NATIVE NATURE
Jim Adams puts Native American legends of medicinal plants in the spotlight during his pharmacology lectures.
If Jim Adams wasn’t already an associate professor of pharmacology, he might be mistaken for an aspiring medicine man because of his expertise in California Native American culture. In particular, by sharing the quiet history of the Chumash tribe, Adams, Pharm.D., enhances his class lectures on local medicinal plants.
The Chumash, he explains, populated California’s central and southern coast for 13,000 years prior to the Spanish missionaries gaining control of their lands. They revered medicinal plants due to an important legend. The story tells of when their homeland, the Channel Islands, became too crowded. Xoy, the creator god, solved the problem by dividing the tribe into two.
“Half of the tribe walked across a rainbow bridge to the top of Mount Pinos near Santa Barbara,” Adams explains. As they crossed the bridge, some fell into the sea. Xoy took pity and changed them into dolphins. The Mount Pinos people became the Ka’ikiku, or brothers of the dolphins, and the people of the islands became the Molmolokiku. Xoy asked them to create plants for the Ka’ikiku to use for survival. When they were done, he took the Molmolokiku with him into the afterlife. “The Chumash still pray to their kin before each plant’s use,” Adams says, “since it is viewed as an ancestral offering.”
Adams uses the story to illustrate the rich spiritual history of medicinal plants in California, and their traditional and modern uses. For pharmacists, knowing common uses along with the active ingredients of a plant can be of great benefit. For example, he says, willow is found in streambeds across Southern California and the Chumash Indians chewed on it to alleviate head and tooth aches. Yerba mansa, also known as swamp root or lizard tail, was used as a tea to treat cuts and sores, venereal diseases, asthma, kidney and urinary tract disorders, and as a bath for arthritis. Washtiqoliqol, or California Rose, was made into a tea to help babies with colic, teething and constipation. The petals were also dried and crushed into baby powder.
While on the hunt for a drug that mitigated brain injury associated with stroke, Adams became intrigued with medicinal plant use. A book on Chumash Indian legends told of a plant used to awaken people from near death. Though he has yet to find the plant in the legend, he began investigating other plants. Like carefully collected clues, he keeps hundreds of photos of native plants he has come across in California wrapped tightly in a binder. With his findings, he plans to write a book in which native uses and associated legends are placed beside their pharmacological context.
For Adams, teaching the uses and sacredness of medicinal plants is a natural progression of learning about them. “The first thing a native does with a medicinal plant is pray. I have embraced that respect for medicine, and I think my students also understand that connection. It’s a special lesson that they just don’t get in their everyday pharmacology class.” ?
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