Native American Medicine

Citation gap: This page currently lacks lead-specialist citations because Vogel (American Indian Medicine, 1970) and Moerman (Native American Ethnobotany, 1998) — the two named lead authorities for Indigenous-Americas medicine — are shelved in the Library but not yet extracted into _evidence/. The page is built from Gilmore’s 1919 Bureau of American Ethnology monograph (a foundational primary source) and supplementary sources. See WISH_LIST.md for extraction priority. Pages by training-data prior should be read with that caveat.

Native American medicine refers to the healing traditions of the Indigenous peoples of North America. There is no single tradition — practices varied widely across hundreds of nations, language families, and ecological regions. What recurred, in many forms, was a body of practice that combined plant remedies, ceremonial purification, sweating, vision, and song with social structures (medicine societies, ritual specialists, clan-restricted knowledge) that placed the work of healing inside the larger life of the community. This page focuses on the Plains tribes — Omaha, Ponca, Pawnee, Dakota, Lakota, Winnebago, Osage, Hidatsa — as documented in Melvin Gilmore’s Bureau of American Ethnology fieldwork between 1909 and 1914, supplemented by other sources. Plains practice is not representative of all Indigenous North American medicine, but Gilmore’s monograph is one of the most thorough early ethnographic records.

A Note on Sources and Standpoint

Almost all early written documentation of Plains-tribe medicine was produced by non-Native ethnographers working within federal anthropology — Gilmore for the Bureau of American Ethnology, J. Owen Dorsey for the same institution, Francis La Flesche (Omaha, working as an ethnologist) being a partial exception. These accounts were collected largely from named informants in the years immediately after the tribes had been confined to reservations and after the suppression of the Sun Dance and other public ceremonies. They are an imperfect record, shaped by what specialists chose to disclose to a federal anthropologist of European descent and by the interpretive categories the ethnographer brought. The page below uses Gilmore’s documentation as Gilmore reports it; readers should not treat it as a closed account of Plains medicine.

Henry E. Sigerist and later historians have noted that what European observers called “the shaman” was a recurring figure in Native American as well as Asian cultures — combining the roles of healer, sorcerer, seer, educator, and priest, and believed to possess powers given by other-than-human persons.(Porter, 1997) The category of shaman is a comparativist abstraction; specific traditions used specific terms (Omaha waxube, Lakota wičháša wakȟáŋ) that do not map cleanly onto each other or onto “shaman.”

Social Organization of Knowledge

Plains medical knowledge was unevenly distributed and ritually held. Gilmore reconstructed the social formation as follows: experiment with edible plants produced knowledge of remedies; this knowledge concentrated in particular persons — what he called the “primitive professors of botany” — who added “the weight and dignity of ceremony and circumstance,” charged fees, and trained disciples on private excursions to the haunts of the plants.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) The result was a tiered structure of practitioners. The Ojibwa, in a parallel example, had four ranks of healers: priests at the top, followed by “Dawning Men,” then seers, then herbalists; women often served as herbalists.(Willard, 2021)

Specific medicines were sometimes restricted to specific kin groups. Among the Omaha, Anemone canadensis — one of the most highly esteemed medicines, prescribed for wounds, sore eyes, and many internal and external ills — could be used only by the medicine-men of the Te-sinde gens. Touching a buffalo calf was taboo to that gens, and the plant accordingly bore the name “little buffalo medicine.”(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) Asclepias tuberosa (pleurisy root) belonged to the Omaha Shell Society; a single member was the authorized keeper, and the ceremonials of digging, preparation, consecration, and distribution occupied four days — four being “the dominant number in all ritual and in all orientation in space and time among the Plains tribes.”(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) Pawnee medicine-men carrying bags of pulverized Arisaema triphyllum corm declined to disclose its uses to Gilmore until he found another informant willing to share.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Ceremonial and Purificatory Plants

Several plants recurred as purificatory or ceremonial agents across the Plains. Cedar (Juniperus virginiana) was sacred to the mythical thunderbird — whose nest was “in the cedar of the western mountains” — and cedar boughs were placed on tipi poles to ward off lightning, “as white men put up lightning rods.” J. Owen Dorsey reported that cedar in the Osage tradition symbolized the tree of life; an ancient cedar pole was kept in the Tent of War of the Wezhinshte gens of the Omaha.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) Cedar was also the central anti-respiratory plant: a decoction of leaves and fruits was drunk for coughs, twigs were burned and the smoke inhaled for head colds, and during the 1849-50 Asiatic cholera epidemic among the Teton Dakota, Red Cloud — then a young man — is said to have cured patients with a cedar-leaf decoction taken internally and used as a bath after various other treatments had failed.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Sweet grass (Savastana odorata, now Hierochloe odorata) and wild sage (Artemisia species) functioned as a ritual pair: sweet grass was burned as incense to invoke benevolent powers; wild sage was burned to exorcise malevolent ones. Both belonged to the working materials of the Wawan ceremony of the Omaha and Ponca, and Dorsey listed sweet grass among the plants used in the Sun Dance.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) Artemisia served additionally as a personal purificatory agent: a person who had unwittingly broken a taboo or touched a sacred object had to bathe with it, and any ceremony was begun by burning it to drive away evil influences.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) The First Nations practice of smudging — the burning of plants for purification — remains widespread; plants used include sage, mugwort, vervain, cedar, and sweetgrass.(Willard, 2021)

The Sacred Pole of the Omaha Nation, the supreme object of veneration, was made of cottonwood; the Plains tribes ascribed mystery to the cottonwood, willow, and cedar — the three trees that pervaded their range — recognizing in each a different relationship to the larger order.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) (Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Tobacco (Nicotiana quadrivalvis) was a sacred medicine, distinct from the species (N. tabacum) Europeans took up commercially. Smoke was traditionally not inhaled. When the plant was introduced to Europeans it was promoted as a “God-sent remedy.”(Willard, 2021) The cultivated tobacco of the Plains tribes had been abandoned by all Nebraska tribes by the late nineteenth century; the oldest living Omaha had never seen it growing. Gilmore obtained seed in 1908 from Long Bear, a 73-year-old Hidatsa in North Dakota, and was thereby able to determine the species and re-establish cultivation.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

The Plains Materia Medica

Plains medicine drew on a wide indigenous pharmacopoeia. A few examples will indicate its range; the full catalog runs to several hundred species.

Echinacea (Echinacea angustifolia) was, in Gilmore’s judgment, used by the Plains tribes as a remedy for more ailments than any other plant. It served as a universal antidote for snakebite and venomous stings, a smoke treatment for headache in persons and distemper in horses, a toothache remedy (a piece kept on the painful tooth), a treatment for enlarged glands and mumps, and a topical analgesic for burns.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) Jugglers and medicine-men also used Echinacea juice in feats of apparent invulnerability to heat — bathing hands and arms in it to retrieve meat from boiling kettles bare-handed, holding live coals in the mouth, enduring intense heat in the steam bath.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Calamus (Acorus calamus) was held in the highest esteem by all the tribes as a near-panacea — carminative, febrifuge, cough remedy, toothache remedy, colic remedy, cold remedy, and ceremonial garland. Among the Teton Dakota, warriors chewed the rootstock to a paste and rubbed it on the face to prevent excitement and fear in the presence of the enemy.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Puffballs (Lycoperdon, Calvatia, Bovista) were gathered by the Dakota, Omaha, and Ponca and kept as a styptic for wounds, especially for application to the umbilicus of newborn infants — the use preserved in the Dakota name hokshi chekpa, “baby’s navel.”(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Cat-tail down (Typha latifolia) dressed burns and scalds, prevented infant chafing, padded cradle boards, served as diapers, and supplied a required component of the niniba weawan ceremonial object of the Wawan ceremony of the Omaha and Ponca.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Wild mint (Mentha canadensis) was used by all the tribes as a carminative, steeped in sweetened water; Monarda fistulosa was boiled by the Teton Dakota for abdominal pain and used by the Winnebago as a topical for facial pimples.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

The general repertoire of tribal healing techniques extended beyond plants to include bathing, sweat-bathing, shampooing with yucca for its saponin content, massage, cupping, emetics, enemas, burning, incision, bloodletting, and trephining.(Willard, 2021)

Animism and the Doctrine of Signatures

Plains medicine carried a body of cosmological commitments about plants. The Dakota believed that each plant species “has its own particular song which is the expression of its life or soul,” and Gilmore reports the wider conviction that Indians “have reverence and affection for the living creatures, the birds and beasts, the trees and shrubs and flowering plants” and tell stories and sing songs about most of them.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Gilmore identified what he called a doctrine of signatures in Plains practice — most clearly in the use of Pepo foetidissima (wild gourd), where the root was held to resemble the human body and to be male and female. For any ailment, a portion of the root from the part corresponding in position to the affected part of the patient’s body was used: the top of the root for headache, the middle for abdominal trouble, and so on. The plant was treated as sacred; only the properly constituted authorities could dig it, and only after making the prescribed offering of tobacco to the spirit of the plant.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) Whether this is genuinely the same doctrine of signatures that runs from Galen through Paracelsus to early-modern European herbalism, or a different practice that Gilmore assimilated to a familiar European category, is a question for further work.

Harvest Ethics and Reciprocity

Gilmore documented an explicit ethic of reciprocal exchange in plant gathering. Dakota women harvesting Falcata comosa (ground bean) from the winter caches of voles carried bags of corn with them and replaced an equal quantity of beans for what they took: “they said it would be wicked to steal from the animals, but they thought that a fair exchange was not robbery.”(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) The norm of leaving an offering — tobacco, corn, prayer — before taking a plant or other-than-human gift recurs across many Indigenous North American traditions and has become one of the more widely cited principles in twentieth-century ethical accounts of foraging.

The Peyote Religion

The peyote religion (Lophophora williamsii) is indigenous to the Rio Grande region; from there its cult spread northward from tribe to tribe, eventually reaching the United States–Canadian border. Gilmore records a specific transmission event: peyote use and the religious observances connected with it were introduced among the Omaha in the winter of 1906-07 by a tribesman returning from the Oto in Oklahoma. He had been “much addicted to the use of alcohol and had heard among the Oto that this religion would cure him.” A society soon formed in the Omaha tribe, and although at first much opposed it grew until it absorbed half the tribe.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Gilmore offered an explicit comparative reading: peyote use corresponds to the Christian use of bread and wine in the eucharist. The Indian “eats the plant or drinks its decoction in order to appropriate the divine spirit,” reasoning, in Gilmore’s paraphrase, that “to the American Indian mind it seems just as reasonable to conceive that deity may dwell in a plant body” as that deity may dwell in a human body.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) Pawnee peyote meetings synthesized Indigenous and Christian elements: a peyote button on a cloth altar beside an open Bible, a fan of twelve eagle feathers symbolizing the twelve apostles, a water drum and gourd rattle, with visions induced by firelight, drumming, song, and the drug’s optic-stimulating physiology.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) The Native American Church, formally incorporated in 1918, gave the peyote religion its modern legal and institutional form; the religion’s twentieth-century history is partly a story of repeated federal and state attempts to suppress it.

Encounters with Settler Medicine

Gilmore himself opened his 1919 monograph by indicting European colonizers for never undertaking a comprehensive survey of the indigenous flora of North America and for choosing to “exterminate everything found here” rather than learn from Native botanical knowledge.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) Native American plant knowledge fed several streams of nineteenth-century North American medicine. The Indian Doctors’ Dispensatory and many Eclectic and Thomsonian texts drew on Indigenous remedies, often without proper attribution, and a number of plants entered the United States Pharmacopoeia by way of this transmission.(Gevitz (ed.), 1990) Albert Isaiah Coffin, the Anglo-American who would later bring Thomsonian botanical medicine to industrial northern England, recovered from tuberculosis as a young man after a Seneca woman cured him with a decoction of prickly ash (Zanthoxylum americanum); he then spent time among Native American tribes learning their herbal medicine before encountering Samuel Thomson.(Griggs, 1981)

The traffic ran one direction more brutally than the other. Roy Porter notes that the Spanish conquistadores who invaded the Americas were “immunological supermen, infinitely more deadly than ‘typhoid Mary’; disease gave them a fatal superiority over the defenceless native populations they invaded” — having survived a hail of childhood diseases in the cosmopolitan Iberian seaports.(Porter, 1997) The collapse of Indigenous populations in the century after contact was, in large measure, a microbiological event; the breakdown of Indigenous medical institutions followed from it. Gilmore’s larger argument, that Plains plant knowledge was an interrupted tradition, takes its force from this background.

One measure of the encounter is plainly legible in the common plantain (Plantago major). The plant followed European settlement so predictably that by 1672 John Josselyn, in New England’s Rarities Discovered, recorded that Native Americans had named it “English-Man’s Foot” — observing that it appeared wherever the English had trodden.(Stapley, 2024) The name is both accurate botany and an ecological record of dispossession.

The cumulative exchange nonetheless shaped the trajectory of North American herbalism as a whole. The blend of Boorde’s sixteenth-century English household medicine, Gerard’s Herball, Culpeper’s English Physician, and Native American plant knowledge formed what became the characteristic American prescribing style — a layered inheritance that neither tradition produced alone.(Stapley, 2024)

Twentieth-Century Continuities

The reservation system and the suppression of Indigenous ceremonies through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not end Plains medical practice; it changed the conditions under which it could be carried out. Gilmore noted as early as 1919 that “the influx of population has greatly reduced or almost exterminated certain species, and, even if the natural supply should suffice, the present restriction in range and movements of the Indians would prevent them from obtaining adequate quantities.”(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919) He inferred from his fieldwork that tribes had been settled in the Missouri River region for many generations and had given close attention to its floral life — the depth of the documented knowledge implied a long time-depth and extensive travel for trade.(Gilmore, Melvin R., 1919)

Tribal worldview, in the framing offered in one twentieth-century herbalism curriculum, has been characterized as vitalistic — in contrast to the mechanistic worldview of modern biomedicine.(Willard, 2021) This is a useful generalization at a high level but glosses over the substantial differences among nations, the historical changes within each, and the contemporary fact that many Indigenous practitioners hold both frameworks together.

See Also

• Ethnobotany
• Materia Medica
• Botanical Medicine
• Doctrine of Signatures
• Shamanism
• Colonial Medicine
• American Medicine
• Columbian Exchange

Sources

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Editorial Notes

Gaps the encyclopaedia compiler flagged for future evidence work, collected from inline markers in the body and frontmatter.

A Note on Sources and Standpoint

Animism and the Doctrine of Signatures

Encounters with Settler Medicine

Twentieth-Century Continuities