Kwakwaka'wakw medicine

The Kwakwaka'wakw are 'the people who speak Kwak'wala'. They live on northern Vancouver Island, on the islands nearby and on the coast of British Columbia opposite. The old name Kwakiutl comes from Kwagu'ł, a single community at Fort Rupert where Franz Boas did most of his work; the name was later wrongly applied to all Kwak'wala speakers and even to their neighbours.

Each nation has its own clans, chiefs and stories. Families, the na'mima, have hereditary ranks, names, songs and dances, which are shown and confirmed at a potlatch. At such a feast the host gives away a great deal to the guests; whoever gives more gains more standing. Copper plates also had great value.

After the first contact with Europeans in 1792 came the diseases. Between 1830 and 1880 the number of Kwakwaka'wakw fell by three quarters; the smallpox epidemic of 1862 alone killed more than half. In 1885 Canada banned the potlatch, on pain of prison. The feasts went on in secret. In enforcing the ban, hundreds of masks and other ceremonial objects were confiscated. Only in 1951 was the ban dropped. Children had to go to boarding schools, where Kwak'wala was forbidden.

Whoever goes to fetch a plant as medicine seeks it out, sits down beside it and speaks to it before taking anything. He calls it 'Supernatural One', 'Long-Life-Maker', 'Healing-Woman', 'Life-Maker' or 'Supernatural Power of the Ground'. He says who is ill and why, and asks whether it will 'have mercy' and go to help. The sick person prays again, with the remedy in hand or the bowl in front of them.

Plants sometimes work together. A woman who had dug western dock told the roots that they would not cure her husband alone, 'for now I shall act according to the dream you gave to my grandfathers': together with skunk cabbage. Each plant is then addressed separately and asked 'to help each other with our friend'.

A plant can also have a bad hand. Of Pacific ninebark George Hunt wrote that the right amount opens the bowels, but too much causes vomiting, with blood: 'that is called the bad hand'. In the prayer the gatherer therefore asks that the bad hand may not come along.

Numbers count. Often four roots are dug, four pieces of bark cut or four cups drunk.

Among the Kwakwaka'wakw there are shamans, who heal with their power, with singing and with sucking. Most remedies in Boas's collection, however, were made at home, by a man for his wife, a woman for her husband or child, or a brother for a brother.

When a woman has long lain in bed with pain in her body, her husband cuts four stems of devil's club by the river. At home he burns off the spines, peels the bark and boils it all day. His wife sits on a board above the tub of hot decoction, under two blankets, until she can bear it no longer. Sometimes a handful of seed of barestem lomatium goes in, 'for this is a very strong medicine'. That seed is also chewed and blown onto an aching head or body, or kept in the mouth for sore throat and cough.

For coughing up blood the husband goes by canoe to a river to cut bark of red alder, 'the only true power of the riverbank'. The woman keeps pieces in her mouth and swallows the juice. For diarrhoea the root bark of hemlock is boiled all day with tips of juniper, the root of deer fern and that of licorice fern, and drunk four times, a teacup each time. For old sores and burns, water is poured on pounded root bark of western hemlock until it turns red, or dried bark of salmonberry is sprinkled on. For pain in the pit of the stomach the patient drinks a decoction of bogbean instead of water. On swellings, warm boiled leaves of black twinberry are laid, and on a painful shoulder pounded single delight, which raises a blister.

Whoever coughs up blood keeps what he spits out in cedar bark. It is folded into four small plates of copper and pushed into the cleft of a thick crabapple tree. 'Now you are caught', the man says to the illness, 'do not look back at my wife.'

George Hunt was born at Fort Rupert in 1854, the son of an English fur trader and a Tlingit mother, Mary Ebbetts. Through marriage and adoption he became part of the Kwakwaka'wakw community. From 1886 he worked with Franz Boas, who taught him to write Kwak'wala. In the decades that followed Hunt wrote some ten thousand pages, about feasts, families, stories and medicine.

These texts went into books by Boas, such as The Religion of the Kwakiutl Indians (1930). Part 1 holds the Kwak'wala text, part 2 the English translation. It contains the prayers to the plants, to the sun, to animals and to the salmon, and the stories about shamans. A well-known one is that of Qʼaselid, who thought shamans were frauds and wanted to learn their tricks. He learned them, and his cures succeeded so often that he became a famous shaman. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss later wrote about him.

The Kwakwaka'wakw are critical of what has been written about them. According to one researcher, the anthropological account had 'too often become a long monologue, in which the Kwakwaka'wakw had nothing to say'.

There are thirteen Kwakwaka'wakw nations, with about 3,700 people (2016). They live on their own land, such as at Alert Bay, Fort Rupert and Kingcome, and in cities such as Victoria and Vancouver.

The potlatch is held again, also to pass on names and rights. In 1980 the U'mista Cultural Centre opened at Alert Bay, for the confiscated objects that museums returned. U'mista means roughly 'the return of something important'. Artists such as Mungo Martin, Ellen Neel and Willie Seaweed kept carving alive. There are only a few speakers of Kwak'wala left, but the language is being learned again.

The Kwakwaka'wakw live between rainforest and sea. Red cedar provides planks, canoes, clothing and the rings of cedar bark worn at the winter ceremonies. Hemlock provides branches for rings and bark for medicines.

Along rivers grow devil's club, with spines over stem and leaf, red alder, salmonberry and black twinberry. In marshes stand skunk cabbage and bogbean. On grasslands grows barestem lomatium, whose seeds are also burned as incense at funerals and chewed by singers to spare their throats. The crabapple provides fruit, strong wood and medicinal bark.

The prayers in this story were written down by George Hunt, himself of Tlingit descent but raised among the Kwakwaka'wakw. They belong to the families and nations they come from, and to their descendants.

Boas's collection also contains remedies made from very poisonous plants, such as false hellebore (Veratrum), water hemlock (Cicuta), the root of elder and the bark of ninebark. No preparation is given for these on purpose. Water hemlock is one of the most poisonous plants in North America.

The potlatch objects in museums are a sensitive subject: many were confiscated and have yet to be returned. The winter ceremonies, such as the dance of the Hamat'sa, are not a spectacle and are not described here.