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The Northwest Nez Perce smoked indigenous tobacco 1,200 years ago, contrary to what they said at the arrival of the white merchants in the 1790s. Traders won with the domestic tobacco with 8% nicotine; tribal tobacco was a mere 0.16 percent.
Here is another common historical story that has been modified by sophisticated laboratory tests.
In this case, the story is that Northwestern Indians began using tobacco in the 1790s, with the arrival of white fur traders.
Not enough.
With the help of advanced chemical analyzes, researchers at Washington State University have tested old Nez Perce pipes from five sites in the Columbia Basin, in eastern Washington.
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Shannon Tushingham, assistant professor of anthropology at WSU, and one of the authors of a recently published article, revealed that the presence of nicotine residue in a tube was positive.
This means that the Nez Perce, whose territory included parts of Idaho, Oregon and Washington, smoked tobacco more than 1,000 years before the merchants arrived.
Tushingham, along with Josiah Black Eagle Pinkham, a Nez Perce cultural specialist who consulted the work, hope this long story will help tribes quit smoking today.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 30 to 40% of Native Americans smoke, compared to 24% for the entire American population. According to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, smoking is one of the reasons why Native Americans have a mortality rate 40% higher than that of whites.
But smoking in these ancient times did not involve lighting a cigarette in everyday life, as is the case now.
There is currently a movement in tribal communities led by a group called "Keep It Sacred", which says these sacred traditions include: "Honor and welcome guests; bless food crops; communicate with the Creator; bless the hunt; link agreements between tribes. "
The group states on its website: "Some Aboriginal teenagers are rebelling using tobacco rather than reserving it for ceremonial purposes."
Pinkham says, "His uses were spiritual and even medicinal. It is a pretty phenomenal thing that we have had this relationship with tobacco for so long. "
This traditional relationship has changed dramatically when white traders have arrived, says Tushingham.
Before contact with the Whites, the tribes smoked sweet native tobacco plants in pipes usually carved from soapstone.
Then, the fur traders arrived with two domesticated varieties (Nicotiana tabacum and rustica) that had much more strength. Considerably.
These varieties had a nicotine content of up to 8.3%; The indigenous tobacco plant (Nicotiana quadrivalvis) had a meager nicotine percentage of 0.16%, according to research by late Joseph C. Winter, professor of archeology at the University of New Mexico.
Native tobacco seems less powerful than domestic, lean and with fewer leaves.
It is hard to resist a more powerful medicine.
"The" tobacco trade "was so much more powerful that aboriginals abandoned their own private plots of native tobacco," says Tushingham, and the story of soft native tobacco plants has just disappeared.
This change, she says, has happened dramatically and in a few years.
Whites would bring their tightly wrapped tobacco into "twists" for maximum portability. The twists looked remarkably like what you see after defecating a Doberman.
Lewis and Clark knew the importance of domesticated tobacco, which in the 16th century was all the rage in Europe after being brought back from the Caribbean, Central America and South America.
The two explorers totally cut off the stock of their men because tobacco was considered "extremely valuable for trade and diplomatic negotiations with the Indians". Men were so addicted to the grass that, according to the expedition's newspaper, they suffer a lot from the lack of it. "
According to Tushingham, the idea for this study began when she examined old stone soap pipes by wondering what was smoked hundreds of years ago.
Tribal history shows that everything has been used, from the tree bark to the bearberry.
The sophisticated tests currently available include gas chromatography mass spectrometry, capable of detecting minute amounts of substance, and which has been used in Mars missions.
And what the tests showed, it was tobacco.
"This is the longest continuous biomolecular record of old smoking from just one region in the world," Tushingham says. The study has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
According to Tushingham, the Nez-Perce would have smoked 1,200 years ago with this mild nicotine content of 0.16%.
In his expedition notes, which included the phonetic spelling of a few words, Meriwether Lewis found the tribal tobacco "very nice" but added "it does not affect the nerves in the same way as the tobacco grown in the United States ".
Soon, says Tushingham, domesticated tobacco was used during ceremonies and in 1900, Native American images were widely used in tobacco advertisements. A cigar box of 1900 presents the chef Joseph Nez Perce in full dress.
Nowadays, American Spirit, which presents itself as "100% tobacco without additives", features an eagle logo at the top of the package, with a Native American man wearing a headdress as the main logo.
The relationship with the Amerindians is at best tenuous. American Spirit is owned by Reynolds American, which is in turn a subsidiary of British American Tobacco, present in 180 countries.
Pinkham says that although one can find native tobacco plants and that there is a program to replant them, their use lies in the "small pockets of individuals".
Although he does not smoke a lot of tobacco, says Pinkham, he smokes ceremonially, the tobacco sometimes being mixed with other traditional plants.
Pinkham says he uses traditional tobacco "when I'm congested and have a very bad cold. It works better than commercial medicine. "
The research paper ends with the hope that "this information could be useful to tribal efforts to educate young people about the dangers of commercial tobacco and the sanctity of native tobacco".
It's a difficult task.
"I had a tobacco addiction myself," says Tushingham, 49, who quit smoking at age 32 when she was pregnant. "I know how difficult it is. I really liked smoking. "
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