Ode'imin: In Defence of the Berry Pickers
| indigenous | 4,109 words
TAGS: personal essay, Indigenous, Métis, Queer, masculinity, botany, berries, linguistics, theology, gift economy, colonialism, history
ORIGINAL: https://brennan.day/ode-imin-in-defence-of-the-berry-pickers/
Ever heard someone called a berry picker as a derogatory insult?
Well, according to Green's Dictionary of Slang, it has been recorded in American slang since at least 1968 as "a rural person, a country dweller." Meanwhile, the Wabanaki have been harvesting wild blueberries for thousands of years, by hand or with hand-held rakes "which look something like a dustpan with fine metal teeth."
But what I'm really talking about here is how "berry picker" is slang online, particularly on Indigenous TikTok (#RezTok), directed at men and hunters who come home empty-handed. Instead of harvesting big game like a moose or a deer, the joke goes, you might as well go back to picking berries. There are hashtags and duet chains of creators from Treaty 6 to Tlingit country demanding moose meat.
Urban Dictionary offers two definitions:
- a person without the means to provide meat for their partner.
- a person lacking masculinity
And an example sentence: "All you women out there; quit asking other men for moose meat. You snagged a berry picker. You made your bed, now starve in it."
Indigenous humour is medicine, and I'm not here to bash the joke (I've written before about how the trickster outjerks everyone). But I've also been trying to eat fully plant-based my entire adult life. So, I am a berry picker.
When you really take a deep look at the history, though, berries have never been a lesser harvest. There's a rabbit hole of botany and culture in the little fruit.
The strawberry is known in Anishinaabemowin as ode'imin, the heart berry. The heart berry is love, emotional truth, healing, and forgiveness. The first medicine of spring. To harvest the heart is not to come home empty-handed.
Go Get Me Some Moose Meat!
Picking berries instead of hunting is regarded as emasculating and degrading. The joke is there because of the feminine connotation attached to berries, and with fruits in general. I mean, I'm sure you know what it means to be called fruity, after all.
Bon Appétit writes that insult dates back to Yale's campus in 1894, where fruit meant a dupe, someone gullible and easily influenced: "In this slang, a fruit was ripe for the picking, just like a naive person." Etymonline found the "male homosexual" connotation in 1927, and notes that by 1931 fruit was also tramp slang for "a girl or woman willing to oblige," probably from the fact of being "easy picking." Green's goes further with fruit-eater, fruit fly, bowl of fruit, and crushed fruit, defined as a homosexual "who constantly denies his inversion."
The berry is easy picking. Ripe. Passive. Sitting on a branch and waiting to be taken.
If you look through Canada's dark, forgotten history, you'll find that in the 1960s, a Carleton University psychologist named Frank Robert Wake was funded to build what became known as the "fruit machine." And yes, this device was meant to detect homosexuality in civil servants and soldiers by measuring pupil dilation, perspiration, and blood volume. It obviously never worked. But by the end of that decade, the RCMP had amassed a list of over 9,000 names of suspected or confirmed homosexuals, anyway.
When a man on the rez gets called a berry picker, he is being called both a woman and Queer at the same time. The toxic hegemonic masculinity that's so nonchalant in our Indigenous communities must be addressed and reckoned with here. We as men must do better, and we must not be jaded into silence.
Robert Alexander Innes and Kim Anderson's collection Indigenous Men and Masculinities begins from the premise that our Nations "come from traditions of gender equity, complementarity, and the sacred feminine," and that patriarchy was really a colonial imposition. The book describes how the hegemonic masculinity that subordinates Indigenous men "encourages them to similarly assert power and control by subordinating Indigenous women and women of colour, as well as white women (where circumstances allow), other Indigenous men who are considered physically and intellectually weak, and those who do not express a heteronormative identity."
The Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres' Bidwewidam Indigenous Masculinities report gathered what Elders remember about the roles before that hierarchy was built. Yes, men in general hunted, fished, and protected. But "[w]omen, children, youth, elders and men typically had distinct and sacred roles and responsibilities, and no one was valued above the other." And "these roles and responsibilities were flexible. The bottom line was that if a job had to be done, it had to be done."
The idea that the hunt is the real work, and the gathering is secondary leftovers, is a myth from Western anthropology.
In April 1966, the Man the Hunter symposium at the University of Chicago brought together the most influential anthropologists of the day to define hunter-gatherer societies, and gave us hunters as the heroes of human evolution. In 1975, Sally Slocum fired back with "Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology", calling out the male bias baked into the framework. In 2023, a team at Seattle Pacific University went back through the ethnographic record and published "The Myth of Man the Hunter." Of the sixty-three foraging societies with clear data, "50 (79%) of the groups had documentation on women hunting." In societies where hunting was the most important subsistence activity, women participated 100% of the time.
The myth is still everywhere, unsurprisingly. Here's a rather ridiculous essay explaining why women are late: "The reason is that women are berrypickers, while men are hunters." Berries, the author reasons, "don't go anywhere."
Except berries do go somewhere--they go into pemmican!
Pemmican
Pemmican is "generally a mixture of dried meat, fat, and berries", providing the sustenance required by the North American fur trade from the 1770s to the 1880s. The Manitoba Métis Federation wrote how, without it, "neither the employees nor colonists could have survived the harsh Canadian climate."
Making pemmican was women's work as much as men's. In Chris Chang-Yen Phillips's paper on women in the pemmican trade, the Métis historian Victoria Callihoo remembers riding the Red River carts on the buffalo hunt as a child in the 1870s. Young men scouted and killed the animals. "When the kill was over," she said, "the women would go out to help bring the meat in, and then the slicing of meat began." Women sliced and pounded the meat and readied the hide bags it was packed into. Sweet pemmican, the kind mixed with berries, "was considered a delicacy fit for gift-giving and diplomacy. The berry of choice was the service or June berry."
On January 8th, 1814, Governor Miles Macdonell of the Red River Colony issued the Pemmican Proclamation, forbidding the export of pemmican out of Assiniboia. The Métis, who made and supplied it, saw the ban for what it was. Two years later, on June 19th, 1816, Cuthbert Grant led the Métis to la Victoire de la Grenouillère, the Battle of Seven Oaks, in what is now West Kildonan in Winnipeg. It was one of the first times the Métis asserted themselves as la Nouvelle Nation and flew our flag. And it was because they forbade our pemmican.
Across the North, Inuit women say that berry harvesting is their most important food-procurement activity. As Rachel Qaqqaq of Qikiqtarjuaq put it, "[b]erry picking is the number one priority for ladies in September!" Among the Tlingit, the best berry patches were treated as hereditary property by matrilineal clans, owned, defended, and celebrated.
The Serviceberry
The serviceberry, Amelanchier, is known by many names. Shadbush, shadwood or shadblow, or sarvisberry, juneberry, saskatoon, sugarplum, wild-plum or chuckley pear. The National Park Service admits that "no one can seem to agree on either a unifying common name or even how many species there are in total," with estimates landing anywhere between 20 and 80. Shad, because it blooms when the shad fish run upriver each spring. Juneberry, for when the fruit ripens.
Early European settlers thought the North American shrub looked similar to the European Sorbus genus (such as the rowan or mountain ash), which produces red berries. The Latin word Sorbus shifted over time in local dialect to "sarvis," and eventually evolved into "serviceberry." The Lewis and Clark journals mention the serviceberry 63 times, spelling it 13 different ways, including Clark's "Sarvis" and "Sarviss," tinged with a Virginian accent.
Folklore says the white spring blooms of the serviceberry signalled that the ground had finally thawed after winter. This thaw allowed preachers to travel to remote settlements to hold delayed community gatherings, weddings, and funeral services for people who died during the frozen winter months. The serviceberry signalled for services. Though the NPS notes its origins "may be apocryphal."
Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote an essay called "The Serviceberry," which later expanded into a book, and she points out that "ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance." In Potawatomi, it's Bozakmin, "a superlative: the best of the berries."
For me, the most important part of the word Bozakmin is "min," the root for "berry." It appears in our Potawatomi words for Blueberry, Strawberry, Raspberry, even Apple, Maize, and Wild Rice. The revelation in that word is a treasure for me, because it is also the root word for "gift."
The berry is the gift.
I think of service more in that sense, too. The sense of giving, of providing and offering. That's a large reason why I named my webdev company Berry House, because I want to offer myself. It is a form of digital stewardship. Most of what I do under that name is pro bono. A house full of berries is a house with more than enough to give away.
Kimmerer tells another story in that essay, from the linguist Daniel Everett, about a hunter in the Brazilian rainforest who brought home far more meat than his family could eat. Everett asked how he would store the excess. The hunter was puzzled. He instead threw a feast until every last morsel was gone.
"Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother," replied the hunter.
In a gift economy, Kimmerer writes, "status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away." The good hunter, in the old way, was measured by what he shared and not by what he killed.
lii pwayr
Here in Alberta, the Blackfoot call the saskatoon okonok. Hungry Wolf reported its name as "Real Berry," and said it ripened at "the time that many tribes gather traditionally for their annual encampments and ceremonials." Camps moved to follow it. There is a hamlet in southeastern Alberta called Manyberries, named for this.
But the saskatoon isn't only fruit--its wood is hard, heavy, and straight. The Galt Museum notes that it was "valued as material for arrows, pipe stems, basket rims and tipi closure pins," and Elder Pete Standing Alone told the Kainai ethnobotany project that the branches make good arrow shafts. The Dictionary of Canadianisms writes that the "saskatoon or choke-cherry-wood arrow was often driven clear through the body of the buffalo."
In 1919, Edward Ahenakew wrote in the Saskatoon Daily Star that his band stopped where the city now stands to cut saskatoon willows for arrow shafts, and that the place where the willows are cut, manimisāskwatān, was shortened into the name Saskatoon. The hunter's arrow was made from the berry picker's bush.
In Michif, the saskatoon is lii pwayr. According to the Gabriel Dumont Institute, it comes from the French poirettes and petites poires. Little pears.
Botanically, the fruit of the Amelanchier is a pome, the same kind of fruit as an apple or a pear. Not a berry at all. The English settlers named it after a European tree it only resembled. My Métis ancestors called it a little pear, and my ancestors were the ones who got it right.
Bacca Spuria
Like nearly all things colonial, what qualifies and counts as a berry is technical and semantic. While we're on the subject, in botany, a berry is a simple fleshy fruit "derived from a single ovary of an individual flower."
By that definition? Tomatoes, eggplants, grapes, and avocados and kiwis are true botanically-defined berries. As are bananas. Watermelons, pumpkins, and cucumbers are pepos, which are "modified berries with a hard rim."
But strawberries? They're aggregate fruits, not berries at all. The red flesh is a swollen receptacle, the base of the flower. The little "seeds" on the outside are achenes, each one the actual fruit with a seed inside. "When you eat one strawberry," Oregon State botanist Aaron Liston told Live Science, "you're getting hundreds of fruits, not just one."
Raspberries and blackberries are tiny stone fruit clustered together in drupelets. Each raspberry flower has 60 to 80 ovaries, and each one becomes its own drupelet. Cornell's horticulture notes describe each one as "anatomically analogous to a cherry." A raspberry, then, is a bouquet of tiny cherries holding hands.
What does this mean, really? Why do we have such completely incorrect words and labels for things?
A berry is a bacca, and in the Missouri Botanical Garden's dictionary of botanical Latin, the raspberry and the strawberry are given as examples of bacca spuria: "any fleshy fruit which is not a true berry." A false berry. Bacca also meant anything round, like a pearl.
I studied English at university and got a Bachelor's degree, a baccalaureate, and that word was likely altered by folk etymology, as if from bacca lauri, "laurel berry." Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary, explained it this way: "Bachelors, being young, are of good hopes, like laurels in the berry." My English degree is a berry through folk etymology. A false one.
This all ties back to how there's no "proper" English, or any other language. Words don't follow definitions, definitions follow power.
In 1893, the Supreme Court of the United States heard Nix v. Hedden, a tariff case asking whether imported tomatoes were fruit (duty-free) or vegetables (taxed at ten percent). Justice Horace Gray conceded the science immediately:
Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas. But in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables...
His reasoning? They're "usually served at dinner in, with or after the soup, fish or meats," and "not, like fruits generally, as dessert." The highest court in the land ruled that what a thing is depends on when you serve it, and on who collects the tax.
How the Strawberry Was Born
When Pedro de Valdivia invaded Wallmapu in the 1540s, he coined a new word for the "new" Chilean strawberry, frutilla, "little fruit." The Mapuche already had words for both wild strawberries (llahuen) and cultivated ones (quellghen), because they had been domesticating Fragaria chiloensis for at least a thousand years.
A century and a half later, a French military spy named Amédée-François Frézier, posing as a merchant to sketch Spanish fortifications, brought Chilean strawberry plants back to France in 1714. They grew, but wouldn't fruit. He'd only brought female plants, unaware the species needed both sexes, which, as one botanical review notes, "was presumably common knowledge to the Mapuche and Picunche people." For "[i]f Frézier had consulted with these indigenous farmers, he could have avoided his mistake."
When farmers in Brittany planted the Chilean strawberries beside the Virginia strawberry, another Indigenous American species already in Europe, the two crossed. The French botanist Antoine Nicolas Duchesne named the hybrid Fragaria × ananassa, after the pineapple, because of its flavour.
The strawberry in your grocery store is a hybrid of two plants native to the Americas, cultivated first by Indigenous peoples, named for a third American plant, and credited to Europe. Who picks them?
In American slang, berry picker has also been used as an ethnic slur for Latino farmworkers in California's berry fields. The anthropologist and physician Seth Holmes spent two summers picking strawberries and blueberries in Washington's Skagit Valley with Triqui families from Oaxaca, and found that the Triqui, an Indigenous people, made up "the very bottom rung of the agricultural labor ladder," earning $5,000 to $8,000 a year. One worker told him: "You pick with your hands bent over kneeling, your back hurts; you get knee pains and [hip] pains... You suffer a lot."
In 2013, Triqui and Mixteco pickers at Sakuma Bros. Berry Farm went on strike after a worker was fired for asking for a raise. They formed Familias Unidas por la Justicia, an independent, Indigenous-led union, and in 2017 they won a contract. In 2015, thousands of pickers in Mexico's San Quintín Valley shut down the strawberry harvest. A 24-year-old Triqui labourer told The Globe and Mail that "[i]t's slavery of indigenous people. It's been going on for generations." The berry pickers of the world are, overwhelmingly, Indigenous.
The Flesh and the Blood
Botanists divide the fleshy pericarp of a berry into three distinct parts. The exocarp is the outer skin of the berry, such as the thin skin of a grape or the tough rind of a banana. The mesocarp is the middle layer, which forms the main edible, pulpy part of the fruit. And the endocarp is the innermost layer surrounding and embedding the seeds. In a true berry, this layer is thin and fleshy rather than stony, unlike a peach pit.
Skin, flesh, and the soft place where the seed is held. I can't help but think of religion here--could a Eucharist be made from berry? Carrying both the flesh and blood simultaneously?
Grapes are true botanical berries. The wine of every communion, the blood, has always been berry. And the bread? A grain of wheat is a caryopsis, "a dry indehiscent fruit." The body, too, is fruit.
The Eucharist was never meat, it was always the harvest of the gatherer.
"I am the vine, ye are the branches," Jesus says in John 15:5. "He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit." And when Paul lists what grows in us, in Galatians, the very first word is love, "[b]ut the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith."
In illuminated Church manuscripts, the strawberry's three-part leaf was a reminder of the Holy Trinity, "the red fruits, pointing downward, were representative of drops of Christ's blood, and the five petals of its white flower were symbols of his five wounds." The strawberry symbolized the Virgin Mary, purity and martyrdom, righteousness and humility, and the Incarnation itself.
But before all that, the strawberry was dedicated to Venus and Aphrodite, symbolizing romantic love, fertility, and beauty. According to Roman myth, strawberries grew where Aphrodite's tears mixed with the blood of the dead Adonis and dropped into the dirt.
And do you know how Adonis died? He was killed hunting a boar. The heart berry grows from the place where the hunter fell, watered by the grief of love.
Art historian Walter Gibson, writing about Bosch, wrote that the strawberry "could represent the Virgin Mary as well [as] Venus, figures not known to coexist amicably." In The Garden of Earthly Delights, the giant strawberries were so central that early viewers called the whole painting el quadro del madroño, the picture of the strawberry, reading it as a warning about fleeting pleasure.
Purity and desire. Mary and Venus. A fruit sacred to both the Virgin and the goddess of love. The berry and the body hold both.
Ode'imin
Which brings me to the heart. The Ojibwe People's Dictionary breaks ode'imin into two parts: ode' meaning heart, and -min meaning "small and globular; berry." The same -min Kimmerer recognized as gift. Heart-gift.
And in the word family, right underneath, is the verb ode'iminike, "s/he picks strawberries, processes strawberries." Anishinaabemowin has a word for a berry picker--a verb built on the word for heart. I can think of nothing further from a derogatory insult.
Teachings vary across nations and families. Elder Lillian Pitawanakwat's teaching, shared widely, is simple:
"The strawberry teaches forgiveness and peace. The strawberry is shaped like a heart, and strawberries are known to our people as heart berries."
Elders say that just as ode'imin is connected to the plant "by a vast system of leaves, runners, and roots, so is the heart connected to all the organs and parts of the human body." During the strawberry harvest in June, many communities hold feasts, "welcoming everyone home, and letting go of differences, judgment and self-righteousness."
When Edmonton renamed its wards in 2021, one ward became O-day'min, the heart of the city. The stem of the heart berry represents the North Saskatchewan River, the vessels are the waterways, and the veins are the people. Because its seeds are on the outside, not hidden, Elders use ode'imin to teach about vulnerability. It "reminds us to love as an active experience--one that involves commitment, compassion and caring." A fruit that wears its seeds on its skin has nothing to hide. Imagine telling that to the RCMP's "fruit machine."
And it is the first medicine of spring. As Notwell, sharing a teaching that passed from Elder Lillian Pitawanakwat through Elder Conni Ma'iingan, told the NB Media Co-op:
"The strawberries are really the first berry, the first fully ripe spring food, that would come naturally from the land as a gift from our Earth Mother. Those strawberries are so important, they're a sign that we made it through the winter."
The strawberry, like the serviceberry, tells you the frozen months are over and when you are allowed to come home.
When an Ojibwe girl gets her first moontime, she may take on the berry fast, abstaining from strawberries and other berries for a full year while she learns from the grandmothers. At the end, she gathers berries and presents them to her community, and a feast is held in her honour. The berry is feminine because it is sacred, not lesser.
The jokes against berry-pickers takes our grandmothers held as medicine, as ceremony, as the power to give life, and treats it as the act of a man who failed. That's not our teaching.
In James Mooney's 1900 record, the first man and the first woman quarrel, and she leaves him, walking east toward the Sun land, never looking back. The Sun takes pity on the grieving man and puts fruit in her path to slow her: huckleberries, then blackberries, then "some trees covered with beautiful red service berries." She walks past them all. Then she sees "a patch of large ripe strawberries, the first ever known." She stoops to pick them, turns to the west, and remembers her husband. She gathers the finest berries and carries them back to him. "He met her kindly and they went home together."
For the Haudenosaunee, strawberries came down with Skywoman, and when she was buried, strawberries and medicines sprang up from the ground above her. The strawberry is the leader of the berries. When Handsome Lake lay unconscious for four days, the Oneida Nation recounts, the messengers told him that through the Great Feather Dance and drinking the juice of the strawberry, "the people will rebuild their spirit and recover." Strawberry juice is medicine for the spirit.
Kimmerer, in "The Gift of Strawberries," remembers picking wild strawberries as a child for her father's Father's Day shortcake. "Our gift was time and attention and care and red-stained fingers," she writes. "Heart berries, indeed."
Call Me a Berry Picker, Eh?
What does the berry picker offer, then? The first sign of spring after a cold, bitter winter. Saskatoons for the pemmican, pounded together with meat and fat by men and women both, carried in hide bags to Seven Oaks. A bush whose fruit fed the camp and whose wood became the arrow. The grief of a goddess and a hunter's blood growing strawberry plants. A girl fasting from berries for a year so she can come back and feed her people. The first woman who turned around because of a strawberry, and the first man who met her kindly. The flesh and blood of all things holy and full of love.
A berry is the small, globular gift. And the heart is a muscle that only works by giving everything away, beat after beat, to every part of the body it's connected to.
Call me a berry picker and I'll take it. I'll be in the patches in June with red-stained fingers, bringing back more than enough to share. Ode'imin. Heart berry. Love, emotional truth, healing, forgiveness. The first medicine of spring.