Chapter Text
Even the title of this fic, which mentions a plant that is at times poisonous and connects metaphorically to the plot, Pokeweed, references Indigenous culture. The ‘Poke’ comes from a contraction of the Omàmìwininìmowin, puccoon, pocan or poughkone (depending on how you want to try and write it using the latin-script alphabet). This word covers plants used for staining.
The setting is a key part of any story, and to have cats living in groups together we must have a reason they have not all died of disease yet. That, and obviously the rule of cool, is why we have herbs being used by cats. Silly, but the entire concept here is silly. This is a fanfic. As this story is set on land that was used by Indigenous people for far longer than settlers, there is a lot more information coming from them about what plants native to Ontario, CA, have interesting interactions with the human body. I enjoy looking for plants that factually have an effect on a mammalian body as reference points for the herb system because it adds an element of realism to our setting, respect for the plants that call this place home, and it at least encourages me to get outside and see them for myself.
So I want to start this fanfic off by saying I am in no way claiming that the herb system used is my own creative property or brainchild. While I did not copy anyone word for word, and I tried to vary what parts of the plant were being used, much of what we know about the toxicity and medical applications of the plants native to North America is provided to us by the people of the many First Nations groups who lived here before us. With the emergence of drug resistant bacteria, I hope only more collaboration and research is done to explore these fascinating plants.
As a side note, yes there are much much worse cases of full on stereotyping in Warrior Cats. The Tribe Cats is a glaring example, which is why they do not exist in this, nor the term or role of a Medicine cat. Me and my co-author, Ace, talked much earlier on in this project about what we wanted to change in order to solve this issue as best we could. We ultimately decided to keep the terms warrior and clan, as they are both ambiguous enough that they could be used referring to Celtic people, Vikings or any other number of non-Christian groups. We drew the line at when there was no one definite culture they were appropriating from.
TLDR: The herb system isn’t mine, as most herbs in Ontario were first identified as such by First Nations peoples, and it is at least supposed to be nature accurate. Warrior Cats does a lot of stereotyping, and we are trying to not perpetuate that, because it’s not okay.