just to take; it’s to return right-relation to the field, the fire, and the people gathered around both.

That ethic travels with me into the cannabis garden. Cannabis is a plant that rewards reciprocity. If you listen, it will teach you when to top and when to leave it alone, when to trellis and when to trust the wind. Harvest in autumn is a choreography: watching trichomes shift from clear to cloudy to amber, timing the cut to the effects you’re seeking, and drying slow enough to protect terpenes. But Indigenous harvesting is also about using the whole plant—because the teaching is that nothing is wasted. We save seed. We compost stalks into next year’s soil. And we remember that medicine does not begin and end with the flower.

In our house, whole-plant cannabis medicine includes a practice many folks overlook: root medicine. For centuries, communities around the world have made use of cannabis roots— decoctions, poultices, and salves for inflammation, joint pain, gout, burns, and more. Even classical sources like Pliny the Elder mention root preparations; early modern herbalists carried the practice forward. Modern analyses have found that cannabis roots aren’t a cannabinoid story so much as a triterpenoid and sterol story: friedelin and epifriedelanol feature prominently, alongside sterols like sitosterol and stigmasterol. Contemporary lab studies point to anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and potential analgesic properties for these molecules, and to practical extraction with familiar solvents like ethanol and ethyl acetate. None of this replaces the clinical data we still need, but it validates what our grandmothers already knew: the roots are medicine, too.

My autumn ritual is simple. After I wash and hang the flowers, I dig a few mature roots from healthy, unsprayed plants. I scrub them clean, slice them thin, and air-dry until they’re brittle. For a triterpene-forward salve, I make a gentle, low-heat ethanol extraction—no boiling, no scorching—and filter it clear. Then I warm that extract into a base of jojoba oil and beeswax with a touch of shea. The result is a salve I use on sore hands after long days hauling sap or splitting rounds. It’s not a cure-all; it’s culturally grounded self-care that connects me to a lineage of whole-plant practice and to a body that has real work to do tomorrow. If you want to adapt this at home, keep it humble: clean roots, food-grade solvents or traditional oil infusions, low heat, patience, and a good label so you remember what you made and how. (And always patch-test first; plants are powerful.)

This season also marks an inflection point for tribal cannabis in Minnesota. Long before the state issued its first non-tribal retail licenses, Minnesota’s tribal nations stepped up to grow, regulate, and sell cannabis under their own laws and then in partnership with state compacts. Today, several tribally owned dispensaries are open and serving Minnesotans, on and (in some cases) off tribal lands. To name a few:

Waabigwan Mashkiki (White Earth Nation)— Dispensaries in Mahnomen and off-reservation in Moorhead and St. Cloud under the tribe’s compact with the State of Minnesota. Waabigwan is vertically integrated and emphasizes Ojibwe heritage and rigorous quality.

NativeCare (Red Lake Nation)— Adult-use sales at Red Lake, with products cultivated and produced on Red Lake sovereign land.
Sweetest Grass (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe)— Serving the Leech Lake community in the Walker/Cass County area.

Ishkode (Bois Forte Band of Chippewa)— Near Fortune Bay Resort Casino in Tower, open daily.

Prairie Island Indian Community (Mdewakanton Dakota)— Recently opened Island Peži, an adult-use cannabis dispensary and cultivation operation near Red Wing, Minnesota. Prairie Island’s approach emphasizes environmental sustainability, local employment, and Dakota stewardship principles that connect medicine, land, and community.

White Earth’s compact also signals a wider horizon: tribally run dispensaries operating across Minnesota communities, bringing Native governance and values into the mainstream retail experience. That’s good for consumers and good for sovereignty.

What connects these storefronts to a Choctaw autumn? Gratitude and responsibility. In our Green Corn season, we resolve old conflicts, light new fire, and ask whether our decisions honor the next generation. The tribal cannabis movement asks the same questions: Are we nourishing community wealth rather than extracting it? Are we extending opportunity to artisans, farmers, and knowledge-keepers—especially those harmed by enforcement? Are we investing in soil, water, and workers so the medicine we harvest is clean in every sense of the word?

That is why I keep circling back to whole-plant medicine. In a market that can fixate on ever-higher THC, Indigenous harvest says: remember the roots. Remember that medicine is relational—between compounds in the plant, yes, but also between people and place. Triterpenes in a salve, seed heads saved for spring, stalks mulched back into the beds—these are small acts with big echoes. The science is beginning to catch up to tradition, showing how friedelin and epifriedelanol may help cool inflammation—perhaps part of why those old-school root poultices brought relief after long harvest days. The lab bench doesn’t diminish the ceremony around the fire; it helps us translate it for neighbors who need both data and story.

So as leaves turn and curing jars line our shelves, I offer this: Harvest is not the finish line. It’s the circle closing and opening again. Make room on your workbench for the “low-status” parts of the plant that elders prized. And when you rub a homemade salve into tired hands, think about the hands that came before you—hands that planted together, forgave together, and gave thanks together. That’s an autumn worth harvesting.