Hupa medicine

The Hupa call themselves Natinixwe, 'the people of the place where the trails return'. They live in Hoopa Valley on the Trinity, just above where it flows into the Klamath, in northwestern California. Their language is Athabaskan, related to languages in Alaska and Canada and to those of the Diné and the Apache. According to the historical record they came from the north around the year 1000. Their cedar-plank houses, their canoes and their basket hats resemble those of the northern peoples; the sweat house and acorn bread they took over from their Californian neighbours.

Until the gold rush of 1849 the Hupa had little contact with outsiders. Then miners came into the valley. In 1864 the government signed a treaty recognising the land of the Hupa, and the Hoopa Valley Reservation was created. So the Hupa are among the few Californian peoples who were never driven from their land.

The first being in their stories is Yimantuwinyai. He travelled through the world before there were people, and made many things as they are now. When a jealous man shot him in the mouth with a poisoned arrow, he rolled about in a frenzy until he came to his senses under a California bay laurel. On that spot a herb grew, Scouler's St John's wort, which he put in his mouth and made a medicine. Later he woke with a swollen belly, saw redwood sorrel growing, chewed it and was cured. 'This plant will be a medicine for the people,' he said. Then he went across the ocean to the north and said to his grandmother: 'I have made the medicines for the people.'

A Hupa medicine consists of a herb and a formula. The formula tells of a case from the first times. Someone fell gravely ill or came into distress. The herb was sought and found, and the patient recovered. Then that first one decided that the people still to come would have a remedy for the same misfortune, and that his deeds would be told whenever anyone used it.

A healer looks for the herb without drinking water that day. When he finds it, he recites the formula. Then he asks the originator of the remedy for help, and gives the answer in another voice. Only then is the remedy used, internally, externally or as steam.

There are medicines for far more than illness: for a mother at childbirth, for a baby, for crossing the river at high water, for hunting, fishing, basket-making and gambling, and to ward off misfortune.

Goddard distinguished three kinds of healers. The dancing doctor determines what is wrong with someone, what the cause is and what must be done. The sucking doctor, kitetau, sucks the 'pain' out of the body. Besides them there are the medicine makers, who learned one or more formulas from their parents or family. Whoever wanted to become a doctor had to fast and dance for months under an old doctor, without water, with only acorn soup as food, until the power came. The fee was paid in advance, and had to be returned if the patient died within a year.

The Brush Dance is a medicine dance for a child who is sick or weak, or for a family that has already lost children. In the formula an old woman lives in the middle of the world with her granddaughter. The granddaughter has a baby, which is already sick before birth. On her grandmother's word the young mother looks for a remedy, finds wild ginger and steams the child with it. Then she looks for a herb to put in the baby's mouth. She follows a floating basket cup along the rivers to the sea, until an old woman holds it up to the sky and bark of ponderosa pine falls into it.

The woman who leads the dance rises at dawn and knocks at the south, north and west corners of the house, to ask the people of the underworld to give back the child's soul. She paints her face, wrists, shoulders, ankles, thighs and breast black. With a girl she looks for the bark of ponderosa pine and pitch wood of Douglas fir, without eating or drinking. In the evening she boils the bark and bathes the child, waves burning pitch sticks over it and burns incense root. Then the dancers come in, holding brush before their faces, and dance until morning. On the third day it all happens again, with even more people.

The formulas belonged to families and were passed on in Hupa. The linguist Pliny Earle Goddard lived in Hoopa Valley as a missionary at the end of the nineteenth century and wrote them down with the people who knew them. In Life and Culture of the Hupa (1903) he described daily life, in Hupa Texts (1904) the stories and formulas, with the Hupa text and a translation.

Goddard called most remedies 'strong-scented plants' that seemed meant to attract the attention of a person or spirit rather than to cure the body. That says more about his view than about the tradition itself, in which herb, word and action belong together.

There is now a Hupa dictionary. In 2024 Verdena Parker was the last person who spoke Hupa as a first language, but dozens of others know some of it, and it is being learned again.

The Hoopa Valley Tribe has more than three thousand members, and the reservation covers more than 360 square kilometres. The town of Hoopa lies entirely on the reservation. Among the Hupa and their neighbours the Yurok, the Jump Dance and the Brush Dance are still part of the ceremonies.

The salmon of the Klamath and the Trinity are food and life to the Hupa. With the Yurok, the Karuk and other peoples they fought lawsuits and campaigns against dams and for enough water. In 2017 the Hoopa Valley Tribe and other tribes won a case about a disease among young salmon. In 2023 and 2024 four large dams on the Klamath were removed.

The Hupa live in a valley of river, oak woods and conifer forests. The acorn of the tanoak was the staple food: pounded into meal, leached and cooked into soup, bread or cakes. The bark of ponderosa pine goes into the bath of the Brush Dance, and pitch wood of Douglas fir is burned with it.

Wild ginger is used to steam a baby and, in one story, to lure deer. Incense root is put in the fire or held in the hand in many formulas, and the priest of the Jump Dance strews its powder over the dance ground. The fragrant California bay laurel stands in the stories where Yimantuwinyai came to and where fires are built.

For their baskets the Hupa use, among other things, beargrass and dyed fern fronds of Woodwardia.

The formulas belong to the families who know them. Goddard wrote them down, but that does not make them common property. Here we only tell what is known about the formulas in general, and do not give them in full. Love medicines, which Goddard also mentions, we leave out.

The ceremonies of the Hupa, such as the Jump Dance and the Brush Dance, are prayers, not performances.

Incense root is an umbellifer, like the deadly water hemlock. Never take a wild umbellifer without certainty about the species.