Second-hand Smoke: Tobacco and the Lingering Seeds of the Columbian Exchange
ENDNOTES
The tobacco plant is one of the stronger transatlantic players, one which merged culture and economy for centuries. Tobacco smoking was first noted in the journals of Columbus’s men as part of their documentary on the behaviors of the Indigenous peoples of Cuba.1 Upon further expeditions in 1508, Europeans marveled at similar smoking habits in Brazil, where Amerindians smoked a dried leaf in a single shared pipe during diplomatic negotiations and medical reasons.2 Over time, the growing, curing, and smoking of tobacco gained a hold on the international market, its ash coating the walls of homes around the Atlantic world. As a heavily traded product in the Columbian exchange, the tobacco plant secured its grip as a cultural cash crop; a nonessential good which came to play an essential role in the lives of millions of individuals. The oldest tobacco seeds of any variety, domesticated or wild, date from 387 to 205 BC.3 Oral tradition relates that the Navajo people believed that the Sky Father and Earth Mother smoked sacred tobacco, and thereby the universe was born. Aztec priests utilized tobacco to communicate with their deities, with the belief that the earth-goddess Cihuacoatl was embodied on the earth as a tobacco plant.4 Tobacco also had medical uses including treatment for asthma, fevers, and alleviating the pain of childbirth.5 It is likely that the tobacco plant was used for religious and medical reasons because its predictable and shortlived effects were more pleasant than other hallucinogens.6 In the early days of American agriculture, tobacco spread to Central and South America from what is now present-day Virginia.7 There are two main varieties of tobacco plants, nicotina tobacum, and nicotina rustica. Although n. tobacum may escape from cultivated plots in some places, it has never been found as a truly wild plant.8 A variety of n. rustica does grow naturally in the Andes from Chile to Ecuador, which has led some botanists to consider it wild. This was the tobacco variety initially grown by Indigenous peoples until it was replaced by n. tobacum.9 The ultimate success of n. tobacum came from its adaptation to the tropical lowlands. Initially, the close connection between Indigenous peoples and tobacco resulted in settlers considering the plant to be uncivilized and, in some cases, demonic.10 The smoking of tobacco could be regarded as a material embodiment of ‘suffocating’ Indigenous culture, as settlers also engaged in the smoking of a plant which was grown by Indigenous hands. While seemingly strange that Indigenous peoples used tobacco as Monardes Tobacco,1574. Wikimedia Commons.
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