Native American Tobacco Coalition of Montana

(47) Article:  “Growing their own” by Graham Chandler (2005) Published in The Beaver, Feb/Mar.

One crisp October morning in 1754, Anthony Henday encountered a few Blackfoot scouts in the hills near present-day Lethbridge, Alberta.  He sat under the autumn yellows and reds and smoked with them.  When he visited their camp two weeks later to discuss trade, again protocol had it that he first sit and smoke, this time with the elders.  Henday offered his favorite Tobacco, but the native leaders preferred their own.  “They think nothing of my Tobacco,” he later wrote in his journal.  The feeling was mutual: he “set as little value on theirs…”  Eighteen years later, Matthew Cocking, another trade envoy, was riding in the same hills when one of his Cree guides discovered a plot of Tobacco.  He wrote of it, “the Natives shew be a Tobacco plantation belonging to the [Blackfoot] about 100 yards long & 5 wide, sheltered from the northern blasts by a ledge of poplars; & to the southward by a ridge of high ground.”  In Penning those lines, Cocking became the first person to record Tobacco cultivation as practiced by the Blackfoot, which was fortunate because a few generations later, by around 1800, the Blackfoot had abandoned their Tobacco gardens and adopted their intruders’ European blends.  [S]moking had long been part of Blackfoot ritual and spiritualism, and the Blackfoot had evolved the specialized knowledge needed to grow successful crops of a species in a land too harsh for it to grow naturally.  The knowledge was passed through oral traditions.  Critical in this process were Tobacco societies, which were typically composed of elders who were adept at the complete rituals associated with Tobacco cultivation.  “The Tobacco societies were in effect a horticultural society,” says Eldon Yellowhorn, assistant professor of archeology at Simon Fraser University and himself a Blackfoot.  “…like people have for roses or orchids.  They preserved the ecological information needed to produce successful crops of Tobacco.”  Although Tobacco now has a negative stigma, Yellowhorn says that “in traditional Blackfoot society it was rather esteemed.”  Smoking of other herbs already had a ritual purpose before Tobacco appeared on the northern plains around 1200 A.D., so the Blackfoot had the cultural background for accepting the product.  “It [native tobacco] was…on the northern plains for at least 3,500 years,” he says, citing a dated find of stone pipe at the Cactus Flower Site in southern Alberta by archeologist John Brumley in 1973.  “Blackfoot smoking pleasure was derived from a blend of bearberry [later known as kinnikinnick] and cambium [inner bark] of red-osier dogwood, in a stone pipe.”  Accepting the practice of planting Tobacco into their cultural system gave them access to a new herb that likely improved the flavor of these smoking blends, he says.  Though the Blackfoot Tobacco societies used myth and ceremonies to help make sense of the investment of labor by surrounding the practice with a spiritual purpose…societies likely dispensed it for medicinal purposes, too.  Medicines came out of it’s roots, the flowers, and you could brew the leaves to make an infusion to put on your sores,” says Yellowhorn.  “It was likely even smoked medicinally because it deadens nerves.”  The primacy of Tobacco in Blackfoot society engendered intense ritual and ceremonialism associated with every step of its planting, protection, and harvest.  The exact methods of cultivating the Tobacco were closely guarded by the societies to ensure success.  They also regulated trade because Tobacco was a chief element in medicine bundles, which contained numerous items of spiritual significance.  Bundles, still a cornerstone of Blackfoot spirituality, were described by Clark Wissler in the 1911 Anthropological papers or the American Museum of Natural History, “the Social Life of the Blackfoot Indians.”  Wissler wrote that there are many different types of bundles, most of which contained Tobacco.  They were opened only for the most compelling reasons, such as calling the buffalo, performing the sun dance, or planting Tobacco.  The beaver bundle was most important to the Tobacco societies:  it contains every sacred object essential to the Tobacco-planting rituals.  According to Wissler, beaver bundles are filled with scores of items like beaver skins, a pipe, Tobacco seeds and pouches of Tobacco, buffalo ribs, tails and hooves, digging sticks, and muskrat and multitudes of other animal and bird skins.  Accessories include Sweetgrass and parsnip root for the smudge, black and red paints, rattles, rawhide, and counting sticks for keeping tally of the months.  The whole package is wrapped in tanned elkskin and kept at the rear of the tipi resting on a parfleche filled with dried meat and a bag of dried berries.  The owner’s wife takes care of the bundle.  Planting Tobacco involved ritual songs associated with the animal skins.  Dances, smudges, and painted faces accompany the ceremony.  There were about four hundred songs in all, accompanied only by rattles beaten on leather.  Words in the Tobacco songs include:  “Tobacco seed, I want it.  A plenty I have taken.  It is powerful…Tobacco leaves, I have taken.  It is powerful.  Old man, he says, “the plants, let us go over there [referring to the Tobacco garden]…”  And so the Tobacco-planting ritual began.  No account of a westerner observing one is on record, but Wissler recorded from a number of Blackfoot informants:  The holders of the beaver bundles, or “beaver men,” hold a four-day dancing and feast and send out “eight single young men to gather deer, antelope and mountain sheep dung, because these animals run fast and so the Tobacco will grow fast.”  The dung is mashed up with berries and Tobacco leaves into which the seeds are placed with water.  The mixture is distributed among the planters who are both men and women.  Brush is gathered and burned on the plot.  Sometimes willow branches were used to mix the ash with the soil.  After the burning, with digging sticks or bison scapula hoes, “holes are dug about a foot apart and two inches deep in a row, into which are placed the seeds and covered by children running over them four times,”  recorded Wissler.  “A child cannot fall or …[bad] luck will follow.”  After the planting, special songs are sung and four smudges lit, one on each corner of the plot.  Camp is then broken in preparation for a spring departure of the entire group for a summer away hunting and gathering.  While they’re away, they must camp in four different places of increasing distances from the garden while mythical “little people’ tend to the crop.  “Some say the seeds are the dwarf people,” wrote Wissler.  “No one must ever try to see the little people for if you do you will die.”  At the fourth campsite, the women make tiny moccasins about five centimeters long and bags of good about seven centimeters long and put them out for the little people.  The group then spends the rest of the summer hunting and gathering.  No archeological evidence has been found of Blackfoot Tobacco gardens.  But carbonized seeds have been recovered at many sites along the Missouri River, including the Travis site in north central South Dakota, that were first cultivated about a thousand years ogo.  Indeed, the origin of the Blackfoot tobacco societies’ ceremonies and methods of cultivation are thought to have derived from the Crow Indians of the Missouri area.  “The Crow Indians have a long tradition of growing tobacco,” says Yellowhorn.  “The Blackfoot adopted some of their rituals and knowledge and plant lore to cultivate tobacco into their societies.”  Descriptions of Crow ceremonial planting of the Tobacco were recorded by anthropologist Robert Lowie and published in Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History in 1919.  He notes that, unlike the Blackfoot, the Crow at that time still planted their own Tobacco for ceremonial purposes.  Lowie recorded that although the Crow rituals differed  slightly, the Blackfoot and the Sarcee were the only other tribes with ceremonial tobacco planting.  Perhaps some of the differences arose from a factor the Crow of the Missouri didn’t have to worry about:  Blackfoot territory lay at the extreme northern edge of the plant’s growing range with the ever-present danger of killing frosts…Today, many of the planting and harvesting rituals are still performed and held sacred by the Tobacco societies…