Plants within the groups living in the North American Northwest do not fit neatly into natural or cultural categories; they are part of intricate and holistic relationships with the land. This website draws on archaeological, ethnographic, and modern traditional knowledge to explore the ever-changing relationships that many Northwest cultural groups had and continue to have with the land. This project is an ongoing attempt to document and provide infomation on ethnobotanical knowledge across the Pacific Northwest, including the Columbia-Fraser Plateau and Coastal regions, and should be considered a work in progress.
To request joining a community or cultural protocol, please contact the site adminstrator at admin@nwnativeplants.org.
For a description on searching for paleoethnobotanical identification criteria, please visit our For Paleoethnobotanists section.
Please visit our FAQ for answers to common questions.
For a list of sources used in this site, please visit the References page.
If you have found this guide useful, please cite as:
Plants Database
2019+ Cultural and Historic Guide to Northwest Native Plants. Washington State University Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation. http://cdsc-wsu.org/nwnativeplants/.