Tobacco

Tobacco entered European life as a commodity and it has been difficult ever since to see what it was before that. Across the Americas, Nicotiana rustica and its relatives were among the most important ritual plants on two continents: offered to the ground, the water and the fire, burned as an approach to spirits, smoked in pipes whose use was governed by protocol, and in the Amazon drunk as a thick syrup, snuffed, and blown over a patient by a practitioner as a working technique.

Nicotiana rustica is several times stronger in nicotine than the commercial Nicotiana tabacum, strong enough that the doses used in some South American practice are frankly toxic and are meant to be. What Europe took up was the milder species, stripped of the protocol, consumed continuously rather than ceremonially, and eventually engineered for delivery.

The pipe in Plains practice is not a smoking implement in the ordinary sense. It is a ritual object with a keeper, assembled for use and taken apart afterwards, and what is smoked in it is often a mixture rather than tobacco alone. The atlas records that the practice is governed and does not reproduce its content.

The result of the commodity version is the deadliest consumer product ever sold, on the order of eight million deaths a year. Both facts are true of the same plant.

The word kinnikinnick is Algonquian and means roughly a mixture. What goes into it varies by people and by region: bearberry leaf, red willow or dogwood inner bark, sumac leaf, and tobacco where tobacco is available, in proportions that are local knowledge rather than a recipe.

That matters for reading historical accounts. European observers described Indigenous people smoking tobacco, and much of the time the mixture was mostly not tobacco, either because the plant was traded and expensive or because the mixture was the point. Assuming the pipe contained what a European pipe contained produces a distorted picture of both the botany and the practice.

Tobacco itself was cultivated well beyond its natural range, sometimes by peoples who grew nothing else, which is a strong indication of how it was valued. Nicotiana rustica reached the Great Lakes and the Northeast as a crop.

The ceremonial and commercial strands have not stayed separate. Commercial tobacco is used as an offering today in many communities, and tribal public health programmes across North America now work with a distinction between traditional tobacco and commercial tobacco, campaigning hard against the second while defending the first. That framing is theirs, and it is the accurate way to state what is a single plant and two entirely different things.