North of the Border
October 2007

Autumn Pearls
by Eileen Delehanty Pearkes

Windy, tarnished weather has arrived in the Columbia Mountains. The birch and alder glow golden-yellow on the forested flanks. The longer shadows suggest that snow will soon be falling on the high mountain ridge across the lake from where I live. About this time, I seek out clusters of powdery blue fruit hanging heavily on a tall shrub known as Sambucus cerulea. Also more recently re-classified by botonists as Sambucus mexicana, this multi-stemmed shrub or small tree has always been known simply as kwikw to the Lakes People living from Kettle Falls north as far as Revelstoke. They had many cultural uses for the elderberry plant in former times.

Along with the mountain ash, blue elderberry ripens late in the season, providing important winter forage for birds. A graceful shrub that likes moist valley bottoms and slopes along watercourses, elderberry doesn't mind having wet feet during the season of high water. Further south, its frequency has been challenged by livestock foraging, but the shrub continues to flourish in portions of the Inland Northwest and upper Columbia River regions. Most wild berry berry-pickers I know pass right by the blue elderberry, considering it far less choice than huckleberry, or worrying that it is poisonous. This rumour stems from the fact that all parts of the blue elderberry do contain small concentrations of hydrocyanic acid. Consuming the leaves and bark can be dangerous. Eating large amounts of the fresh berries can lead to mild cyanide poisoning. The small amounts of this acid found in the fresh fruit are destroyed by cooking, or by separating seeds from flesh (the latter a challenging task). It is perhaps for this reason that the Lakes people traditionally ate only small numbers of the berries fresh. Otherwise, they cooked a juice made from them that they relished in the winter months.

Elderberry is an attractive shrub, with narrow leaves and dense sprays of white flower in late spring, followed by clusters of fruit that botanists call "umbels." The Lakes described the flavour as ts'akwt, or "a type of sour taste." This is perhaps an explanation for why bears tend to pass by elderberries here, even as their hibernation approaches. Traditionally, the Lakes left the fruit hanging on the bush until close to the first snowfall, sometimes as late as November. When the weather turned toward snow, they would break off the fruit, lay the clusters on a thick bed of pine needles and cover them with more of the same.

A search through the accumulated snow in winter would result in a harvest of fresh-frozen fruit, the taste slightly sweetened by frost, the snow stained pink by the juice. Small quantities of this soft fruit or its juice (cooked in birch bark baskets with heated stones) varied the diet of dried Saskatoon (slhak), huckleberry (st'xalhk), chokecherry (lhexwlhaxw) and soopolallie (sxwusm).

Other parts of the plant had cultural use and meaning. Like many tribes all around the West and those to the south, east and west of Kettle Falls, the Lakes hollowed the white pith from stems and crafted small flutes. Some indigenous peoples in the West refer to the elderberry as the tree of music for that reason. Dried elderberry branches were burned to smoke buckskin or placed in a steam bath for arthritis or rheumatism.

The Lakes used the hollowed-out stems of the plant to inflate the animal intestines in which they stored ststa, or, "hammered food." Dried crushed berries, meat and fish would be mixed with bear grease and loaded into these containers for winter.

It's a favourite autumn task of mine to pull the little blue pearls from their pink stems and crush them to extract the red juice. I boil the juice with sugar and a little pectin to make a tasty winter syrup. When I stand over the boiling pot, the scent of wild autumn wafts up -- earthy and filled with sharp flavour. Once the winter snows begin to fall, I can look forward to watching the birds flock around the elderberry growing at the fringes of my yard, gobbling up all the berries that I could not reach.

Eileen Delehanty Pearkes is the author of Geography of Memory and The Inner Green, coauthored by K. Linda Kivi. She lives in the West Kootenays of British Columbia.

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