Excerpts from the Introduction
Medicinal Wild Plants of the Prairie: An Ethnobotanical Guide (1992)
By Dr. Kelly Kindscher
Kelly Kindscher was born in Kansas and grew up on his family’s homesteaded farm near Guide Rock, Nebraska. He attended the University of Kansas and completed his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 1991. Presently, Dr. Kindscher is a plant ecologist for the Kansas Biological Survey where he conducts research on plant communities throughout Kansas and the Great Plains. He is author of two books: Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie (1987) and Medicinal Wild Plants of the Prairie (1992), published by the University Press of Kansas. He has also published several articles and technical reports on prairie plants, prairie and wetland restoration, ethnobotany, land ownership, and agriculture. Dr. Kindscher was a founder of the Kansas Land Trust and currently is its vice-president. He also serves on the boards of the Tallgrass Legacy Allinance and the United Plant Savers. He lives near Lawrence, Kansas, where he is an active gardener and conservationist.
Most Indian tribes had hierarchies of medicinal plants, with certain plants commonly used for a wide variety of purposes. Ales Hrdlicka, a medical doctor and physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, emphasized this when he stated in 1932:
In every tribe the older women and men knew scores of herbs and various mechanical or other means, which they employed exactly as did many of our country grandmothers and grand fathers, simply, rationally and often with marked success. They knew poisons, emetics, cathartics, antifebriles, tonics, narcotics, and hemostatics, cleansing solutions, healing gums and powders. They had antidotes. They employed massage, pressure, scarification, cauterization, bandaging, splints, sucking, enemas, cutting, scraping, and suturing.
But whenever the cause of a complaint was obscure, or when the complaint was proving dangerous and all ordinary aid had failed, particularly if this was in a hitherto healthy adult—then their minds turned to the supernatural (Hrdlicka, 1932, pp. 1661—66).
There were both medicine men and medicine women in the Plains Indian tribes (Denig, 1930,p. 422; and Grinnell, 1905,p. 37). Frederick Hodge stated in his Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico: “These shaman healers as a rule were shrewd . . . ; some were sincere, noble characters, worthy of respect; others were charlatans to a greater or less degree.” (Hodge, 1959, p. 838). As part of their healing ceremonies, they used ritual songs drumming, prayer, and medicinal plants.
The Indians did not separate the use of these various methodologies in their healing practices. For the purpose of this study, however, I have examined one component in isolation— their use of medicinal plants.
Medicinal plants have played a major role in the health and healing system of the Indians. This system is not static, but has changed to meet new needs. Diseases that were apparently brought to North America from Europe, such as venereal disease and smallpox, have in some cases been treated with native prairie plants (Camazine and Bye, 1980 pp. 381—83).
The Indians of the region also used moxa. For this they burned a piece of a plant (such as the stem of lead plant, Amorpha canescens) on top of an injury. The burn was believed to counteract the injury underneath it.Moxa is used in Asia today to stimulate an acupuncture point or serve as a counterirritant. The use of moxa shows a link in healing methodologies between native peoples of Asia and North America. Plants used as moxa by the Plains Indians include: lead plant, Amorpha canescens; asters, Aster species; white sage, Artemisia ludoviciana; nine-anther prairie clover, Dalea enneandra; round head lespedeza, Lespedeza capitata; prickly pear, Opuntia species; prairie ground cherry, Physalis pumila heterophylla and wild alfalfa, Psoralea tenuiflora
There are also examples in Indian medicine of what in Europe was known as the Doctrine of Signatures, or belief in signs. According to this doctrine, the distinctive characteristics of a plant revealed its medical uses. For example, both the green milkweed, Asclepins viridiflora, and snow-on-the- mountain, Euphorbia marginata, have milky sap, which was taken as a sign or signature that these plants were good medicines for nursing mothers who needed to produce more breast milk.
The Indians’ tremendous knowledge of prairie plants is evident throughout the book. Probably all native plants had Indian names, and in some cases the Indians recognized a greater number of species or varieties than we do. For example, Beebalm, Monarda fistulosa, is recognized today to have two distinct varieties in the Great Plains (Great Plains Flora Association, 1986, p. 725; and Gilmore, 1977, p. 59). The Pawnees had four names to distinguish the four varieties they recognized and used.
At least two plants, yarrow, Achillea millefolium, and sage, Artemisia species, were used almost identically by Indians in North America and folk practitioners in Europe before the two cultures had contact. Concerning Artemisia, the botanist William Chase Stevens stated:
In the New World, as in the Old, the lives of the natives were intimately and vitally related to theplant population and itneed that our Indians put the indigenous Artemisias to much the same medicinal uses as the early Europeans and Asiatic, did theirs; but that our Indians - should have, as they did, the same kind of superstitions about the Artemisias and use them in similar rites and ceremonies, with confidence in their magic powers is amazing (Stevenson, 1915, p. 422).
In addition, there were some highly specialized uses of plants that today are considered to be dangerous. For example, yucca, Yucca glauca, and puccoon, Lithospermum species, were known to be birth control substances, and locoweed, Oxytropis species, was used for sore throat, asthma, sores, ear troubles, and to increase the flow of breast milk (Johnston, 1970,p. 314, Hellson, 1974, p. 73; and Hart, 1981, p.29). These species contain poisonous substances, so successful use indicates considerable knowledge.
Many of the Indians’ remedies can be explained by the presence of pharmacologically active substances in the plants. Twenty-eight of the 203plants included in this study have been listed at some time in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia. However, the majority have ranges that extend into the more wooded eastern United States. There was only one species listed in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, the purple coneflower, Echinacea angustifolia, that had a range confined to the Prairie Bioregion. This does not indicate that the prairie has fewer plants with biologically active substances, but rather, that prairie plants have not been sufficiently studied. It has been estimated that only 5 to 15 percent of the world’s 250,000to 750,000existing species of higher plants have been surveyed for biologically active compounds, and many of those have been analyzed for only one type of compound, such as antitumor agents (Croom, 1983, p. 23). There is a growing recognition of the value of plants for medicines. The World Health Organization concluded “that to meet the minimum health needs of developing countries by the year 2000, traditional medicine must be utilized” (ibid.).
There is also a growing interest in plant medicines in the more deve1oped countries. In Germany, a country with liberal regulations on herbal preparations based on a strong tradition of natural drug usage, a survey found that 76 percent of women interviewed take herbal teas for their beneficial effects, and about 52percent turned to herbal remedies for the initial treatment of minor illnesses (Tyler, 1986, p. 281).It is remarkable that the greatest interest in purple coneflower today comes from Germany, where most of the researchon its immunostimulatory properties is being conducted. This plant, native only to North America, was also the medicinal plant widely used by the sot the Prairie Bioregion.
In the United States, public interest in herbs and medicinal plants has spawned a booming industry that is expected to gain momentum. Varro Tyler, a medicinal chemist, stated that “a government that underwrites a program for engineers to send people to the moon will probably be forced to provide some support to biological scientists to investigate plant drugs to cure human disease.” He predicts that the government will “therefore ease somewhat the unnecessarily rigid standards for marketing new drugs, particularly drugs from plants long in use as folk remedies, and thus stimulate more producers to begin research and development of them” (ibid.).
Many plants have been used for medicinal purposes in the United States. An 1849study by the American Medical Association showed that there were more than a thousand species of plants in the United States “reputed to possess medicinal qualities of value in the treatment of disease” (Davis, 1849,p. 663). In 1950,the American drug trade was using about 900plant species, but only 350of them were native, naturalized, or cultivated. Although no exact figures are available, itis estimated that 40percent of the prescription drugs now sold in the United States contain at least one ingredient derived from nature. Up to 25percent of our prescription drugs contain an ingredient derived from higher (flowering) plants (Foster and Duke, 1990,p. vii). Although further study of native prairie plants in the laboratory probably will not find a cure for cancer or AIDS, antitumor agents and substances that stimulate the human immune system have been discovered in some of these plants.
The medicinal constituents and ethnobotanical uses of the plants of the Prairie Bioregion have not been adequately studied. The most comprehensive study to date is Melvin Gilmore’s ethnobotanical work on the Indians of the Prairie Bioregion, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, first published in 1919 (Cilmore, 1977). In this work, Gilmore recounted the use of plants by the Omahas, Poncas, Dakotas and Lakotas, Pawnees, and Winnebagos. He reported the ethnobotanical use of over 150species, either for food or for medicinal purposes.
I have identified 203species of native prairie plants that were used medicinally by Indians of the Prairie Bioregion. The medicinal use of these plants was probably as important, if not more important, than their use as food. A previous study showed that only 123species of prairie plants were used for food (Kindscher, 1987, p. 4). Many plants were used for both food and medicine, but medicine was usually made with more potent parts of the plant and with different preparation techniques, and higher dosages were given. A few well-known medicinal species (peyote, Lophophora williamsii; jimsonweed, Datura innoxia; and tobacco, Nicotiana rustica) were excluded from this study because they are not native to the Prairie Bioregion. Their use in this region is probably a relatively recent development.
Paul Vestal and Richard Schultes of the Harvard Botanical Museum concluded in 1939that “the economic botany of no group of Indians in North America is probably so inadequately known as is that of the Plains tribes” (Vestal and Schultes, 1939, p. 83). Since then, there have been few studies of specific Plains tribes. This is the first study of the medicinal plants of the entire Prairie Bioregion.
In examining both the ethnobotanical and historical literature on the Prairie Bioregion, I found little recorded use of tree species or aquatic species. This supports the conclusions of historians and plant ecologists that the region had few trees before white settlers arrived. It also indicates that tribes like the Mesquakies of present-day Iowa, who used primarily prairie plants for their medicines, are people of the prairie rather than the woodland. Their affinities remain with the original and predominant vegetation type of their native homelands, the prairies.
In addition to studying the Indian use of these plants, I investigated their use by pioneers and settlers in Anglo folk medicine and by medical practitioners. I also reviewed recent scientific research involving native prairie plants. It is significant that all prairie plants that were used by medical practitioners had been used previously by the Indians of the region.
By the time the region was being settled, many of the Indians had been displaced and removed to reservations. What little contact there was between the remaining Indians and white settlers was generally not conducive to the sharing of information. This lack of positive interaction may explain why the medicinal use of native prairie plants by pioneers and settlers on the Oregon, California, and Santa Fe trails was almost nonexistent (Olch, 1985, pp. 196—212).In addition, the fundamentally different spiritual worldviews that underlay the health systems of the two groups effectively prevented the exchange of information on plants health.
A study of Kansas folklore listed folk customs concerning “The Prevention and Cure of Ills and Injuries” (Koch, 1980). This was the largest number of customs in any of the twelve areas of folklore studied, indicating that health and healing were primary concerns. Nevertheless, only a handful of plants to the region were used for treatments (prickly pear was listed three times, cedar trees were listed only twice and ragweed, ironweed, sageweed, and milkweed were each listed only once). Plants from outside the region (sassafras listed nine times) and cultivated plants (tobacco listed eight times) were more frequently used. Nonplant remedies were the most common of all. Not only did settlers overlook the medicinal uses of native prairie plants, they also overlooked their potential as food (Kindscher, 1987, p. 5). In sum, since the time of settlement by pioneers, the use of plants by humans in the Prairie Bioregion has received little attention from either specialists or nonspecialists. The time is ripe for the discovery of the plants around us.
Kindscher, Kelly. "Introduction". Medicinal Wild Plants of the Prairie: An Ethnobotanical Guide. Lawrance, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1992. 6-11