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"Herbs & Roots" (1754) by Samson Occom

Title

"Herbs & Roots" (1754) by Samson Occom

Description

This 1754 herbal diary is a rare written record of indigenous medicinal practices from early New England. Part of the original manuscript is housed at Dartmouth College (link above); the other part is in the New London County Historical Society in Connecticut.  A full transcription can be found in Joanna Brooks’s collection of Occom’s writings

Jason Mancini, a senior researcher at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, attributes the relative scarcity of Native medical remedies in the historical record to “fear, misunderstanding, and subsequent mischaracterization of Native beliefs,” as well as to the arrogance of European colonial physicians. He adds, “in spite of the fact that many North American plants became part of the Euro-American ‘medicine chest,’ Indians were seldom given credit for ‘discovering’ their uses.”

What prompted Occom to make this unusual record?  Joanna Brooks says that the death of Occom’s father, Joshua, in 1743 “fully ushered Samson into his responsibilities as an adult member of his family, kinship network and tribe. These weighty new responsibilities and his sense of the imperilment of Mohegan territory generated in Occom ‘a great Inclination’ . . . to improve his reading and writing skills” (14).  Meanwhile, English settlers brought diseases that proved disastrous to Native communities.  According to Brooks, Occom developed a close relationship with a Montaukett man named Ocus, who taught him how to treat the eyestrain that plagued him during his study with Eleazar Wheelock.  Ocus also shared over 50 additional herbal and root medicines useful for a wide range of ailments and purposes, from treating burns and digestive complaints to serving reproductive health and contraception. Perhaps Occom felt a record of these medicines should be left for survivors. After all, that is really what we learn from all of his writings—a constant sense of obligation or desire to regenerate the Mohegan tribe.

But the herbal diary is often cryptic. It appears Occom purposely avoids any issue concerning the science of growing, discovery, and the timeliness in gathering of the herbs. Perhaps the diary was a ruse to satisfy the colonists’ curiosity about medicinal cures from plants.   Or perhaps he felt this knowledge was being effectively kept by Mohegan women who could read between the lines. In an email exchange in April of 2012, Melissa Tantaquideon Zobel, the current medicine woman and tribal historian, stated, “In Mohegan tradition women were the healers, which suggests gender issues may have come into play here in the denigration of indigenous medicine just as they did in old Europe.” Thus, in those places where Occom does not even name the herb or weed used in a specific cure, perhaps he was relying on the fact that the older generation instructed the young women which seed to plant for what, verbally transmitting their instructions for how medicine was to be prepared.          

Samson Occom’s recording of these remedies marks the beginning of a Mohegan ethnobotanical literary tradition that continues to this day, from Medicine Woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon’s scholarly treatise to the historical writings and novels of her protégé and descendant, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel.  These writings blend both Mohegan and Euro-colonial traditions to preserve and promote indigenous knowledge.

The very fact that they are written, and written in English (Tantaquidgeon adds botanical Latin), is a shift in traditional Mohegan ways of imparting knowledge.  Mohegan medicine people were and are thoroughly trained by elders, following them as they gather herbs and listening carefully to their knowledge.  They would not necessarily need to write this knowledge down, and they might not even want to, because wild plant populations are vulnerable to over collection, misuse and (as Winona LaDuke explains) biopiracy. Tantaquidgeon frames her Mohegan pharmacopeia by cautioning, “pick only what you need and leave some in reserve. The Indian practiced conservation in its true meaning” (68-69).

Occom’s notebook therefore gives very few specifics.  His entry (#29) for wintergreen, for example, calls of “wintergreen and another herbe.”  He uses English standards of measurement (“3 quarts of water”), but doesn’t reveal other things: at what time does one pick wintergreen? When it is a sprout, fully grown or drying out?   On this same remedy, Tantaquidgeon says simply that wintergreen tea is “a warming beverage and a kidney medicine” (72).  These omissions urge those seeking cures to look towards more knowledgeable sources, like the tribes, for help.  They are a way of protecting traditional ecological knowledge even while they document the value of the cures. In the time Occom was writing that value was also monetary. Occom says he paid Ocus “in all 27 York money” for the information.

This hybrid text connects readers to Mohegan herbal knowledge, but is also indicative of a more complex relationship, one with the utmost respect for the earth. In order for herbal medicine to be practiced successfully we must follow the ways of the Mohegans in order to sustain the land that serves us.

Works Cited

Brooks, Joanna, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan Edited by Joanna Brooks

Dartmouth University Archives, Rauner Special Collections Library

Fawcett, Melissa Jayne. The Lasting of the Mohegans: Part I, The Story of the Wolf People. Uncasville, CT: The Mohegan Tribe, 1995.

Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel. Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon. University of Arizona Press, 2000.

LaDuke, Winona. “The Political Economy of Wild Rice.” Multinational Monitor 25, no. 4 (April 2004): 27–29.

 Occom, Samson. The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century Native America. Edited by Joanna Brooks. Oxford University Press, USA, 2006.

 Tantaquidgeon, Gladys. Folk Medicine of the Delaware and Related  Algonkian Indians. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission,1972.

Creator

Occom, Samson

Date

1754

Contributor

Verna Boudreau UNH '16
Jody Curran UNH '12

Language

English

Type

Document

Format

jpeg

Identifier

DV-257

Geolocation

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