Kuwesi-medicine

Statements by Passamaquoddy Elders

DAVID FRANCIS, tribal historian / Wabanaki language coordinator. If it weren't for Indian medicine, I wouldn't have a family. My wife couldn't bear children. But with our medicine, once she started having babies they wouldn't stop coming. We had 10 children. We depend so much on our own medicine. If you needed an appetite you had solan [z'LAH­N] (sumac tea cooked on woodstove). Mother made me and my brother drink it every morning before we went to high school. Solan gave us a big appetite and we wouldn't get sick. We ate a lot and worked hard. A lot of medicine is lost because of people not sharing, even Indians not sharing with each other. They die with it. I share everything, whatever it is – medicine, language, recipes.

WAYNE NEWELL, Bilingual Director, Indian Township School; recently nominated to the board of the University of Maine. That would be my assessment, that the elders would want us to do whatever we can to preserve this knowledge. It is a powerful process; it doesn't just deal with the ailment it deals with the whole person. Given the substance abuse issue in our community, we need something to replace it. They're doing this methadone stuff. If they only do that, they'll go back on drugs. You've got to have something beyond another substance. It has to do with spirit and believing in something beyond what we can see. That's where our people were at, that's where they came from and we need to go back to that. We have an opportunity to share that with each other and with a bigger world. This is a valuable contribution - not just to our own community, but to the area and to all the Wabanaki people.
With the medicine, the younger generation will start to pay attention to us. Looking at the fact that if we don't share, where are our kids going to look after we're dead? Who are they going to ask?
Every time we lose an elder, we lose the knowledge...

FREDDA PAUL, traditional healer,
When I was a teenager, I came back to the reservation from Indian Residential School in Shubenacadie. My grandmother began teaching me the medicine, but it had to be done in secrecy. Many of our spiritual ways, which included medicine, were suppressed by the Catholic Church. 
At that time, people were so healthy. We worked together and we worked hard. Sickness wasn’t taking over people’s lives. You didn’t see diabetes, arthritis and cancer, like you do today. We had an alcohol problem, but drugs hadn’t come in.