Seed Collection Guide for Six Boreal Plants Important to Indigenous Peoples

This publication is intended to be a source for plant identification and seed collection and is available to all who wish to use it. We aimed to make the information in this guide illustrative for beginners, interesting for community members, and informative for practioners in the field of reclamation and restoration. It is with sincere hope that the content provided in this book will be expanded upon and make its way into a more comprehensive guide that incorporates a larger collection of species. This seed collection guide includes information on how to distinguish when seeds are ready to be collected, where seed sources may be available (geographically), a forecasted timeframe for seed collection, and some basic information on seed cleaning and storage. The focus of the SINEWS program is, at its core, centred on the importance of meaningful relationships, and those relationships took us to some wonderful places. This guide is a culmination of contributions from multiple sources of knowledge, and we acknowledge the valuable offerings that both Indigenous and scientific perspectives provide us and help us to understand our world in different ways. It is our hope that respectful and meaningful relationships continue to lead us all toward a deeper level of mutual understanding, improving connections to one another and to the Land. The plants are identified using their common, scientific, and Dene names; the source for the Dene names is the book “Aboriginal Plant Use in Canada’s Northwest Boreal Forest”. All GIS maps were produced using publicly available Alberta Ecodistrict layers provided by the Natural Resources Canada branch of the Government of Canada in conjunction with ABMI’s publicly available Species and Habitat Raw Data.