SACRED SMOKE

Tobacco has marked Indian rituals for centuries, regarded as medicine,
not a menace, documentary shows

[Photo Captions: Indians smoking a pipe around a campfire, whether in 1868
at Fort Laramie, above, or today, use tobacco smoke as a medium, like
incense in a church service. Ann-Marie Sayers says her people have used
tobacco as a sacrament for generations.]

Tobacco kills. Cigarette smoke can be lethal. There's not much
disagreement on those counts, yet American Indians say they tell only
part of the story. Since the beginnings of tribal memory, Indians have
burned tobacco to initiate ceremonies, to honor elders, to send their
prayers swirling upward to the Creator. Used ritually, tobacco heals,
rather than harms, they believe. It is a medicine, not a menace. The
plant that modern society has demonized is, from the Native American
perspective, a sacrament.

This is the story told by filmmaker Ismana Carney in a new documentary
entitled ``We Pray With Tobacco,'' which has its first public
screenings this month. The film explores the depths of tradition that
lie behind the mocking ``We-Smokum-Peace-Pipe'' image that's been
slapped on American Indians.

Why were the Indians always smoking that pipe, anyway? Because tobacco
and the pipe itself are divine gifts. When the pipe is smoked, every
bit of tobacco is thought to represent a part of creation, so that all
of creation is contained in the pipe's bowl. And as the ceremonial
smoke wafts between the peacemakers, all their good intentions are
made plain to the Creator.

That's why they smoked the pipe, Carney, of Scotts Valley, explains.
And as she does, the thought rises in the film viewer that Sir Walter
Raleigh's tobacco trade must have represented the grand theft of
something holy -- an unspeakable sacrilege -- to indigenous people.

But this is no simple paean to the spirituality of Indians. ``There is
no pristine, perfect culture out there,'' says Carney, an instructor
of history and world religions at local colleges, who co-directed the
film with her husband, John. ``There are Natives dying of lung cancer,
young kids smoking.''

And there is irony, she admits, that modern American Indians -- whose
communities are often ravaged by addictions to alcohol, drugs and
other substances -- should reclaim tobacco as a source of spiritual
well-being. It's as if the plant that everyone hates is undergoing
renewal, becoming a symbol of the recovery of ethnic identity.

``What I wanted to say was it's not the nature of the plant that's the
problem so much as how we choose to use it,'' Carney explains. ``And
there's a universal lesson to be learned there, which extends to
caffeine, alcohol or wine, even peyote, which is a part of certain
tribal ceremonies . . .

``We're talking about the appropriate use of something that's really
powerful. By contextualizing it in a sacred format, Native Americans
control tobacco's negative aspect. There's almost an implicit boundary
that's set. The problem is we've taken the sacred element out of
ordinary, everyday living.''

The film is filled with interviews with Indians -- many from the South
Bay and Central Coast -- who regard the casual smoking of cigarettes
as an abusive habit.

They describe the myriad ritual uses of ``Indian tobacco,'' which
includes tabacum nicotanea as well as herbal tobaccos derived from red
cedar bark, mullein and other plants. Luta Candelaria, raised in San
Jose, tells how tobacco is thrown on the head of a drum to ``bring the
drum to life.''

Leonard Crow Dog of South Dakota says that tobacco is burned to honor
a returning hunter or to welcome a baby to the world. Ella Rodriguez

of Salinas explains that tobacco is thrown into an open grave as ``an
offering, like other people put a flower or a handful of dirt. . . .
It's a peace offering to hurry the spirit on to their other world.''

To this day, Ann-Marie Sayers, tribal chair of the Indian Canyon
Nation near Hollister, picks and dries tobacco that grows on her
family's land.

``I can recall as a child going down to the creek to harvest some
oregano,'' she says in an interview, ``and my mother would say,
`Remember to acknowledge the plant.' You see, when we pick a plant, we
offer it tobacco, to acknowledge the life of that plant. When we have
sweat lodges, we offer tobacco to the stones. Many people believe the
stones contain the spirits of our ancestors, so the tobacco is food
for the stones.''

This cosmology comes especially alive when American Indians sit around
campfires, as they do throughout the film, patiently tending the
coals, telling stories and honing Indian lore. The fire is said to be
a source of life, like the heart. When Patrick Orozco of Watsonville
holds aloft an abalone shell filled with burning herbal tobacco, the
smoke seems potent.

``Tobacco is nothing to be played with,'' warns Crow Dog gruffly. The
thought is
extended by Alan Doxtator, a member of the Oneida tribe in Ontario: ``Be
careful of what your thoughts are when you're smoking tobacco,'' he says in
the film. ``Be careful of what you're seeing when you're smoking tobacco.
The tobacco is a real sacred thing, and it can hurt you when you misuse
it.''

One of several participants in the documentary who have traveled to
the Bay Area to attend the screenings -- tonight's in Monterey is sold
out -- Doxtator waxes further on tobacco's potency during an
interview. He explains that tobacco smoke is a medium, like incense in
a church service, through which prayers are transported ``to the Sky
World where the Great One lives. And the Great One looks after us and
is our creator. And he sees all our needs and wants, and they're met.''

Hotline to Creator

The smoke is a spiritual transmitter: ``It's our hotline to the
Creator.''

Carney loves the symbolism. For years, she has taught history and
religious studies at Hartnell College in Salinas and Monterey
Peninsula College and Chapman University in Monterey. Sacred fire and
``holy smoke'' exist in many faiths, she well knows, and almost every
religion extols its own particular gateways to non-human realms.

To Carney, tobacco is another ``conduit to the sacred, like the wafer
in the Holy Eucharist. In and of itself, that wafer is made of flour
and water, nothing more. Someone made it. But when it's in the
Eucharist, it's a medium through which sacred things happen, and the
same thing with the tobacco. It's a plant, yes, but also something
more.''

``We Pray With Tobacco'' is Carney's first film, a collaboration with
her husband, who's been in the industry for years and served as
technical adviser. Carney was born in England, but her interest in
American Indian culture has been building for nine years, ever since
she met an Indian council leader at a crafts festival in San Juan Bautista.

She was invited to a workshop on Indian traditions, wound up
volunteering at local pow-wows, and, over time, developed ``a certain
access'' to the Indian community.

It didn't take long for her to observe the ``real close relationship''
that exists between Indians and the tobacco plant.

``Ceremonially, it's a very critical component to establishing
relationships, almost immediately,'' she says. ``You meet an elder,
you always give them tobacco. It's a way of saying, `I have come into
your life and stand on your ground with respect.' ''

She pronounces, slowly and respectfully, the Indian names for tobacco
in several tongues: ``shunshka . . . shashansha . . . pukateh.'' Then
she explains that the most ancient carbon-dated tobacco seeds --
excavated in South America -- are 2,300 years old.

From Brazil to northern Canada, most tribes pray with tobacco. And for

many, no ceremonial item is more important to Indians than the sacred
pipe, known as the Chanunpa Wakan to the Lakota people of the Great
Plains.

The first sacred pipe

According to Lakota legend, the pipe was brought to Earth by a
spiritual being known as the ``White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman,'' who
carried with her a ``Sacred Bundle,'' the source of the tribe's
ceremonial traditions. The first sacred pipe, made from the leg bone
of a buffalo calf, was in that bundle; it is said to remain in the
possession of a man named Arvol Looking Horse, a member of a prominent
Lakota family.

Here's how a sacred pipe is smoked, as explained by William S. Lyon in
his ``Encyclopedia of Native American Healing'': The tobacco mixture
is almost ``never inhaled,'' Lyon writes.

``One simply takes several strong puffs while holding the bowl in the
left hand; with the free right hand, one moves the smoke over one's
head for a blessing. When finished, one often says, `All my
relations,' as a reminder that everything is one in the Creator. When
praying with a loaded sacred pipe, one usually points the stem
skyward. When blessing a person or object with the sacred pipe, one
usually touches it with the stem.''

Owning such a pipe is a serious responsibility. In Carney's film,
Candelaria is practically in tears as he describes the moment when his
older brother presented him with a pipe as a gift. Candelaria had
lived through drug problems and unspecified troubles before finding
his way back to the old Indian ways. The gift was a sign that his
brother had been watching him and now believed he was walking a sacred
road.

One of the film's sub-themes is that those old ways are gradually
returning to the Indian nation; Doxtator reports that it's common for
young people to learn the Oneida language on his Ontario
reservation.

Sayers, the tribal leader in Hollister, says the tradition has been
``dormant, not dead. It's been sleeping in our brains. And I feel the
ancestral spirits are reactivating the brain cells to bring back all
this knowledge.''

How ironic, that tobacco -- Public Health Enemy No. 1 -- should be
described as ``the breath of the Creator,'' as one tribe puts it.

You don't have to buy into that description, Carney says. But she
hopes everyone who sees her film will realize at least that ``there's
another picture here, another story. There's a plant that's been used,
non-addictively, for thousands of years by the native people of this
land.''

She imagines that Indian teenagers -- smokers -- will turn on their
television sets one of these days and see her film.

``They'll be channel surfing, smoking away, and then they'll see the
show and think, `Hey, look at this. This is different.' '' And then
maybe they'll put down their cigarettes.

``We Pray With Tobacco'' will be shown at the 23rd annual American
Indian Film Festival at noon Nov. 19 at the AMC Kabuki Theater, 1881
Post St., San Francisco. Additional information on the film can be
found at www.wepraywithtobacco.com

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady