Tobacco As A Painkiller In The Native Americans' Cultures.
Although the origin of tobacco use in Native American culture is uncertain, tobacco clearly played a far more ceremonial and structured role than it would come to play in Europe and the modern world.
A strong, dark, high-nicotine tobacco was crucial to the performance of shamanistic rituals and social ceremonies. Usually smoked but also chewed, drunk, taken as snuff, and even given as an enema, tobacco was seen by Native Americans as a means for providing communication with the supernatural world through the medium of the shaman, for either medicinal or spiritual purposes. Among other medical applications, tobacco was used as a cure for toothache by the Iroquois, as a cure for earache by the Indians of central Mexico, as a painkiller by the Cherokee, and as an antiseptic in Guatemala.
Beyond such practical functions, tobacco was also often exchanged as a gift, helping to forge social connections and establish community hierarchies. In many groups tobacco was given as an offering to the gods, and in some groups, in particular among the Maya, tobacco was itself deified as a divine plant. Tobacco was also linked to the fertility both of the land and of women, and it was used in initiation ceremonies for boys entering manhood. Most famously, tobacco was used in the calumet ritual, when agreements and obligations would be made binding with the passing of the ritual pipe (the calumet, or sacred pipe).
Tobacco was thus central to Native American culture, be it with the cigar in the South or the pipe in the North, and its properties were known from Canada to Argentina and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. So important was it that some native groups, such as the Blackfoot and the Crow, cultivated no other crop.
