Cherokee medicine

The Cherokee call themselves Aniyvwiya, 'the real people', or Tsalagi. They lived in a large area of the southern Appalachians, in what are now North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Virginia. Their towns lay along rivers such as the Oconaluftee, the Tuckasegee and the Little Tennessee. The mother town was Kituwah, on the Tuckasegee, and one of the old names of the people is Ani-Kituwah, 'the people of Kituwah'.

Around 1821 Sequoyah devised a writing system for Cherokee, and within a few years thousands of Cherokee could read and write. In 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix appeared, the first Indigenous newspaper in North America. Shortly afterwards, with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and a treaty most Cherokee had never accepted, they were driven from their land. In 1838 and 1839 the US Army drove them to Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. On that Trail of Tears perhaps four thousand died, nearly a fifth of the people. A few hundred hid in the mountains or were allowed to stay; from them came the Eastern Band.

At the end of the 1880s the ethnologist James Mooney worked among the Eastern Band. From the healer Ayunini, Swimmer, and others he received notebooks of sacred formulas, written in Sequoyah's syllabary. He published them in 1891 and the stories in 1900. A century later J. T. Garrett, himself a member of the Eastern Band and for years director of the Cherokee hospital, wrote down what elders had taught him about the plants.

The old story of the origin of disease and medicine is in Mooney. When people grew too numerous and killed the animals without respect, the animals met in council. The bears wanted to shoot back, but their claws caught in the bowstring. The deer decided that whoever killed a deer without asking pardon would get rheumatism. The snakes, fish, birds and insects devised many more diseases. When the plants heard this, they decided to help people: each plant offered a cure for one of those diseases. When a healer does not know what to use, the spirits of the plants show him.

Health is balance, with the people around you, with the animals and plants and with the world. Illness can come from the body, but also from a broken rule, a dream, an evil spirit or someone who wishes you harm. The numbers four and seven are sacred: there are four directions, and seven when above, below and the centre are added, and there are seven clans. A river is called Long Man, and 'going to water', at sunrise, cleanses and blesses at important moments of life.

In his book Garrett arranges the plants by the four directions. The east stands for heart, spirit and family, the south for the skin and the play of the child, the west for the inside of the body and strength, and the north for breath, calm and the mind. He writes himself that this is his own interpretation of what he learned.

A healer works with formulas: words that are spoken or sung, often four or seven times, together with a remedy of plants. Mooney noted that a healer looking for a plant passes by the first three he sees and only takes the fourth, and that he leaves a bead in the hole from which he took the root. A remedy usually consists of several plants, and in bark the side facing east is the strongest. When healing, a healer often blows the remedy onto the body through a reed, or lightly scratches the skin with thorns or a comb of teeth and rubs the remedy into the scratches.

In 1975 Hamel and Chiltoskey collected the uses of hundreds of plants, from elders in the communities and from older sources. Yellowroot is chewed for a sore mouth and throat. Wild cherry goes into cough medicine and is used for fever, dogwood for headache and fever, and ginseng as a tonic. Plantain goes on burns and stings, jewelweed on poison ivy rash, and the resin of the sweetgum into an ointment for wounds. Coughs are treated with rabbit tobacco. Sassafras and spicebush are spring drinks, and ramps a spring green.

Garrett also mentions the Medicine Society, a society of healers who met to share formulas and which, according to him, ended around 1920, and he tells stories that belong to plants. Ant discovers the sweet bark of the wild cherry. A boy in love hides behind hearts-a-bustin'. And Little Butterfly shows people the butterfly weed for coughs.

The formulas were written in Sequoyah's syllabary and kept in family notebooks. Mooney published The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees in 1891, and in 1932, with Frans Olbrechts, Swimmer's whole notebook appeared. Myths of the Cherokee (1900) contains the stories, such as the one about the origin of disease and medicine and the one about the first fire. Many Cherokee distrusted Mooney, because they felt the knowledge did not belong in Washington. Garrett writes that his older teachers asked him not to write anything down, and that he therefore leaves out the sacred formulas.

In 1975 Paul Hamel and Mary Chiltoskey published Cherokee Plants and Their Uses: A 400 Year History, with Cherokee names and the uses of hundreds of plants. Mary Chiltoskey taught at the high school in Cherokee and was married to the carver Goingback Chiltoskey. The book is still the main source on Cherokee plants. In 2003 Garrett's The Cherokee Herbal appeared, with stories, uses according to elders and his arrangement by the four directions.

There are three recognised Cherokee tribes. The Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, with hundreds of thousands of citizens, is one of the largest tribes in the United States. The United Keetoowah Band, also in Oklahoma, has more than fourteen thousand members, as does the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina. Cherokee is still spoken, but by fewer and fewer people. The Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band have schools where children are taught entirely in Cherokee.

Healers still work, within their families, and the Green Corn ceremony and the stomp dances are held. In the 1980s, as director of the Cherokee hospital, Garrett helped set up a programme through which patients could also see a traditional healer.

Since 2006 the Cherokee Nation has had a seed bank of heirloom crops: corn, beans, squash, gourds, tobacco and plants for ceremonies, and in 2025 it handed out nearly ten thousand packets of seed to citizens. Through the RTCAR programme the Eastern Band works to restore river cane, white oak and dye plants, so that basket makers, potters and carvers keep enough material.

The Cherokee lived in one of the richest forests of the temperate world, the mountains and valleys of the southern Appalachians and the Great Smoky Mountains. There grow tulip trees, chestnuts, oaks, hemlocks and sycamores, and in the understorey ginseng, goldenseal, bloodroot, black cohosh and trillium.

The blooming of the dogwood marked the start of the planting season. The Three Sisters, corn, beans and squash, were the staple food, and corn is the sacred plant of Selu, the Corn Mother. In the story of the first fire the Thunder Beings set a hollow sycamore alight, and Water Spider fetches the fire in a little basket on her back.

The Cherokee weave baskets of river cane and split white oak, dyed with bloodroot and black walnut. Less than two percent of the river cane that once grew remains. Ginseng and goldenseal are dug so much in the wild that they are endangered.

The sacred formulas, love and hunting medicine and the remedies to influence someone belong to the families who keep them. Garrett deliberately leaves them out, at the request of his teachers, and so do we. That Mooney published them does not make them common property.

We give no preparation for poisonous plants such as mayapple, pokeweed, bloodroot, water hemlock, wild tobacco and Veratrum, nor for hearts-a-bustin', devil's walking stick and Indian physic. Garrett also mentions chaparral, foxglove, belladonna and comfrey; their risks are too great to recommend them.

Do not dig up ginseng, goldenseal, Adam and Eve root or lady's slipper in the wild. In the Great Smoky Mountains it is forbidden to collect plants.