Category:Native American herbs

A Native American herb is a plant medicine used in the indigenous medical traditions of the Americas, encompassing the Algonquian, Iroquoian, Cherokee, Lakota, Apache, Diné (Navajo), Pueblo, and many other First Nations medical traditions of North America; the Mayan, Aztec (Nahua), Zapotec, and other indigenous traditions of Mesoamerica; and the Quechua, Aymara, Tukano, Yanomami, and many other indigenous traditions of South America. The category collects the herbs whose Native American use is sufficiently established and (for the pharmacopedia.wiki clinical-reference purpose) sufficiently relevant to contemporary herbal-medicine practice to warrant a dedicated wiki monograph.

The pharmacopoeial record of the Native American traditions, unlike the written compendia of Ayurveda and TCM, was largely oral and was therefore mediated for the modern record by European, American, and ethnobotanical interlocutors. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (the Badianus Manuscript) of 1552, a Nahuatl-text-to-Latin-translation of the Aztec medicinal plant pharmacopoeia compiled by the Aztec physician Martín de la Cruz and translated by Juan Badiano at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, is the earliest documented Native American medical text; the Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún (compiled in the 1570s) records substantial Aztec pharmacological knowledge in book eleven. The North American First Nations traditions enter the documentary record principally through nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnobotanical work: the Daniel Moerman Native American Ethnobotany database (1998) is the foundational modern reference, documenting more than four thousand plant uses across two hundred North American tribes.

Native American plant medicines have contributed disproportionately to the modern Western pharmacopoeia. Cinchona bark for malaria entered European medicine through Quechua use in seventeenth-century Peru; coca (Erythroxylum coca), tobacco (Nicotiana species), cacao (Theobroma cacao), chili pepper (Capsicum species), and many other foundational medicinal-and-food plants were Native American medicines transferred to global use. Curare from Strychnos toxifera was the basis of modern neuromuscular-blocking pharmacology. Witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) entered the Western pharmacopoeia through Mohegan and Iroquois use. Lobelia entered through the same route. Echinacea was a Plains-tribe medicine before its Eclectic-era and modern adoption. Slippery elm (Ulmus rubra), black cohosh (Actaea racemosa), bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis), and many others crossed from Native American medical use into the American Eclectic tradition and from there into modern Western herbal practice.

The contemporary clinical and ethical considerations around Native American herbs are substantial. The conservation status of several traditional medicinal plants is precarious (the United Plant Savers At-Risk list, established in the 1990s, was developed in substantial part to address overharvest of Native American medicinal plants — goldenseal, black cohosh, slippery elm, and American ginseng are among the At-Risk species). The ethical question of cultural appropriation and benefit-sharing is active, with the Convention on Biological Diversity's Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit-sharing (2010) and various national-level legal frameworks attempting to address the historical extraction of Indigenous medical knowledge without compensation or community consent. Many of the traditional ceremonial-medicine uses (peyote in the Native American Church, ayahuasca in the syncretic Brazilian churches, several others) are now restricted under controlled-substance regimes that have produced complex legal-religious accommodations.

The Native American medicinal plants of established use, as documented across the ethnobotanical literature and the Eclectic-tradition incorporation, are progressively indexed as their individual monographs are built. The foundational set: echinacea (Echinacea purpurea, E. angustifolia), goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis), black cohosh (Actaea racemosa), slippery elm (Ulmus rubra), witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana), lobelia (Lobelia inflata), bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius), Oregon grape (Mahonia aquifolium), yerba mansa (Anemopsis californica), uva-ursi (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), pleurisy root (Asclepias tuberosa), the herbal materia medica of the Cherokee, the Algonquian wild cherry (Prunus serotina), the willow bark (Salix species, used by many tribes for fever and pain), and the foundational food-medicine plants (corn Zea mays, squash Cucurbita, beans, sunflower).

The boundary of this category is "plant medicine of established use in one or more Native American medical traditions, with a dedicated wiki monograph." The category covers indigenous North American, Mesoamerican, and South American traditions. The classical Mesoamerican ceremonial medicines (peyote Lophophora williamsii, psilocybin mushrooms, datura, ayahuasca-component plants) are cross-indexed with the Plants entheogenic-axis subcategories per the multi-membership rule; their herbal-clinical use (where it exists outside of ceremonial use) is documented under this category. The Western adoption of Native American medicines through the American Eclectic tradition is documented in detail under Western clinical herbs, with the originating Native American use cross-referenced from each individual monograph. The Convention on Biological Diversity provisions on traditional-knowledge benefit-sharing are referenced for context on the relevant medicine pages but are not themselves medicines.

This category page is an encyclopedia article about its subject. The actual index of herbs belonging to the category is generated automatically by the wiki engine, from category-membership declarations on the individual herb pages, and appears at the foot of the page below the references.