CHUMASH CURES

The Chumash had many treatments and cures for illnesses. Here are a few.

Toloache (Datura wrightii) was used with extreme caution, because the plant is highly toxic, with many deaths among the Chumash reported as well as during modern times. When a sick person was given toloache, relatives would gather around to sing and dance and shout to keep the person who was ill from falling asleep (they apparently recognized the danger of a person falling asleep and lapsing into a coma and death). Fernando Librado said that in measuring how much to give a sick person, you should use a person who has a short last joint on the fourth finger. In that way, they give a short measure. When the person who has been given the toloache awakens (apparently many did fall asleep), they must not drink water. The person who has administered the toloache may provide the ill person some little bit of warm water so that the ill person can wash out their mouth. After that they must abstain from all water for two days, eat only a light acorn gruel with clam or cotton-tail or some other light meat and abstain from sleeping with their spouse for 21 days. Great credence was given to dreams while under in effects of toloache.

Red ants (probably the California harvester ant) were also used. When taken internally, an ant doctor, usually an old woman, would administer the treatment. The sick person would be given a mixture of hundreds of live ants mixed with down. In other cases, the patient would lie or stand naked on a red anthill, which had been broken into. This resulted in the ants biting the patient hundreds of time. The effects of the bites, which contain formic acid, were said to render cures. The victim, who often fainted during the ordeal, would be rubbed all over with green sycamore leaves and then with freshly chewed tobacco. Doctors were paid only if the patient got well.

When people became seriously ill, it was often assumed that they were being poisoned by someone. Great efforts were gone to determines who the poisoning party was. During the early mission period, as the Indians died in great numbers, many Chumash medicine men were killed by their own people, for it was assumed that they were the cause of so many deaths.

Seawater was probably used most often to effect cures. Several quarts of water were given to the ill person. This normally resulted in vomiting , which the Chumash believed expelled whatever was causing the person to be sick.

Two cures for epilepsy are recorded. One was to drink some deer blood. This, of course, had to be done as soon as a deer had been killed, so the patient had to follow a deer hunter around in order to be there when the kill occurred. The other cure was to eat the throbbing heart of a crow. For this latter cure to work, one had to abstain from sex for 21 days.

Rheumatism was sometime cured by wrapping the rheumatic part with a dead rattlesnake. People with rheumatism sometimes carried dead rattlesnakes around with them in their pockets.

                                                                                                Mike Kuhn

12-23-04