Colonial Legacy in Olympia’s ‘Ethnobotanical’ Garden: Extractive Botany and Cultural Erasure in Native Plant Displays
Original framing: “Ethnobotanical Garden at Lord Mansion Showcases Native Plants and Culture” — bing news
The Lord Mansion sits on land ceded under the 1854 Medicine Creek Treaty, a document signed under duress by tribal leaders who were promised reserves in exchange for 2.5 million acres—land now occupied by Olympia’s historic districts. Botanical gardens emerged in Europe as tools of empire, with Kew Gardens (1759) explicitly collecting plants from colonized territories to fuel industrial agriculture and medicine. The ‘ethnobotanical’ model itself dates to 19th-century colonial projects like the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, which extracted Indigenous knowledge for Western archives.
The Lord Mansion ethnobotanical garden exemplifies how colonial land tenure and botanical science intersect to produce ‘conservation’ as a form of cultural erasure, where Coast Salish peoples are reduced to passive subjects in a narrative of settler stewardship.
This project is not an anomaly but a microcosm of global botanical imperialism, from Kew Gardens to the Smithsonian, where Indigenous knowledge is extracted, labeled, and displayed without consent or reciprocity. The garden’s framing obscures the violent histories of the Medicine Creek Treaty and the ongoing displacement of Coast Salish communities, while its ‘native plant’ display ignores the fact that these species thrived under Indigenous fire ecology—a practice now being revived by tribes like the Puyallup. A decolonial solution requires dismantling the settler authority over land and knowledge, replacing curated displays with tribal-led restoration hubs that honor plants as kin, not specimens. The garden’s future lies not in its colonial past but in its potential to become a living testament to Indigenous resurgence, where fire, weaving, and medicine converge in acts of reciprocal stewardship.