Story By Gisela Telis December 7, 2010
At the Whole Foods store on Speedway Boulevard, Medicine of the People blends right in. The glossy tins of sore-joint salve and lip balm form a rainbow of color, and their design has the clean lines of a corporate marketing campaign. But while the cruelty-free nail polish and jade luck charms that flank this display traveled thousands of miles to get here, the elegant tins started their lives just up I-10, in northeastern Marana.
Virginia Boone lives there, in a purple house on four acres off a remote dirt road. Boone is Navajo, and for fifteen years she has turned the traditional herbal medicine of her people into Medicine of the People—a line of balms, lotions, teas and other natural products that she sells at Native American markets and pow wows, on the Internet and, most recently, in stores and gift shops.
]]>At the Whole Foods store on Speedway Boulevard, Medicine of the People blends right in. The glossy tins of sore-joint salve and lip balm form a rainbow of color, and their design has the clean lines of a corporate marketing campaign. But while the cruelty-free nail polish and jade luck charms that flank this display traveled thousands of miles to get here, the elegant tins started their lives just up I-10, in northeastern Marana.
Virginia Boone lives there, in a purple house on four acres off a remote dirt road. Boone is Navajo, and for fifteen years she has turned the traditional herbal medicine of her people into Medicine of the People—a line of balms, lotions, teas and other natural products that she sells at Native American markets and pow wows, on the Internet and, most recently, in stores and gift shops.
The idea may seem like a tightrope-walk: selling the fruits of sacred knowledge without compromising tribal traditions. But Boone says she's simply carrying on her family's work, which is to bring healing to anyone who needs it. Leonard Marcus and Virginia Boone have turned her knowledge of Navajo herbal medicine into a successful local business. Boone grew up outside Flagstaff, near what is now known as Camp Navajo. Her father, Sam Boone, worked there after serving in World War II and Korea. The son of a medicine man, he had learned from his clan how to properly gather and prepare medicinal herbs.
Navajo herbalists must remember when and where each plant is most plentiful and potent, and they must know the right prayers, offerings and other rituals to show respect to the spirits of the plant world.
The plants are then used in healing ceremonies and in everyday life to treat arthritis, upset stomach or other common ailments. Boone and her siblings learned about them by watching their father.
"We went gathering together," she says. "He was very casual about it. He just did it in front of us and that's how we learned." The problem, as Sam Boone saw it, was that not everyone had access to a knowledgeable healer or a sufficiently varied selection of plants. So, in the 1970s, he began selling the plants in small markets on the reservation and teaching people to use them.
"He really decided he was going to help his people in this way," Boone recalls. "He just loved the people, and he wanted their minds and bodies to be better."
His commitment to sharing the medicine with everyone met with resistance from more traditional tribe members, and that’s not surprising, says Wade Davies. Davies, a historian at the University of Montana in Missoula, has studied Navajo healing and health care.
“In Navajo healing, it’s always been about face-to-face contact and relationships with people,” he says. “If they’re strangers, then that could be an issue. There’s a parallel to when Native American elders started telling their stories to anthropologists—some people thought they shouldn’t, because that might be disrespecting the knowledge. But some elders told those stories anyway because they were afraid that, if they weren’t recorded somewhere, the stories would be lost.”
Sam Boone’s work did help preserve the tradition; he taught several apprentices and became a founding member of the Arizona Ethnobotanical Research Association (AERA). He also planted the seed of socially responsible work in Virginia Boone, one that stayed with her even as she moved away and began her own life.
Boone lived in California and Hawaii, raised a daughter and worked as a ranger with the National Park Service and the Forest Service before returning to Arizona in the mid-1990s. It was then that she met Leonard Marcus, a part Potawatomi transplant from New York, and the two decided to make a go at life together in Tucson.
From gathering and drying the herbs to pouring salve into their trademark tins, Marcus and Boone do all the work of running Medicine for the People themselves. Boone's business brings her family's traditional knowledge to the modern market.
"And then I was sitting there one day and I saw there was an Indian market at the Tucson Indian Center, and I thought I would make some salves," Boone says. She bought cheap plastic bottles, hand-wrote some labels and instructions, and simply showed up. She admits, laughing, that she "had no idea what I was doing."
Nevertheless, Boone's herbal medicines sold out. Just two years later, Marcus quit his job to help Boone gather and prepare herbs full time.
The pair traveled widely throughout Arizona, New Mexico and Utah to find the right plants, handcrafted all the balms, teas and other products, and logged 50,000 miles a year as they worked the circuit of Indian fairs, shows and conferences. All the while, the two remained true to Sam Boone’s teachings, taking as little from the earth as possible, offering corn pollen to the plant spirits, praying for their customers’ healing and handling the herbs in what Marcus calls the “beautiful way.”
“We can’t make it up as we go along,” he says. “We have to approach what we do with respect and with the knowledge that our people are watching.”
Boone's sales have grown steadily since 1997. "People are starving for this," says fellow herbalist and businesswoman Phyllis Hogan. "It's a healing for their spirit." And now many outside the Navajo community are watching as well.
While Native American-owned businesses in Arizona have taken a hit during the recession, Boone’s business has continued to steadily grow and Medicine of the People reports its busiest Christmas ever. That speaks to a need people feel even in spite of hard times, says Phyllis Hogan, AERA director and owner of the Winter Sun Trading Company in Flagstaff, which also sells medicinal herbs. “People are starving for this, they’re starving for a connection to the earth,” she says. “Medicine of the People makes them feel there’s somebody out there who has that connection. It’s a healing for their spirit.”
Hogan was Sam Boone’s apprentice in the 1980s, and she says she’s watched Boone and her sisters—who continue to gather and sell herbal medicines on the reservation—carry on their father’s work with joy and interest.
“They’re such grounded, spiritual women,” she says. “They’re courageous visionaries to do what they do. Not everyone can walk in both worlds, but they do it.”
Boone and Marcus have “retired” from the fair and pow wow circuit and are currently focusing their efforts on wholesale clients and Internet sales. Boone continues to hone her herbal medicine skills, studying with an 87-year-old aunt who is also an accomplished healer, and has hopes of returning to her father’s land to give back to its people. For now, her handcrafted medicine is her way of giving back.
“People need to wake up, to learn to use their own way and their hearts, and we help show them the way,” she says. “If it will put a little light in their lives, that’s all we can ask for.”
]]>Story Published: Jul 20, 2009
Story Updated: Jul 17, 2009
MARANA, Az. – Virginia Boone and Leonard Marcus are in the fortunate position of living lives in which work, family, social life, health, spirituality, tradition and culture meld together into an integrated, meaningful whole. Life and business partners for the last 15 years, the couple collects wild herbs and other plants in areas of the southwestern states of Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, crafts them into handmade traditional Navajo herbal remedies and sells them at pow wows, Indian markets, conferences and on the Internet It’s a way of life to which Boone and Marcus are profoundly committed.
“The commitment comes from the understanding that we have a connection with the earth and that is how all Native Americans relate their way of life – by working the earth and being committed to using the spirit of the body and the earth to live, you know?” Boone said. “It keeps the culture alive and it helps people. It’s not just one thing or the other; it’s a whole thing in itself. We’re fortunate that it’s something we can do to help people and share with a lot of people.”
]]>Story Published: Jul 20, 2009
Story Updated: Jul 17, 2009
MARANA, Az. – Virginia Boone and Leonard Marcus are in the fortunate position of living lives in which work, family, social life, health, spirituality, tradition and culture meld together into an integrated, meaningful whole. Life and business partners for the last 15 years, the couple collects wild herbs and other plants in areas of the southwestern states of Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, crafts them into handmade traditional Navajo herbal remedies and sells them at pow wows, Indian markets, conferences and on the Internet . It’s a way of life to which Boone and Marcus are profoundly committed.
“The commitment comes from the understanding that we have a connection with the earth and that is how all Native Americans relate their way of life – by working the earth and being committed to using the spirit of the body and the earth to live, you know?” Boone said. “It keeps the culture alive and it helps people. It’s not just one thing or the other; it’s a whole thing in itself. We’re fortunate that it’s something we can do to help people and share with a lot of people.”
Boone, Navajo, was born near Flagstaff, Ariz., and gained her herbal knowledge from her father, who was raised in the traditional Navajo way, learning the healing crafts from his aunt when he was a child. He later studied under eight other Navajo herbalists gaining knowledge of more than 200 plants and becoming a renowned herbalist himself for 20 years.
“He taught my brothers and sisters and me when we were young, taking us with him to gather plants. We learned to give corn pollen as an offering to the plants and talk to them in a sacred manner. He taught us to be aware of the plant’s energies and that, like people, they each are different and that they possess powerful healing and spiritual qualities.”
Boone continues to learn the healing arts from her 87-year-old aunt, her father’s only living sister. “She has really helped me a lot the last couple of years to keep moving and learning this medicine directly from her in an oral tradition, and that it’s important for other Native people to be inspired by what we do so they can go back to their grandparents or parents and ask these questions. It’s just another way of keeping the culture alive and keeping people aware that the things that keep happening to our earth can’t keep going on, because we do have to survive and it’s important for people to know that this is not just for Native Americans, and it’s not just a matter of marketing the green thing. It’s our belief, our way of life.”
Boone has given each of the salves, balm, teas, oils and creams she produces a Navajo name that states its function. A natural diet tea, for example, is called Tsa halts’aa’i, which mean skinny or thin tea. A salve that’s efficacious in reducing the pain, swelling and itching of insect bites is called Na’ash, Jeeh ii Ch’il, which means spider in Navajo. The ingredients and descriptions of the healing powers of each of the 35 products and ordering information is available on the Web site. Yellow Root Tea, for example, is good for cleansing the liver, kidney, spleen and body organs; Greasewood Cream helps dry, cracked skin, rash and symptoms of eczema and psoriasis.
When Boone first started the business, she sold only the dried herbs she collected, but as time went on people began asking about salves and lotions and other products. “So we had to go and research how to make these products, and the business just grew from those demands of our customers.”
All aspects of production, including pasting labels on tins and sealing them currently take place in a room in the couple’s house in the Sonoran Desert, about 30 miles from Tucson. Virgina Boone is seen here with her 87-year-old aunt, who she continues to learn traditional Navajo medicine from. The couple has not tried deliberately to grow the business, but instead have responded to what they perceive as the business’s organic growth.
“We’re slowly growing with the demand. We’re not trying to put a big manufacturing facility out there or do anything other than growing as the people demand from us, which is always the way it has grown,” Boone said. But the demands of the market are forcing a decision and Medicine of the People is now at a point where expansion is almost unavoidable. The two-person business with part-time help from a single, trusted employee must either grow or remain static. Recently, the company began to wholesale its products.
“For a long time Virginia was adamant that she wouldn’t wholesale. She would protect the medicine with every part of herself and I always went along with that because it’s her family’s medicine, not mine,” said Marcus, whose background is Pottawattamie.
Under the current circumstances, the company is considering conversion to nonprofit status. “That would let us allow in a few people that we trust who have abilities that complement what we’re doing and it would allow us not to sell out to a big corporation, which we never would do anyway, even if they offered us $100 million right now,” Marcus said.
He said they are not against money and technology, if used correctly, but they are more conscious of “where things need to go to fix the earth” and more committed to pursuing that goal than chasing the big bucks.
“We have a really strong belief in the Creator and that there’s a meaning and a story and a bigger picture to this whole thing, and that we’re participating in it. And if our company and we as individuals can be a force in helping, that’s all to the good. We really feel the medicine has given us the form it wanted to go out in.
]]>Photography by Jim Davis
ARIZONA DAILY STAR Tucson, Arizona | Published: 02.10.2006
As a Navajo herbalist and entrepreneur, Virginia Boone has learned to walk a fine line.
In her youth, Boone learned Navajo traditions and language while living with her family off the reservation.
Today she's learning how to balance a career as the head of a traditional Navajo healing herb company, based in Marana, without compromising family and tribal traditions.
"We were taught at a young age about our connection to the Earth and to the plants," said Boone, 50, owner of Medicine of the People LLC., which makes all-natural healing balms and herbal spa products. "We also learned to respect their medicinal qualities."
With her father's teachings, Boone and her siblings spent their childhood and teen years learning about the healing qualities of plants and herbs found throughout Northern Arizona.
]]>Photography by Jim Davis
ARIZONA DAILY STAR Tucson, Arizona | Published: 02.10.2006
As a Navajo herbalist and entrepreneur, Virginia Boone has learned to walk a fine line.
In her youth, Boone learned Navajo traditions and language while living with her family off the reservation.
Today she's learning how to balance a career as the head of a traditional Navajo healing herb company, based in Marana, without compromising family and tribal traditions.
"We were taught at a young age about our connection to the Earth and to the plants," said Boone, 50, owner of Medicine of the People LLC., which makes all-natural healing balms and herbal spa products. "We also learned to respect their medicinal qualities."
With her father's teachings, Boone and her siblings spent their childhood and teen years learning about the healing qualities of plants and herbs found throughout Northern Arizona.
The Boone family lived near the Navajo Army Depot, now known as Camp Navajo, in Bellemont, outside Flagstaff. Weekend visits and summer vacations were spent with relatives on the Navajo Reservation.
Though traditions were emphasized, education was also highly regarded in the Boone household.
"The idea was to remain modern and educated. But my mom and dad were adamant about learning Navajo teachings and beliefs," Boone said. "Language was key. That was the one thing my parents did not want us to lose."
Boone has parlayed a long-held family tradition into selling a line of products that include sage-lavender massage oils, peppermint foot balms, conditioning hair oils, white-sage creams and sore-joint salves.
The products are sold at local guest ranches, museums, cultural centers and regional gift shops, including a few at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix.
Using herbs and plants found on the Navajo Reservation, Boone, along with her partner Leonard Marcus, create the products at their home.
The company incorporated in 2004.
Product growth started to pick up last summer, due in part to a new marketing plan, redesigned packaging and an updated Web site, which contributed to increased orders in the last year.
"It can be hard to find quality products that are made by Native Americans and are produced in Arizona," said Lynn Bullock, a bookstore manager at the Heard Museum Shop and Bookstore, 2301 N. Central Ave., in Phoenix.
The shop stocks most of the Medicine of the People products.
"The products are selling well and we reorder quite often. It's been very successful."
After meeting through a family acquaintance in 1993, Boone and Marcus decided to try a relationship and started to sell some herbs at weekend powwows ? intertribal cultural fairs ? and arts and crafts fairs.
Sales started with various teas and dried herbs that could be used to help treat skin problems, backaches, stomach problems and to relieve arthritis pain.
"We weren't sure how we were going to do," Boone said.
"But there was this energy around us," Marcus said. "We sold out fast, and we thought, 'We can actually do this.' "
By emphasizing socially responsible behavior and supporting various cultural beliefs, Boone and Marcus said having a business that does not harm the environment or compromise their traditional beliefs is possible.
Becoming a major corporation is not part of the plan, Marcus said.
The couple still sells at regional powwows and art shows throughout the Southwest.
"We're still holding onto those grass roots." said Marcus. "But we have to grow. It's important to keep that balance and not stray from our vision."
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