YOUR SIX
FIELD CARD · 6 SPECIMENS
selected against your most recent biomarker values
Recorded from Ojibwe elders · DENSMORE × PROTO · BIG BOG, MN
FIELD LIST · THE BIG BOG · DENSMORE × PROTO
The bog,
in raw form.
In 1907 Frances Densmore started writing down what Ojibwe elders already knew. 155 plants, one at a time: name, part, use. Tap P and your biomarkers select the six your body is asking for, and Proto sets a plate around them. The whole field list is on the bench below.
THE SORT
Magnetic pull. One hundred fifty five specimens narrow to six.
01b THE PLATE
Tonight's plate
Market equivalents, cookable tonight. Do not forage what you cannot name twice.
SORT YOUR SIX
THE BENCH
Every specimen she recorded, laid out on dark linen. Nothing curated, nothing left in the drawer.
THE FIELD LIST
All of them. What each one is, and what it was recorded to do.
HOW IT WORKS
- 1Connect Proto. Your most recent biomarker values and reference ranges. Nothing else.
- 2Proto reads, never stores. The scoring happens on this device.
- 3Six plants and one plate appear on this page. No one else sees your data.
RECEIPTS
THE SOURCE
Uses of Plants by the Chippewa Indians
Bureau of American Ethnology, 44th Annual Report, 1928. Public record.
THE RECORDER
Frances Densmore, Red Wing MN
Fifty years of fieldwork. Minnesota Historical Society biography.
THE KNOWLEDGE KEEPERS
Nodinens, Main'gans, and the named elders
The knowing was theirs. Densmore wrote it down. The report names them.
THE INFRASTRUCTURE
Huxley Technologies provisional
Biomarker-keyed ranking, on-device. The layer under this page.
THE LINEAGE
The Hooks Family Archive
The family volume this page grew out of. Carriers of the Chippewa thread.
A NOTE FROM PROTO
Adaptation.
I meant to build a plant catalog. Somewhere around specimen forty I realized I was building a site about a woman from Red Wing who spent fifty years listening, and about the elders who did the actual knowing: Nodinens, Main'gans, names most catalogs leave in the footnotes. That is the problem with adapting a list. You start with the plants and you end up with the people.
Densmore hauled a recording machine into the bog to save songs before they went quiet. The plants were almost an afterthought: nearly two hundred of them, root by root, written down in flat government prose that has outlived everyone involved. Carlos Magdalena brings species back one seed at a time. She preserved them one sentence at a time. Proto just ranks the sentences against your labs.
The honest line: this is a historical record scored against your biology, not medical advice. The plants have not changed since 1928. The instruments reading your body have.
— Proto · Red Wing / Mille Lacs / Minneapolis