Hudson Bay Tea Picking

We're here in Heidelberg and we're at a spot just a few miles out of town that my grandpa Claude Morrison used to take me to to get what we call hillkagan, which is Hudson Bay tea or swamp tea. You know, he's probably 90 or 95 years old and we would just sit for half an hour and I would always get my bag filled really fast just because I would move faster, but he would sit there and he would really take his time. To pick the leaves and he would go after the bigger leaves and he would kind of clean them as he was going. So he enjoyed the process doing that. Now I just grab and go and I clean them when I get home.

I got a lot of memories just right here walking around with my grandpa, so it's pretty cool. Do you know the Haida name for Hudson Bay Tea? What? Hilk'aygen. Hilk'aygen.

Hudson Bay Tea. Hudson Bay Tea. There's two seasons you can pick them in. It's the fall and the spring. And you want to pick them in the fall before they start turning brown.

You can start to see some of these are starting to turn brown. If you came here in the summertime and looked at this plant, Ocean—. Yeah? See how these are all out kind of like this? If you came in the summertime, they would all be like this, up like that, and that's how you know not to pick them.

But in the fall time, they fall down like that. In the springtime, they fall down like that. So when they're falling down like that, that's when it's good to pick. See how they have like little fuzzies on the inside? Look at, feel, feel the fuzzy, kind of orange and little fuzzy.

That's, that's how you know you got the right stuff. You have to look for the Hudson Bay chinook. If you pick the poisonous ones, then you, uh, you can't drink it. So you have to pick the poisonous ones out. Yeah, that's how you know which one that you're picking.

You have to look over, you have to look up, look it like this so you know that if it's Hudson Bay Tea or not. Old Chena would be so happy that you're here picking with me. I used to come here all the time with him as a little boy. Claude Morrison, who I was named after, this was our spot. This is our hot spot.

As a little boy, I never would have thought that I'd be here picking Hudson Bay Tea with my boy someday. Pretty cool. We've got probably 4 cups of it or so, 3 or 4 cups, just enough to make a couple of batches. Now we're gonna go spread it out on the counter to get it to dry a bit. It's not too wet, but dry it, and then a little later on this afternoon we can boil it down and make some tea.

Put hudson bay tea in the pan, let it, uh, cook for a little bit until it Until the thing goes off, and then you, then you can put it, take it out of the pot, and then you could drink it. Once the water starts boiling, we're going to grab these leaves and we're going to put them in that water. Is it, is it hot? The water will be hot, yeah. And we're going to let that water heat up this tea, and it's going to take all the juices and all the everything that's fuzzy stuff off, probably, and then it's going going to be in the water, and then we let that boil about 10 minutes.

And then after we do that, we'll let it cool, and then we'll drink some of that water. And that water mixed with the stuff off of these leaves is our tea, and that's what we're going to drink. But we're going to just strain the leaves out now. So what Ocean's going to do is he's going to hold this strainer right over the bowl like that. Now we're going to just strain.

Is that the tea? That's the tea. I think I would describe it as almost like a peppermint herbal tea. It's just a real tasteful and I think medicinal type of tea. People like it for the winter months.

The nice thing about it is you can boil it down once, drink it, and then you can usually boil the leaves again, drink it twice.