Mixed Smoke Signals

By Louis Sahagun

Nov. 18, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

BISHOP, Calif. —

Raymond Andrews picks through the foliage of wild tobacco plants on an arid, wind-swept Sierra Nevada plateau.

The 55-year-old Paiute Indian, with waist-length gray hair and a leather satchel slung over his shoulder, inspects the leaves with an expert eye. Some, he prunes and discards. Others, he saves to smoke in sacred pipes or distribute as gifts of honor.

He sets aside a portion for educational presentations at powwows and local schools, where he urges Native Americans to use tobacco as a spiritual tool, not a recreational vice.

“The tobacco plant,” he says, “is a magical being, one that can give life -- or take life when abused in its commercial forms.”

Native Americans smoke more and die at a greater rate from tobacco-related illnesses than any other ethnic group. Anti-tobacco campaigns have done little to reduce the toll.

Now, anti-smoking advocates, including those from reservation lands and the National Cancer Institute, are trying new approaches that respect tobacco’s role in Native American rituals and traditions. The message: Skip the cigarettes and use tobacco, if you must, in ceremonial ways -- to bless marriages and cropland, to banish malevolent spirits and promote peace.

Shaping an effective anti-smoking message for Native Americans has not been easy. Asking them to give up tobacco completely is unrealistic because it is central to their religious beliefs and culture. In addition, many tribes rely on revenue from lucrative, tax-protected reservation “smoke shops.”

Even urging tribal elders to set an example by kicking the habit is asking for trouble. They generally don’t appreciate outsiders telling them what to do.

Generic anti-smoking messages delivered by non-Indians, such as the U.S. surgeon general’s warning, have fallen flat in Native American communities. So the theme that smoking kills is being repackaged in ways considered more culturally relevant.

In the support groups she leads, Jacelyn Macedo, a member of the Yurok tribe in far northwestern California, compares quitting smoking to weaving a basket with sticks and fiber. Both undertakings involve motivation, a will to persist and renewal -- all powerful themes in Native American culture.

Billboards going up on reservations in Humboldt, San Diego and Alameda counties encourage Indians to boycott tobacco products marketed with Native American icons such as bison. Such images imply that the product is culturally acceptable. “Don’t buy the lie,” the signs say.

When it comes to tribal elders, anti-smoking forces now make special efforts to seek their advice and support from the start. A strong relationship with such figures, organizers say, can be the difference between success and failure for a health program.

“After 15 years in this business, we now have a good game plan,” said Michael Weakee, director of the state-funded American Indian Tobacco Education Network in Sacramento. “We’ve got billboards up on reservation lands and along freeways. We’re training people to give presentations that won’t upset tribal leaders. We produce anti-smoking posters.”

Andrews, the Paiute educator, is a consultant for Weakee’s group. He is among a growing number of Native Americans who are seeking to revive ancient tribal traditions.

Mindful of the trend, the current anti-smoking campaigns acknowledge the importance of ceremonial uses of tobacco, which often do not involve inhaling.

“We even hand out advice on growing and caring for tobacco plants,” Weakee said. “More and more people are asking us for information about this traditional medicine; how to identify it, gather it, prepare it and use it.”

Steven P. Schinke, a professor of social work at Columbia University in New York and a specialist in smoking prevention, said that such efforts tap into a renewal of interest among Native Americans in “things traditional.”

They also reflect Indians’ deeply conflicted attitude toward tobacco.

“What we have here is a strange confluence of cultures,” Schinke said. “The sacred and the profane -- a plant traditionally rich with meaning for native people as a purifier, and tobacco products associated with disease and death, economic expense and damage to the health of one’s own children.”

Many tribal members, like Tucson art gallery manager Vonda Talaweti, feel torn between two worlds when it comes to smoking. Growing up on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, she was taught that women were not supposed to smoke cigarettes.

“The only women allowed to use tobacco smoked it in ceremonial pipes,” she recalled. “That’s why I get an uneasy feeling inside whenever I smoke an occasional cigarette with friends.... Every time I light up, I think about quitting.”

Long before Columbus reached the shores of the New World, Native Americans were using wild tobacco for religious and ceremonial purposes.

After commercial tobacco products became available in 1884, they joined millions of other Americans who got hooked on cigarettes, cigars, rolling tobacco and chewing tobacco. Eventually, Native Americans began to use commercial products in their rituals.

Today, cartons of cigarettes are often presented to tribal elders and spiritual leaders as offerings of respect. Some tribal members stick burning cigarettes into the ground at funerals or carry leather pouches full of crushed rolling tobacco in their briefcases and automobile glove compartments.

Traditional uses vary from tribe to tribe. Tobacco is smoked in sacred pipes -- like portable altars -- to send prayers to the Great Spirit. It’s burned as incense, sprinkled on the ground, tossed into open fires and buried to promote peace and bind contracts.

Some tribal members smoke hand-rolled cigarettes filled with mixtures of wild tobacco, cedar, red willow bark, sage and sweet grass to ensure safe passage or drive away malevolent spirits. Crumbled leaves are applied to cuts to relieve pain and stop bleeding. Smoke is blown into the ears to cure earaches.

For purists, using commercial tobacco products for such purposes is sacrilegious. A growing number of Native Americans are growing their own and learning to identify native species in the wild.

Those most commonly used by Native Americans are Nicotiana attenuata and N. quadrivalvis. Unlike the relatively mild, broad-leafed tobacco plants used in commercial cigarettes and cigars, these and other wild species are found in dry washes, in foothill and mountain regions charred by fire, and along roadsides. They are ubiquitous in Southern California.

The wild varieties contain highly toxic alkaloids that, in small quantities, can induce a sense of well-being. In high concentrations, they can be fatal.

Some Northern California tribes cultivate tobacco in backyard plantations fertilized with salmon carcasses and blessed with songs and prayers.

Virgil Lewis, 59, a member of the Gila River Pima tribe, gets his the old-fashioned way: by collecting leaves from wild plants in the desert washes and canyons in the Palm Springs area and near his Hesperia home, or anywhere else he finds them.

He recently spotted a robust wild tobacco plant dominating a freeway onramp in Eagle Rock.

A few miles north of San Bernardino, a natural garden of a species he calls “coyote tobacco” is shooting up through the cracks of an abandoned asphalt road in the Cajon Pass, just west of Interstate 15. Some of the plants are more than 8 feet tall.

Lewis carefully picks, dries, cures and crushes his tobacco, then mixes it with sweet grass according to formulas handed down for generations. He won’t touch his tobacco mixtures without first burning sage smoke over them to “purify the area.”

He does not inhale.

“If the smoke enters your lungs,” he said, “your prayers are no good.”

Not all tribes agree with this. Some allow inhaling from traditional pipes and cigarettes made from wild tobacco.

Lewis, who teaches cultural programs to Native American children at the Robert Sundance Summer Camp south of Bishop, said he tells students that tobacco should be used to bless families and wedding couples, to bless fields prior to planting and to promote healing -- but should not be smoked recreationally.

“Sometimes they listen,” he said, shaking his head. “But some people, especially some teens, think it’s all a bunch of hogwash.”

Thirty percent of Native American adults in California smoke cigarettes, about 50% higher than the rate of any other ethnic group, according to federal health officials. Of the five leading causes of death among Native Americans, four are related to recreational smoking.

Tom Glyn, director of science and trends for the American Cancer Society, says the organization has found little or no harm in using the plant for traditional and ceremonial uses that do not involve inhaling.

Chumash Indian Art Martinez, a clinical psychologist at the Shingle Springs Rancheria, about 20 miles southeast of Sacramento, is a liaison between tribes and Weakee’s tobacco education network. He also counsels clients who want to stop smoking.

“We had to take a serious look at how, if tobacco is a medicine, it became a poison for our people to the point that we’re in danger of losing our proper relationship with it,” Martinez said. “Now, I see a definite revival of interest in the old traditions, and in finding our way back to using medicines as they should be used.

“We believe that tobacco is something that has life, like a child. If you hurt it, you are also hurt.”

Sachelle Jaime is in charge of regional anti-smoking programs for the San Pascual Band of Mission Indians in northern San Diego County.

Jaime collected a few thousand dollars in grants to hand-paint half a dozen anti-smoking billboards along a stretch of Highway 76 that winds through four reservations.

Lately, she has focused on organizing support groups, as well as the tricky business of dealing face-to-face with tribal elders who smoke.

“Here’s how we do it,” she said. “Older folks are concerned about the prevalence of diabetes and high blood pressure. That’s our gateway. First, we talk to them about those problems, then about how smoking and secondhand smoke can make things even worse.”

Kim Marcus of the Santa Rosa Band of Cahuilla Indian Reservation holds fast to a different image of tobacco. As a boy growing up on the southern Riverside County reservation, he collected the sacred herb in ravines and sang its praises at tribal gatherings.

In the shade of a large oak tree behind his home on the reservation, Marcus, 44, recently conducted a purification ceremony he learned from his father.

“Before I can even talk about that tobacco,” he said, filling a pipe with a pinch of shredded leaves, “I must say a prayer of thanks to the Great Spirit and to the earth for its offerings.”

Marcus put a match to his pipe and blew puffs of smoke to the spirits of the west, east, north and south; to the heavens above and the earth below.

“Tobacco gives us a connection to the old times,” he said. “It brings us hope and faith and a chance to live the religion of my ancestors.”

A tour of his reservation led to a sandy wash where Marcus tends a handful of bright green tobacco plants.

He knelt before one of the shrubs and began carefully pruning dead leaves.

“Achama-cham pivat,” he said, speaking in the Cahuilla Indian language. “I have come to you in a good way, good tobacco.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Smoking rates

Native Americans smoke more cigarettes than other ethnic groups in California, and getting them to quit is hampered by the role tobacco plays in their culture and religious beliefs.

% who smoke

American Indians

All adults: 30.2%

Men: 29.2%

Women: 31.5%

Blacks

All adults: 20.6%

Men: 22.0%

Women: 19.5%

Whites

All adults: 18.1%

Men: 19.4%