IROQUIOS HERBALISM — FENTON 505 



kin, locality, and dialect, permitting some Iroquis to retreat from 

 the modern world of frustration into a native religion that fur- 

 nishes delusions of past political granduer and quasi health insur- 

 ance in Indian herbalism. Thus the Indian herbalist, bolstered by 

 a native religion and the belief of many ignorant whites m his uni- 

 versal knowledge, is encouraged to preserve the ethnobotanical 

 knowledge of his grandparents whose ancestors learned plant uses 

 for the flora of the region his people continue to inhabit (pi. 2, fig. 

 2). To what he can retain of this fund of family knowledge, the 

 modem Iroquois adds the plants that he collects for drug traders 

 and other popular practices that the whites have proved to him to be 

 effective. Moreover, discounting plant species and usages of obvious 

 European introduction and checking one informant against another, 

 one can readily assemble a respectable list of plants and their Indian 

 names which have currency in the Iroquois community and are 

 probably ancient. Similarly, if we compare them tribe by tribe and 

 reservation by reservation, those names and usages that are now 

 widely separated in time and space and yet are demonstrably equiva- 

 lent date back to the time when the Iroquois tribes were inhabiting 

 neighboring territories, or to a still earlier time. 



Since so much of Iroquois culture has the mark of a southern 

 origin, it would seem that, as they moved into the area wliich they 

 inhabited during historic times, not only was it important for them 

 to discover new edible fruits, but a host of plants awaited tech- 

 nological and medicinal experiment. Possibly Algonquian neighbors 

 had devised some uses which they showed them, but to other plants 

 the Iroquois have applied concepts that relate to analogous domestic 

 or known southern species. However, those plants which are named 

 for maize may reflect a process of reinterpretation following long 

 years of maize cultivation in the north. In comparing present 

 Iroquois and Algonquian plant names we find some names that have 

 similar meanings and yet we cannot be sure in which direction such 

 ideas traveled. 



INDIAN AND COLONIAL MEDICINE 



10th : I give a beverage made from an excellent white root, with which dis- 

 eases of all kinds are cured in my country. — Speech of a Mohawk envoy at 

 Quebec, 1659.4 



Contact between Indian herbalism and western medicine was a 

 natural result of colonization. When they met in the early sixteenth 

 century European medicine was still carrying a heavy burden of 

 medieval practices so that the few first physicians in the colonies were 

 but several centuries advanced from the Indian shaman who selected 



* Jesuit Relations, vol. 45, p. 83. 



