I was always told that Native Americans smoked tobacco from their peace pipes, but one of my neo-hippie pals insist that given their world view ("they were so in tune nature, man), the natives must have been smoking ganja. Was pot a part of the peace pipe ceremony, and did native Americans take advantage of the wild pot that grows all over the continent?
I don’t know if anyone in the world smokes straight tobacco. You certainly don’t get that in most cigarettes or pipe tobacco you can buy in a tobacconist.
Native Americans made up their own mixes for their pipes, but I don’t know what they used. I shared a social pipe with an Iroqouis chief while I was researching “Weequehela”, and I can swear that it had no noticeable amount of “Weed” (or anything else odd)in it. Your friend’s feelings about this notwithstanding, the needs and wishes of Native Americans aren’t necessarily the same as his, and their ideas about how to connect with the world don’t necessarily involve psychotropic substances.
Of course the Indians smoked tobacco. The tobacco genus is Nicotiana of which there are over 60 species. A few species are native to Australia but most are native to the Americas. Only two species are commercially important. N. rustica is the species used by Indians in eastern Norht America, but is now commercially important only in parts of Asia and the former USSR. N. tabacum was used by Indians in the Caribbean, Mexico, and the northern part of South America. All US-made cigarettes are made from N. tabacum.
Columbus noted that Indians used tobacco in many ways: as snuff, as chewing tobacco, as pipe tobacco, and in cigars.
Just in case I didn’t make myself clear – the mixture in the pipe was undoubtedly MOSTLY tobacco. I just don’t know what else was in it.
By ancient tradition, the Native Americans can’t have smoked
pot, since it was native only to the Old World.
Couldn’t they have also smoked peyote out west?
And tell your neo-hippie friend that he’s wrong.
Generally, native Americans did not smoke pure tobacco, but rather a mixture of tobacco (if they could get it) and other herbs and bark. This mixture was known as kinnikinnick (also spelled kinnikinnik or kinnikinnic). For instance, this site reports that the Cree used the bark of the dogwood tree mixed with other herbs.
In the west, where tobacco doesn’t grow, they often substituted leaves from bearberry plants. Because of this, the bearberry is also known as kinnikinnick.
Yeah, when I worked in the bush in northern Canada the Indians would mix the reddish bark of a low bush called “kinickinick” with their tobacco if they were very poor, or away from town for a long time, and had to make their tobacco last.
Thanks Teeming Millions. My Flower Child pal stands corrected.
Smoke peote? Are you nuts? 
Dried cactus would not smoke too well IMHO, it’s mostly water and skin.
Peote is also a very powerful little plantlife, and is usually taken in very small doses (by people with a certain NA religious affiliation) in ceremonies supervised carefully by the local shaman.