Haudenosaunee medicine

The Haudenosaunee, 'the people of the longhouse', are also known as the Iroquois. Originally they were five nations in what is now New York State. From east to west these were the Mohawk (Kanien'kehá:ka), the 'keepers of the eastern door', the Oneida, the Onondaga, the 'firekeepers' with whom the council met, the Cayuga and the Seneca, the 'keepers of the western door'. Early in the eighteenth century the Tuscarora from the south joined them, and since then people speak of the Six Nations.

According to tradition, the Peacemaker and his spokesman Hiawatha brought the divided peoples to peace under the Great Law of Peace. The white pine became the symbol of the league: the Tree of Peace, under which the weapons were buried. Archaeologists date the founding of the league to somewhere between 1400 and 1600.

The Haudenosaunee lived in villages of longhouses covered with the bark of the elm. Families were matrilineal: you belonged to your mother's clan, and the eldest women of a clan chose the chiefs and could also remove them. Women worked the fields of corn, beans and squash, the Three Sisters. Men hunted, fished and went to war.

As early as the winter of 1535 to 1536, Jacques Cartier's crew near present-day Quebec recovered from scurvy with an infusion of annedda, an evergreen tree the Indigenous inhabitants showed them. Those inhabitants were St. Lawrence Iroquoians, related to the Five Nations but a different people, who later disappeared.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Haudenosaunee controlled a large territory and played the Dutch, French and English off against each other. In the American War of Independence most nations sided with the British. In 1779 the army of Sullivan and Clinton destroyed dozens of villages and fields. Many Haudenosaunee then moved to Canada, among other places to the Grand River in Ontario; others stayed on reservations in New York.

Reservation life brought hard times, with drunkenness, quarrels and accusations of witchcraft. In 1799 the Seneca Handsome Lake had visions. His teaching, the Gaiwiio or Good Word, forbade alcohol, witchcraft, love medicines and abortion and gave the old ceremonies a new place. From it grew the Longhouse religion, which still exists.

In the creation story, Sky Woman falls from the world above the sky through a hole beside the Tree of Light. Birds catch her and set her down on the back of a great turtle. A muskrat dives to the bottom of the primal sea and brings up mud, and from that mud grows the earth, which keeps expanding as Sky Woman walks over it. Her daughter gives birth to twins. The Good-Minded One, also called Sapling or the Creator, makes everything that helps people. His brother Flint makes what harms: troublesome animals, ice, storms, disease and death. From the mother's grave grow corn, beans and squash, and according to other tellers strawberries and medicinal plants. When people neglected their ceremonies and disease went unchecked, the Creator gave them medicinal herbs. He added that only a few people would ever know all their names and uses.

Everything has its own power, orenda. That power can heal and can harm. The word translated into English as 'medicine' therefore means more than a remedy: it is the use of power to restore something, to protect it or, on the contrary, to disturb it. There are also love medicines, hunting medicines, medicines for selling baskets and medicines for rain. Health is balance, in a person and in the world around them. Body and mind are not separated.

According to the anthropologist James Herrick, the Haudenosaunee saw four causes of illness, which overlap. The first is breaking the rules the Creator gave: performing a ritual wrongly, skipping a feast for the dead or neglecting a powerful object. The second is an unfulfilled wish of the soul. What someone dreams must be fulfilled, or they fall ill; Jesuits already described this in the seventeenth century. The third is contact with something that is 'otkon', a dangerous power: a corpse, menstrual blood, certain animals or a powerful charm. The fourth is witchcraft: someone with knowledge of power who wishes you harm. Someone with a cough or fever thinks of an ordinary remedy first. Only when the complaint persists or gets worse do people look for a deeper cause.

Every gathering opens with the Thanksgiving Address, the words that come before all else. In it the speaker thanks, in a fixed order, the people, the earth, the water, the fish, the plants, the food plants, the medicine herbs, the animals, the trees, the birds, the four winds, the Thunderers, the sun, Grandmother Moon, the stars, the teachers and finally the Creator. According to Herrick, a plant has more power the more it gives to people. The Three Sisters come first. Then come the maple and the sunflower, then the pine and the hemlock, which stay green and so escape the winter. Next come the strawberry and the raspberry, the elm and the basswood, and only then the herbs. Every plant has a male and a female. Plants of the same kind growing side by side are 'married'.

Almost everyone knows a few home remedies, and older relatives keep the family's knowledge. Besides them there are herbalists. Someone who proves especially good at finding causes becomes a fortune-teller. Fortune-tellers read tea leaves, water or dreams, and say whether the sick person needs a ceremony, a new friend or membership of a medicine society. Knowledge was traditionally bought, not simply shared. A Seneca healer told the anthropologist William Fenton in 1938 that he could not name his medicines: whoever sells or gives away his recipes loses them.

When gathering, the collector speaks to the plants. By the first plant of a kind he scatters tobacco, Indigenous tobacco, and says what the medicine is for and for whom. He leaves that first plant standing and takes the next. Many healers gather only in the morning, because the dead walk about in the afternoon, and only before the fireflies appear in spring. Bark is often taken from the east side of a tree, where the sun rises. Whoever needs an emetic scrapes the bark upwards; for a laxative he scrapes downwards. According to several healers, plants can hide or move, and laugh at whoever seeks them with the wrong intentions.

In spring and autumn many people take a cleansing medicine, often an emetic, to come through the summer or the winter in good health. A healer at Akwesasne compared it in 1973 to the oil and antifreeze you put in your car for each season. Lacrosse players and runners also drank an emetic before a match.

When herbs do not help, healing becomes a matter for the community. At the yearly ceremonies, such as Midwinter, the Maple Ceremony, the Planting Ceremony, the Strawberry Ceremony and the Green Corn Ceremony, people give thanks and dreams are guessed and fulfilled. Medicine societies heal members and the sick. The best known is the False Face society, whose masks are carved from a living tree, usually a basswood. There are also the Husk Faces, the Little Water society, the Bear, Otter and Eagle societies, and that of the Little People. Whoever has been cured by a society often becomes a member. Water too counts as a medicine: for some remedies it is dipped from a stream in the direction of the current.

The knowledge is oral. In the seventeenth century Jesuits described dream interpretation and healing in their yearly reports, the Jesuit Relations. In 1851 Lewis Henry Morgan wrote League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, Iroquois, with the help of the Seneca Ely S. Parker. Parker's grandnephew Arthur C. Parker, himself of Seneca descent, described the uses of maize and other food plants (1910) and the teaching of Handsome Lake (1913).

Most plant knowledge was recorded in the twentieth century. The Canadian ethnologist Frederick W. Waugh noted hundreds of uses from older herbalists in Ontario, Quebec and New York between 1912 and 1915. William N. Fenton did the same between 1933 and 1942, mainly among the Seneca. He later wrote about the False Faces (1987) and the Little Water Medicine (1979).

In 1977 James W. Herrick wrote a dissertation on Iroquois medical botany, helped by Fenton and the botanist Stanley Smith. He set Waugh's and Fenton's notes beside what healers at Akwesasne, Tonawanda and Allegany told him in the 1970s. In 1995 the work appeared as Iroquois Medical Botany, edited by the archaeologist Dean Snow. The book describes 454 plant species with their names, uses and preparations, and the world of thought they belong to. Herrick noticed that over the twentieth century healers said less and less about causes and more and more only about complaints. That came partly from distrust of anthropologists and partly from the old rule that knowledge may not simply be shared.

There was also exchange with European medicine. In Buffalo stood the large clinic of Dr Ray Vaughn Pierce, who according to Herrick bought roots from Haudenosaunee collectors, such as stoneroot and purple-stem angelica. His home medical adviser of 1875 found its way to the reservations, and English disease names such as 'consumption' came into use with meanings of their own.

Haudenosaunee now live on reservations and territories in New York, Ontario, Quebec and Wisconsin, and in the cities beyond. Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario is the largest community. Others include Akwesasne, Kahnawake, Onondaga, Tonawanda and the Seneca reservations of Allegany and Cattaraugus. The Grand Council of the league still meets at Onondaga.

In the longhouses the ceremonies of the yearly cycle are held and the teaching of Handsome Lake is recited. Children learn the Thanksgiving Address, also at school, and the languages are being passed on again in language nests and immersion schools. Lacrosse, which counts as the Creator's game and can also be played as medicine, is played internationally by a team of their own, the Haudenosaunee Nationals.

Traditional healers work alongside regular healthcare, and plant knowledge is passed on within families and communities. At the same time plants are under pressure. Since 2002 the emerald ash borer has been killing almost every ash in North America, including the black ash, whose wood basket makers split. They are now collecting seed to keep the tree for the future. The American chestnut, once an important food tree, almost entirely disappeared in the twentieth century because of a fungus. Ginseng, goldenseal and ramps are overharvested in the wild.

Museums have returned many masks and other sacred objects, and this is still going on.

The Haudenosaunee use plants of forest, open field, riverbank and marsh. The Three Sisters, corn, beans and squash, are 'our mothers' and are thanked with ceremonies of their own. The maple gets a ceremony when the sap begins to run, and so does the strawberry, the first fruit of the year. The masks are 'fed' with oil of the sunflower. Indigenous tobacco carries the words to the Sky World with its smoke.

Evergreen trees count as powerful. The white pine is the Tree of Peace. Tea of hemlock, balsam fir and white cedar brings on a sweat in a cold. From slippery elm, wild cherry, witch hazel and sumac the bark is used. Black walnut, hickory and chestnut gave nuts.

Well-known herbs are bloodroot, goldenseal, goldthread for a sore mouth, ginseng, wild ginger for fever, black cohosh for rheumatism and boneset for fever and broken bones, like the root of bellwort. Wild sarsaparilla, spikenard, pipsissewa and wintergreen belong here too, as do partridgeberry at a birth and Joe-Pye weed after it. Spicebush serves for colds, bergamot for fever, and mint and catnip for children's bellyache. Self-heal, plantain, yarrow and mullein are used for many complaints.

Some plants are especially powerful or dangerous. The pitcher plant catches insects and is therefore a medicine to attract, for love and for selling baskets. The yellow pond-lily keeps witches away. Jack-in-the-pulpit must not lie in the house with other medicines. Skunk cabbage, mayapple, Indian tobacco and blue flag are strong too. Spotted water hemlock is so poisonous that it was known as the suicide plant.

Plants from elsewhere were added as well, such as burdock, dandelion, elecampane and coltsfoot. Herrick sees this openness to new remedies as a feature of the tradition itself.

The medicine societies are closed. In 1995 the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee forbade the sale and exhibition of medicine masks, and also the showing of pictures of them. According to the Council, the image of a mask is sacred and meant only for the purpose for which it was made. That is why there are no pictures of masks here, and we describe the societies only in broad outline. We do not give the composition of the Little Water Medicine. Witchcraft, love medicines and medicines to harm someone are mentioned only as part of the thinking about illness, without recipes.

Much of the knowledge in this story was written down by outsiders: Waugh, Fenton, Herrick. It belongs to the healers and families who shared it, and to their communities. They decide for themselves what is shared. Healers themselves said that knowledge can lose its power if it is sold or given away.

Some plants are poisonous. For spotted water hemlock, green false hellebore (Veratrum viride) and jack-in-the-pulpit we give no preparation on purpose. Never take a wild plant of the carrot family: angelica and water hemlock look alike, and a mistake can be fatal.

Buy ginseng, goldenseal and ramps only cultivated, leave trillium and pitcher plant standing, and for baskets of black ash choose makers from the communities themselves.