The Medicine Plants

Now we turn to all the Medicine plants of the world. From the beginning, they were instructed to take away sickness. They are always waiting and ready to heal us. We are happy there are still among us those special few who remember how to use these plants for healing. With one mind, we send greetings, and thanks to the Medicine Plants. “Medicine” is a wide word. In modern North America, most people tend to think of it only as something we take once we are already sick. In Haudenosaunee tradition, though, medicine is also what keeps us well. It is part of the food that we eat and the water we drink. Almost every growing thing has the potential to be a medicine, and to help other living things.

When Sonkwaia:tison, our Creator, made the medicine plants he gave each of them special instructions. As long as they existed, their job would be to help the animals, the birds, and the people stay healthy. The medicine plants were given the ability to generate an energy that could be consumed or absorbed by other living things. That energy would know exactly where to go in the body to provide strength and healing.

When the medicine plants were being made, our Creator’s twin brother, Sawisakaren, was also making plants. Some of those plants are poisonous. Some look almost the same as the original medicine plants, so that identifying and gathering medicine can be a challenge. Sawiskaren’s plants are not “evil” though. Used properly, and at times combined with other plants, they, too, make helpful and useful medicines.

As we give thanks, we also remember the people who, through their hard work and skill, have gathered knowledge of the medicines, and who give their time and lives to healing others.

Medicines grow all over. They can be found in the forest. They are in meadows, in water, on the shore. People who work with the medicines teach us to walk gently on the earth, and to take only what we need. Learning the right ways of gathering and caring for medicine plants is a lesson in an entire way of living.

Tobacco, sage, sweetgrass and cedar are four very sacred and important medicine plants for the people of this continent. Each has medicinal properties. Each of these plants represents a particular direction, and the peoples of that direction. The Creator’s attention is drawn to the smoke that rises when these plants are burned in ceremony or Thanksgiving. These plants heal; we can communicate to the Creator through these plants, as well as through thoughts.

The Haudenosaunee recognize that there is a special relationship between medicine plants and humans. Plants have the ability to communicate with us. They can speak to us in our dreams, and through ceremonies in the sweat lodge.

Very few of us touch a living plant every day of our lives, and of those few, many touch the plant only to end its life. More and more of us, every day, are becoming disconnected to our Mother Earth. We are spending more time in artificial environments. At work, at home and at play, and less time in the natural world. We create places without wind, with furnaces or air conditioning that allow us to ignore real temperatures, with artificial lighting that allows us to blur the boundary between day and night, and with floors that disconnect us from the earth and roofs that shelter us from the sun and rain. As our connection with the earth becomes weaker, the artificiality of our self-confidence increases.

Our efforts to create artificial environments for ourselves, or to change the natural ones, have other consequences. When we alter one part of the web of life, it throws another part of the web off balance. Pesticides and herbicides injure more than just the target species they were designed for. Their harmful effects climb the food chain. Global warming is probably the best example: it means more than just a change in the temperature - it means ice storms and floods, forest fires and winds and desertification. Our disconnection from the earth has allowed us, the species which changes its own environment, to injure the earth herself. The balance is delicate.

One way to measure our connection with the earth is to observe our children. At

birth, and when they are very small, children are not completely of this world yet. They are still partly in the Sky World, and when a very young child dies, we say that the Creator has called that child back. As they become a little older, we see that children have a special ability to commu­nicate with the natural world, and especially with animals. Their sense of wonder overcomes all fear, and their hands and minds are constantly exploring. Animals sense that they are dealing with children, and usually will not hurt them.

As more of them grow up in cities, children lose the opportunity to recognize and value the natural environment. We can see that they are losing the ability to communicate with the animals, the birds, the trees and plants, and also the medicine plants.

The food that we are eating and the medicine that we are using are also being removed from the natural environment. They too are becoming disconnected.

Our bodies are made up of those things provided by our Mother Earth. Every day we are encouraged to eat more and more processed foods. Not only does our food no longer look, taste or feel like it did in its original state, but it no longer carries the energy it once had. It is truly as if we are eating dead food. The food we eat should provide us with nutrients and energy that we need to feed all parts of our bodies: if our food is no longer alive, we may soon no longer live.

This is also true for our medicines. Pharmaceutical companies are taking medicine plants and extracting the “active” ingredient from the plant so that they can develop a product that they can call their own. This extraction and “purification” of medicines leads to several problems.

In our way, nobody “owns” the medicines. Nobody “owns” the knowledge of them, either. Our people have kept and shared the knowledge of the plants. We have not tried to make the knowledge our property. While we acknowledge that there should be a reward for hard work and research, it troubles us that “patents” are being regis­tered for knowledge that comes from us, and that we shared.

We believe that most medicines are best in their natural state. Pharmaceutical companies often view the plants differ­ently: they try to identify the “active ingre­dient” and isolate it. Often, they go beyond extracting it to trying to create it syntheti­cally, without even using the plant at all. By the time we buy the medicine in the pharmacy, its ingredients may not have come from their original sources. The medicine is no longer balanced and no longer knows where in the body to go to heal. The medicine plants were intended to be used whole, as they were created. There is another side-effect of synthetic medicines: the plants themselves, and the places that they grow, become unnecessary.

Many plants contain several medicinal ingredients, which work together in harmony. Isolating a single “active ingredient” often misses this, creating a single vector which, while powerful, is not balanced and can sometimes do as much harm as good. Having synthetically isolated and concentrated the “active ingredient”, researchers then have to identify, isolate and concentrate things that balance it, to reduce its impact, to restore the balance.

These medicine plants grow from our mother and by using her flesh and blood, the medicine was able to become strong, healthy and balanced. We, as humans need this balance to be healthy. If we take in only one part of the medicine, we will not be balanced and this is what creates harmful side effects.

Our elders always talk about the earth being our mother, a mother who will provide us with all things we need to be her healthy children. The medicines continue to take what they need from our mother, to provide us with what we need, in the hope that we will use them. The medicines are continuing to do their job and to follow their original instructions from the Creator. We are all a reflection of our Mother Earth and as our mother becomes more and more polluted, so do the plants, animals, insects, berries, birds, trees, and people. If we want to become well, we must heal our mother.

As humans, we too, were given a job. We always show respect for the medicines. To use medicines and to enjoy what it provides. If we fail to show respect, the medicines may disappear.

As humans, we need to once again develop a relationship with the medicine plants that provide us with good health, One way we can ensure that the medicines continue is to teach our children how to identify the plants, what their uses are, and how and when and where to gather them, As we continue to know and value the plants, so we will protect them.

When you gather medicine, your attitude plays a role in the effect that the medicine will have in the body. What you touch is affected by how you feel. When you gather medicines, make sure that you have a good mind, and are not sick yourself. When you set out, you should always offer tobacco, the strongest plant among the medicines. When you offer tobacco, you explain who you are and where you live; what you are going to use the medicine for, and who it is and where they live, and if it is needed for a specific illness, what that is. When you find the plant, you explain these things. You tell the plant how much you need to take, and you ask that the plant tell its people you are going to take only some of them. We offer tobacco to show our love, respect and sincerity.

When you go to gather medicine, the plants guide you and show you what to pick.

You never take the first plant you see. This is the one that will show you.

The animals and birds help ensure that our medicine continues. They help to spread the seeds of the plants. They use the medicine plants to stay healthy themselves, and they show us humans what we can use. It is important to watch and respect those animals. If we destroy their environment, they will be gone - and so will our medicines.

Trees are also medicine; not only do they clean the air some provide us with medicine in their bark and roots and leaves.

Not all the plants around us are native to North America. The invasions that began five centuries ago continue, as new plants from around the world take hold in our country. For many of these plants, though, we are also grateful, since they, too, are medicines. We have shared our knowledge of our own plants with our neighbors, and they have shared with us. We have learned that no plant is a “weed”, an enemy to be eradicated or poisoned -for every plant; there is a purpose, and a balance to be sought within our ecology.

The foods we eat are also medicines. When they are healthy they keep us well. As we become removed from natural foods and eat processed foods instead, we open ourselves to disease. In our communities, we can see that white sugar and white flour have contributed to diabetes and bone diseases. Today, we tend to eat until we become sick, and then take the medicines to become well again, when our foods might have kept us in balance so we would not have become sick at all.

Everything in creation is important: we must continue to give thanks to everything in creation for without any one part we would not exist.

Some ways to ensure the continuation of medicines is to take only what you need, and to remember that others may be gathering there as well. Never gather endangered species. Make sure that when you are gathering medicines they are free of pollution (chemicals, noise, and electromag­netic fields). It is becoming more difficult to find peaceful places as our population grows.

When women are pregnant, they should be encouraged to use natural medicines, so that their children will be born strong. Not only physically strong, but strong in the way they have already been introduced to the natural world. They will have a relationship with the natural medicines, a connection with them.

With half our population living in the cities, it is becoming harder for them to stay connected with the natural environment. The result of this is pollution and a lack of respect. It is easy to harm or destroy something you cannot see, and have no feelings for or connection to. We must find ways to reconnect the people and natural world.

Humans no longer communicate with plants. Plants are affected by negative thought, and if they receive negative energy all the time they will shut down. It is at this time that they will leave the earth and return to the Sky World. This is why it is so important to continue to offer thanks to medicines.

The blood that flows through our medicine is the same water that runs through our mother and the flesh that builds the medicines is also that of our mother. The medicine plants are constantly grateful to our Mother Earth, so they can continue their original instructions. We, too, are connected to the earth; when we die we once again become part of our mother, as she gave us our own flesh.

Katsitsarishons is a Mohawk herbalist who lives on Mohawk Territory on the Bay of Quinte.