IROQUOIS HERBALISM — FENTON 515 



(M.), "stump dweller," the common elder {Sairibucus canadensis 

 L.) or 'oskaa'a (S.), the hellebore {Veratrum viride Ait.)/^ the use 

 of which in wounds has been attributed to the Penobscot and Micmac 

 of Maine and New Brunswick.^'' 



The ignorance of the French colonists provided the Indians with 

 some amusing incidents when they did not have tragic consequences. 

 A French boy in Sagard's party set all the Hurons laughing when, 

 having teased some Huron children to share with him some roots 

 called Ooxrat which they were carrying home, he burned his mouth 

 badly on biting into them. The appreciative savages had long since 

 learned to avoid the stinging pain by first cooking the roots in hot 

 ashes, and they used them * * * "to purge the phlegm and 

 moisture in the head of old people and to clear the complexion; 

 * * *" Although Ooxrat has the smarting properties of hellebore 

 'oskaa'a (S.), the dried root of which is still popular among the 

 Iroquois as a snuff for catarrh, the fruit and root of Indian turnip 

 or Jack-in-the-pulpit {Arisaema triphyllum (L.) Schott) produces 

 the burning sensation mentioned, and its Cayuga name, owa'hyshra', 

 "cradleboard," resembles Huron Ooxrat. 



A reporter on New Netherlands, in 1650 without professed skill 

 in medical botany found with little effort over 30 plants which he 

 thought might convey a notion of the valuable plants that were 

 known to the Indians. Of these, we recognize the following as herbs 

 in use among the Indians of later times: polypody, muUein [intro- 

 duced from Europe], priest's shoe, sweet flag, sassafras, crowfoot, 

 plantain [introduced], mallow, laurel, violet, blue flag, wild indigo, 

 Solomon's seal, dragon's blood, milfoil, fern[?], agrimony, wild leek, 

 snake root, and prickly pear.^^ 



The histories of three American plants that were used medicinally 

 by the Iroquois — sassafras, maidenhair fern, and ginseng — are suffi- 

 ciently documented to serve as examples of how the Iroquois con- 

 tributed to the introduction of medicines into Europe. Sassafras, 

 known to the Seneca as "rough bark" (ono'hsta'she'), and employed 

 by all the Iroquois as a tonic, created at one time in Europe a stir 

 like that which attended the discovery of the sulfanilamide series or 

 vitamins in our own time. Brought to Spain after the middle of the 

 sixteenth century from Florida, where French Huguenot refugees 



" Phonetic note. — The orthography employed In this paper for writing Iroquois words 

 has the same phonetic values as explained in "Iroquois suicide ♦ * ♦" cited above, with 

 a single Innovation of denoting long vowels by doubling them instead of employing a 

 raised period after the vowel to indicate length. 



Abbreviations in parentheses following Indian words refer to dialects of Iroquois as 

 follows: (M.), Mohawk; (Oe.), Oneida; (Oa.), Onondaga; (C), Cayuga; (S.), Seneca; 

 (T.), Tuscarora ; and (H.), Huron. 



«2 Stone, Eric, op. cit., p. 80. 



82 The representation of New Netherland, 1650, p. 298. 



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