Indian Uses Of Native Plants

Healing gardens: The North Fork's first pharmacies

Before there was your family pharmacist, and long before chain drug stores popped up all over, aches and ills were addressed by potions and poultices made from North Fork plants.

Nancy Smith of Mattituck, a master gardener for 30 years, has long been fascinated by the role native plants played in the medicine of the Native Americans whose village once stood on the land that’s now home to the Mattituck-Laurel Historical Society.

Five years ago, the historical society was considering planting a Victorian herb garden, but when members of its board sought Ms. Smith’s advice, she instead suggested a garden that focused on Native Americans’ healing plants.

“Indians didn’t just sit around with a toothache or a bleeding wound and wait for the drugstore to open,” she said on a recent afternoon while looking over the society’s healing garden she created on the society’s grounds.

“Most pharmaceuticals are based on plants from South America, but we don’t realize what was here,” Ms. Smith said. There were few doctors among the colonists, because they couldn’t make money in the New World, so settlers turned to Native American medicine men for advice on how to cure their ailments.

Ms. Smith, who was a science teacher for 33 years, scoured rare seed catalogues and local roadsides looking for the perennial plants that make up the garden.

Some, like the purple coneflower, whose root contains immune system-boosting echinacea, have been selectively bred to produce a larger, more formidable flower than the true genetic original. Ms. Smith had looked for the plant as it grew in the wild.

She found seeds for the wild plant in a catalogue from North Carolina. After two years, though, the plant she grew from that seed has yet to flower.

Native strawberries, high in vitamin C, were also much smaller and harder to find than their modern counterparts. After years of encouragement, they’re beginning now to spread through the garden.

While planning the garden, there were many moments when Ms. Smith asked her husband to pull the car over to the side of the road, having spotted a plant she’d been looking for. That was the case with mullein, a large roadside plant with leathery leaves and a tall stem full of yellow seeds.

Mullein is full of essential oil, and its leaves are so hefty and textured that Native Americans used them to line their moccasins. The plant was also known as “Quaker Rouge,” because Quaker women, whose beliefs included a prohibition on makeup, would rub the leaves on their cheeks for a ruddy, healthy look.

Peyote as Medicine: The Power of Native Plants to Heal « ::Native ...

Most people in the United States are unaware of what an important role plants play in the field of medicine. Plants are the original source material for nearly 40% of all pharmaceutical remedies in the United States. In other words, there are prescription and over-the-counter drugs on the market right now that either contain plant-derived materials, or synthesized materials from agents that were originally derived from plants.

You’ve probably taken plant derived medicine at some point in your lifetime. There are numerous examples of how plants have been used medicinally via western science and pharmaceutical companies. Pseudoephedrine, a nasal and sinus decongestant and stimulant found in many over-the-counter cold and flu medications, was originally derived from the ephedra plant species. The cancer drug Taxol is derived from a plant alkaloid found in the Yew Tree. Quinine, the anti-malarial drug, was originally discovered in the bark of a cinchona tree. It was first used by the Quechua native people of Bolivia and Peru before being taken back to Europe by the Jesuits.

Culturally and traditionally, indigenous people have an especially close relationship with plants. Even today, roughly 80% of the world’s population still employs herbs as primary medicines. Although, tragically, because of the federal government’s policy of termination and assimilation of native people in this country and the suppression of cultural and spiritual beliefs that followed, a lot of American Indian traditional plant knowledge has been lost. Natives are fighting to protect and preserve their respective native languages. In a similar manner, we must now fight to protect and preserve ancestral knowledge about the medicinal uses of native plants. Like the buffalo and every other wild thing that lives and grows, native plants rooted in Ina Maka (Mother Earth) are part of our identity as native people. Without the flowering stick, the sacred hoop of life is incomplete and cannot be healed.

Peyote grows in northern and central portions of Mexico, and in parts of America’s extreme southwest. Native peoples have been ingesting peyote as a part of spiritual ceremonies for thousands of years. At present, the legal use of the peyote in the United States is now restricted to use in rituals and ceremonies performed within the Native American Church.

Under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the traditional religious use of peyote as a sacrament within the Native American Church was legalized; however, the transportation, possession, and use of peyote by unauthorized parties for use other than bona fide traditional ceremonial purposes is strictly prohibited. The Drug Enforcement Administration is responsible for the regulation and registration of persons who cultivate, harvest and distribute peyote under the law. State and local laws are also applicable.

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