g6 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



to justify by reading the "doctor books" ; consequently, he speaks 

 the professional jargon of two cultures. By agreeing to concentrate 

 on the older household medicines, we felt surer that we were dealing 

 with Indian culture. 



We visited two Mohawk reservations on the St. Lawrence, St. 

 Regis on the United States-Canadian border, and Caughnawaga ( "at- 

 the-rapids"') above Montreal. Three hundred years of Jesuit teach- 

 ing has left little but the language. The family of Noah La France, 

 representative St. Regis dairy farmers, gave us the run of Racquette 

 Point ; but cattle had eaten away the flora and, except for a few 

 household remedies, we had to be content with Mohawk paradigms. 



The Christianized Mohawks were persuaded to settle at La Prairie 

 in 1668, and here opposite Montreal, Kateri Tekakwitha ("moving- 

 in-two-directions"), Lily of the Mohawks, lived out her saintly life 

 (fig. 100) ; but the "Praying Indians of Quebec" soon removed to 

 Caughnawaga, now an old stone village of ironworkers, where I 

 located Katie Debeau, who had worked for Waugh in 1912 (fig. 101). 

 With the aid of an illustrated flora and the careful interpreting 

 of Frank Jacobs, we reviewed Waugh's earlier notes ; Katie related 

 cases of Mohawk women taking Cicuta for the same reasons as the 

 Senecas, and the Mohawk name for the plant is near enough the name 

 given by the Jesuits to clinch its identity. 



The balance of the season was spent with Simeon Gibson, J. N. B. 

 Hewitt's old interpreter at Six Nations Reservations near Brantford, 

 Ontario. He also had worked for Waugh, and his sister Jemima 

 (fig. 102 J knew the techniques of preparing medicines. We returned 

 to Allegany for the Green Corn Festival at Coldspring longhouse, 

 the season when the herbalists prepare to dig their roots. 



All the Iroquois herbalists place tobacco at the first plant encoun- 

 tered and take the second, and individual collectors have particular 

 routes which they habitually traverse when hunting plants. Their 

 range of knowledge is not extraordinary, but a few will know upward 

 of 100 plants ; the more common plants like boneset, Eupatorium 

 perfoliatum L., and hemlock, which cured Cartier's crew of scurvy 

 m L535- are known by the same names over wide areas by tribes 

 speaking distinct dialects. Although overdoses occur, the Senecas 

 have learned to bake the poison out of mayapple roots, but water- 

 hemlock the}- universally fear. Xearly every family has its blood 

 nostrum composed of nearly 20 plants, including bloodroot, sarsa- 

 parilla, partridgeberry, pipsissewa. and various barks that are taken 

 by scraping them upward when the prescription calls for an emetic 

 and downward for a cathartic. 



