THE PLANT’S LACY, FERNLIKE FRONDS WERE just starting to yellow, one branch standing out against an otherwise green background on a high plateau in southwestern Colorado. Kelly Kindscher, an ethnobotanist with the Kansas Biological Survey who studies culturally significant plants around the Southwest, stomped a shovel into the ground around the base of the plant, called oshá. The blade broke through its rhizomes, pieces of a root system that fans out through the soil. He shook loose the dirt clinging to the roots’ nooks and slipped a finger into the cluster to isolate a single strand, showing white marrow through its dark, hardened exterior. An astringent smell wafted from the roots. Kindscher, 65, fiddled with the plant while attempting to explain the questions that surround it, including who can and should benefit from its healing properties. For the past decade, Kindscher has been studying oshá, trying to supply data for the search for answers.
Oshá resembles a tall, leggy version of parsley. In the Centennial State, the plant—also known as bear root and Colorado cough root, among other names—grows primarily in the Four Corners region, between 9,000 and 11,000 feet in elevation, but its habitat ranges from northern Mexico’s mountains to the central Rockies. I caught up with Kindscher on an afternoon in late summer, when the plant’s leaves yellow as it funnels its energy back into its roots for winter.
It’s this time of the year that the treasured roots—often used to ease a variety of ailments, including colds, sore throats, indigestion, and asthma—are dug up by harvesters. Those pickers include members of several Native American tribes that consider oshá sacred and use it as medicine; traditional Hispanic healers in southern Colorado and New Mexico; and those who wish to gather it for personal use or to sell to herbal product companies. Because oshá is almost impossible for farmers to cultivate in mass quantities, it must be “wildcrafted,” or harvested from the woods. The U.S. Forest Service, the federal agency that oversees the bulk of oshá habitat (although it can sometimes be found on private land), does not issue permits for commercial collection of oshá in its Rocky Mountain or Southwestern regions. Yet it’s still somehow widely available to order online or purchase at herbal shops, where the knot of roots in Kindscher’s hand would sell for roughly $200 per pound.
“It’s hush-hush where any company gets its herbal products with oshá from,” Kindscher says,
