Phyllis Hogan’s Winter Sun

Reverence and Reciprocity

Flagstaff, Arizona · By Ashley Rood and Rose Houk

Phyllis Hogan lives life according to her own script. Applied ethnobotanist-trader, mother-community leader, mentor-scholar, activist-musician – these are the many roles she assumes as part of her philosophy of reverence and reciprocity.

Phyllis’s business, Winter Sun Trading Company, is in a historic building in downtown Flagstaff, Arizona. Winter Sun is a modern Southwest trading post, filled with treasures and tinctures collected from local artisans, wildcrafters, and healers. Phyllis is in constant motion, her long full braid and flowing skirt a blur as she simultaneously chats with customers and negotiates the small daily tribulations of a retail shop. In the front of Winter Sun, walls are hung with a beautiful collection of traditional Hopi katsina carvings, glass-topped cases are filled with silver jewelry, and yucca baskets hold bundles of sagebrush. In the back, a smaller, low-ceilinged room – filled with herbs, spices, teas, soaps, and salves – has the feel of a century-old apothecary shop.

The impetus for Phyllis’s life’s work came more than thirty years ago, when she made her first trip to the Hopi Reservation in 1971. She became close friends with Herbert, a Hopi medicine man, and read Alfred Whiting’s Ethnobotany of the Hopi. In correspondence, Whiting suggested she undertake a study comparing Navajo and Hopi plant-gathering strategies. She began a long process of teaching herself about ethnobotany.

Then, for the next four years, she spent time with her two young daughters in tow “just looking around” the Sonoran Desert, meeting like-minded people, and at times delivering herbs to the Hopi. Disillusioned with conventional medicine, she was searching for natural alternatives for her daughters’ usual childhood ailments. That search led her to a small Mexican curio and traditional herb store in Coolidge, Arizona, owned by Señora Marion Valencia. One day Phyllis waited patiently at the screen door with her two daughters in hand. Señora Valencia was an herbalist and curandera, or traditional healer, and she was wary of strangers. But she opened the door out of curiosity. At that moment a long friendship began.

As Phyllis watched and learned about medicinal plants from Señora Valencia, she wondered who would document this traditional knowledge. Her conviction that she could do so led her to open her own store first in Coolidge in 1976, then in Flagstaff in 1978, and a year later on Route 66 in downtown Flagstaff. Her contact with the Navajo began here, especially with medicine man Sam Boone, Sr. “It all spiraled from there,” she recalls.

Phyllis approaches ethnobotany from two angles: practice and reciprocity. Applied ethnobotany is the practice end of things. “I wanted to document the plants and their uses,” she says, “and the only way to do that is to use plants and get involved in them.” Reciprocity takes place in her Flagstaff store, where the trust between her and Native American and Hispanic people has developed, and where she offers to the community an exceptional selection of medicinal herbs.

This combination of practice and reciprocity has taken Phyllis down a unique path. She has been granted the rare honor of being invited into indigenous communities, and of having people from those communities come to her as well. Collecting herbs with native people, she has seen how they respect the land, and in turn how respect must be accorded the plants themselves. “I learned never to take anything without respect and asking,” she notes. When she gathers, she observes an age-old tradition of honoring the plant by making the proper prayers and offering pollen, cornmeal, or tobacco. She notes that the practice also requires proper preparation, such as dressing appropriately and disregarding worldly concerns.

The places where Phyllis gathers growing things are to her “wild gardens,” some of which have been tended for hundreds of years by particular clans. Many of them are in or near towns or cities. The places where the plants grow are as important as the plants themselves, and the sites are carefully guarded because they are sacred . “That’s what is being lost,” Phyllis asserts, “because the information about the significance of the sites is not being passed on to new generations.” She expresses a profound sense of responsibility toward the knowledge she’s been granted. And even though she is non-Indian, she’s trusted “because I’ve been in place so long. That’s what reciprocity is.”

Through the years, Phyllis has seen her profession gain respect in wider circles; it’s now nearly mainstream, not a cause out on the fringe. She expresses pride that she has remained independent in her research, and has had the persistence to prove that there is stability and honor in the work. Her measure of success after so many years is straightforward. She explains, “The people I started working with thirty years ago are still my friends, and their grandchildren now are listening to my stories.”

In addition to her full-time responsibilities as proprietor of Winter Sun, Phyllis, with Michael Moore and the Sam Boone, Sr. family, founded the Arizona Ethnobotanical Research Association. The nonprofit association was established in 1983 to document and preserve traditional plant knowledge. It has expanded over the past two decades to include multicultural and bilingual regional education programs, an heirloom seed bank, and an annual conference.

Phyllis is always on the go. She is advising the new Black Mesa Water Coalition, building her own straw-bale home, and teaching at the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine. Perhaps most important, she has passed down her passion for traditional medicine and community to her two daughters, DeeAnn and Denise Tracy. The sisters are both graduates of the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine and each has created her own original, all-natural skin care line, Peak Scents and Super Salve.

Amid the chaos of Phyllis’s many ventures is this constant: she thrives on community. Her philosophy can be wrapped up in the term “bioregionalism,” which connects a range of community conceptions from the complexity of its plants to scientific appreciation, experiential understanding, reverence, and most important, the act of reciprocity. She extends this philosophy into her work and her life, rewriting the script joyfully and respectfully every step of the way.

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This is one of many stories from the Four Corners region that were printed in A New Plateau: Sustaining the Lands and Peoples of Canyon Country, edited by Peter Friederici and Rose Houk. This book was a project of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and Renewing the Countryside, with assistance from the Museum of Northern Arizona. A New Plateau can be purchased at the Renewing the Countryside online bookstore or the Northern Arizona University bookstore, or request it at your local bookstore.