The Teas: Plant Teas of the Nations

Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending

How to read this entry: Documented fact = a published primary account, archaeological study, or published scholarship (Sources). Tradition — the people's own account = Indigenous oral history / Indigenous-organisation teaching, labelled as such. Debated / Claim = a disputed point, carried with its positions and never settled by assertion. No ceremonial or restricted content is dug out; where a tea stood inside ceremony, the setting is named at the published-record level only. Medicine caution, governing this whole entry: this is historical record only. Traditional plant use is historical information only — the historical record is not proof of clinical effectiveness. No dosages, no preparation quantities, no treatment instructions, and no health claims are given. Where the record says a tea was "used for" something, that states the record, not a recommendation and not evidence that it worked.

Scope

• What "tea" means here. Documented fact: long before imported Camellia sinensis arrived, the nations of North America made drinks by infusing or decocting native leaves, needles, bark, twigs, and berries in water. The standard index is Moerman's Native American Ethnobotany (1998), compiling uses people by people; the boreal record is reviewed in Uprety et al. (2012). This entry follows that record in time — earliest written episodes, the exchange with newcomers, continuance — as history, not as a catalogue of recipes.

1. Stadacona, Winter 1535–36: The Annedda Episode

• The setting. Documented fact: Jacques Cartier wintered in 1535–36 beside Stadacona, the St. Lawrence Iroquoian town at present-day Québec City, his ships frozen in from mid-November to mid-April. Scurvy broke out first among the Iroquoians, then the French; Cartier estimated some fifty Iroquoian deaths, wrote that by mid-February, of his 110 men, "not ten were well enough to help the others," and lost twenty-five Frenchmen (Cartier's Relation, in Biggar, ed., 1924; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, "Donnacona," n.d.; Durzan, 2009).
• The teaching. Documented fact: Cartier records that Domagaya, son of the leader Donnacona, who had himself recovered, told him of a preparation from a tree the Stadaconians called annedda (also Ameda, Hanneda, Anneda). Women fetched branches and showed the French how bark and leaves were boiled together; the sick who drank recovered with a speed Cartier proclaimed miraculous, and eighty-five Frenchmen survived the winter (Cartier, in Biggar, 1924; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, n.d.; Durzan, 2009). The knowledge was St. Lawrence Iroquoian; Cartier's narrative is the first written record of a North American plant tea in the European archive.
• The aftermath. Documented fact: the St. Lawrence Iroquoians had dispersed by Champlain's arrival in the early seventeenth century, so the teaching could not be asked for again from its source; conifer drinks as sapinette and spruce beer nevertheless entered French and British naval practice (Durzan, 2009; §3).

2. What Was Annedda? — Debated

• Debated / Claim. Cartier named no species in any modern sense; the identity has been argued for over a century. No position below is settled here.
• Eastern white cedar — the identification most commonly printed today: Thuja occidentalis, arborvitae, "tree of life," resting on botanical evaluations, historical documents, naval and folklore medicine, and candidate trees' vitamin C content. Seeds of a "tree of life" reached Fontainebleau before 1547, and by the eighteenth century the Jardin du Roi knew Thuja occidentalis under that name (Durzan, 2009).
• A spruce — white and black spruce (Picea glauca, P. mariana) are argued from the ethnobotanical literature: spruce is frequently recorded as antiscorbutic, was common at Québec, and period analyses found its needles and bark rich in the vitamin whose absence causes scurvy; hemlock and black spruce both stand in the Maritime scurvy record (Durzan, 2009).
• Eastern white pine — Moore, re-examining Belon and citing Bolle, proposed the five-needled Pinus strobus: two "trees of life" appear to have reached France, an arborvitae and a five-needled pine, and Cartier's tree "as large as an oak of France" fits a great pine better than a cedar (Durzan, 2009). Algonquin use of Pinus strobus is independently recorded (Arnason, Hebda & Johns, 1981).
• The wider set, and "Scots pine." Durzan (2009) lists every candidate argued in print: Thuja occidentalis, Picea glauca, P. mariana, Pinus strobus, P. resinosa, Abies balsamea (also named in some Canadian museum summaries), Tsuga canadensis, Juniperus communis. The Scots pine name enters only through the European sapinette tradition — northern-European fir and pine decoctions, including the Baltic trade — a parallel Old World practice in Durzan's discussion; Pinus sylvestris is Eurasian, and no sourced case makes it the Stadaconian tree.

3. Cedar and Spruce in the Boreal Record

• Cedar and spruce teas. Documented fact: independent of the annedda argument, Thuja occidentalis infusions are widely recorded for Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Algonquin, Cree, and other peoples (Moerman, 1998; Uprety et al., 2012; Duke, 1983), and teas from needles and young shoots of white, black, and red spruce are recorded across the boreal forest — spruce still in use in Nunatsiavut households at Postville, Hopedale, and Rigolet in a recent survey (Moerman, 1998; People and Plants in Nunatsiavut, Economic Botany, 2021). Conifer needles, buds, inner bark, and sap are documented generally among traditional plant foods of Canadian Indigenous peoples (Kuhnlein & Turner, 1991).
• Adoption at sea. Documented fact: the conifer-drink practice passed into European seafaring as spruce beer, brewed shipboard as an antiscorbutic; James Cook used it on his Pacific voyages of the 1770s, from a recipe associated with Joseph Banks's Newfoundland experience (Durzan, 2009). A fermented drink rather than a simple tea, it is the clearest case of an Indigenous North American beverage practice travelling the world in newcomer hands.

4. Labrador Tea in the North and Subarctic

• The plants and the record. Documented fact: "Labrador tea" names three evergreen heath shrubs of northern wetlands — Rhododendron groenlandicum, R. tomentosum, and R. neoglandulosum (Dampc & Luczkiewicz, 2015). The leaf tea is among the most widely recorded northern beverages: Moerman (1998) compiles it for Inuit, Dene (Athabaskan), Cree, Algonquin, Ojibwe, and many other nations; Tam et al. (2014), working with Cree healers and Elders, record R. groenlandicum for Cree, Algonquin, and other First Nations and R. tomentosum for Inuit and northern Cree; on the Pacific slope the western species is recorded for Pomo, Kashaya, Tolowa, Yurok, and others. In Nunatsiavut it was among the most frequently reported useful plants in the Postville, Hopedale, and Rigolet survey, and Hutton's 1912 Labrador notes already record it drunk for illness, a use continuing in the 2021 survey (People and Plants in Nunatsiavut, 2021).
• The record describes it as used for… a beverage in its own right and, in healers' practice, for colds and chest complaints, stomach trouble, and headache (Moerman, 1998; Arnason et al., 1981). Reported at that level only: traditional plant use is historical information only — the historical record is not proof of clinical effectiveness.
• The caution in the record. Documented fact: the leaves contain the terpenoid ledol and, in the wider rhododendron family, grayanotoxins; toxicity varies by species and locality — R. groenlandicum lowest in ledol of the three, R. tomentosum highest — livestock poisonings are documented, and human poisonings in the record are rare, usually tied to confusion with more toxic bog plants such as bog laurel (Kalmia) and bog rosemary (Andromeda) (Dampc & Luczkiewicz, 2015; Flora of Newfoundland and Labrador, n.d.). Stated as the record states it: historical information, not advice in either direction.

5. The Mint Family: Bergamot, Oswego Tea, Mountain Mints

• Bergamot / bee balm. Documented fact: Monarda fistulosa and M. didyma leaf teas are recorded for many peoples — Moerman (1998) compiles Monarda beverage uses for Cherokee, Chippewa (Ojibwe), Menominee, Meskwaki, and Winnebago (Ho-Chunk), among others, the record describing the teas as used for colds, fevers, and stomach complaints.
• Oswego tea. Documented fact, with a traditional element: the name for M. didyma is traced in horticultural and historical literature to the Oswego River country south of Lake Ontario, in Haudenosaunee territory, where the naturalist John Bartram learned the tea in the 1740s and carried it into settler gardens (Bartram's 1743 journey, published 1751; USDA Monarda literature, n.d.). After the Boston Tea Party of 1773, colonists drank it as a substitute for taxed imported tea — one of several "liberty teas" (§7) — and the plant passed permanently into North American and European gardens, keeping its tea name.
• Mountain mints. Documented fact: the Pycnanthemum species (hoary, Virginia, and kin) are a second eastern mint-family tea group; Moerman (1998) compiles their uses, beverages included, for Cherokee and other eastern peoples, with the Cherokee record carried by Mooney (1891) and Hamel & Chiltoskey (1975). They never became a settler commodity on the Oswego scale — a local tea that stayed local.

6. Sassafras and Spicebush

• Sassafras before Europe. Documented fact: Sassafras albidum root and bark teas are compiled by Moerman (1998) for Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), Delaware, Haudenosaunee, and other peoples, the record describing the tea as used for fevers and as a spring drink. Choctaw dried powdered leaf — filé — survives in Louisiana cooking (Sargent, in Elwes & Henry, 1908).
• The export episode. Documented fact: the French in Florida heard in the mid-sixteenth century from Indigenous people of the tree called Pavame; Monardes published the first European description at Seville in 1569 (Englished by Frampton, 1577). European belief in the root as a cure for many maladies — belief, not fact — made sassafras one of the first great American plant exports: an object of the English expedition to Massachusetts in 1602, named in Virginia's instructions by 1610, and through the seventeenth century among the leading American exports to Europe, at points second only to tobacco; London sellers later sold the hot sweetened tea as "saloop" (Sargent, in Elwes & Henry, 1908; Vogel, 1970; UNH Extension, 2018). Demand collapsed as the reputation failed; sassafras settled into flavouring uses, root beer above all, and in 1960 its oil constituent safrole was prohibited as a U.S. food additive — a regulatory fact, not a health claim (Vogel, 1970, and later histories).
• Spicebush. Documented fact: spicebush (Lindera benzoin), sassafras's understory laurel relative, is the family's second eastern tea — twig, bark, leaf, and berry preparations, beverages among them, compiled by Moerman (1998) for Cherokee, Creek, Haudenosaunee, Mohegan, Chippewa, and others, and carried for Cherokee by Hamel & Chiltoskey (1975). Settlers adopted it as a spring tonic and, in the Civil War years, a substitute when coffee and tea ran short, with dried berries as an allspice substitute. It was never an Atlantic export; its history stayed in the woodlands.

7. New Jersey Tea

• Indigenous use first. Documented fact: Ceanothus americanus is older than its name — Moerman (1998) compiles Ceanothus uses across many peoples, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (n.d.) records Missouri River peoples drinking the leaves as tea and Great Lakes peoples using the plant for digestive complaints, and root preparations stand in the Cherokee and Haudenosaunee record.
• The Revolutionary name. Documented fact: the English name dates from the Revolutionary era, when the dried leaves were widely brewed as a substitute for imported tea cut off by boycott and blockade (Virginia Native Plant Society, 2019; Carnegie Museum, n.d.; already so explained in Hogg, 1858). The leaves contain no caffeine; the substitution was of a pleasant native infusion for an imported one, as with Oswego tea and spicebush. After the war the plant entered nineteenth-century American botanical practice, and the shrub is still sold under its Revolutionary name (Virginia Native Plant Society, 2019).

8. Yaupon and the Black Drink

• The plant and the historic record. Documented fact: yaupon (Ilex vomitoria), a coastal-plain holly, is the only North American native plant known to contain caffeine; its leaves were brewed into the black drink (also asi, cassina) (Hudson, ed., 1979). From the sixteenth century, Spanish, French, and English accounts describe it among Timucua, Creek (Muscogee), Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and other Southeastern peoples — drunk socially, in council, and in ceremonial settings, above all in the published record as a council-house and purification drink before important undertakings; use declined through the nineteenth century (Hudson, ed., 1979). The setting is named at that level only; ceremonial content is not described here. Hudson's caution stands in the record: yaupon drunk ordinarily did not itself produce the rites' ritual vomiting — vomitoria preserves a European misunderstanding, not a property of the leaf (Hudson, 1979).
• Cahokia. Documented fact: Crown et al. (PNAS, 2012, "Ritual Black Drink Consumption at Cahokia") found that residues in eight beaker vessels from Cahokia and its settlements, dated c. 1050–1250 CE, carried the Ilex biomarker profile — caffeine and theobromine in the holly ratio, with ursolic acid distinguishing holly from cacao. Neither yaupon nor dahoon holly grows near Cahokia, in present-day Illinois; the nearest source lay hundreds of kilometres south. This is the earliest direct evidence for black drink in North America, five centuries before the European accounts, and documents long-distance trade in the leaves into the largest Mississippian city (Crown et al., 2012; Smithsonian Magazine, 2012). A small commercial yaupon revival in the South in the 2010s is press-reported and carried here as Claim only.

9. Preparation in General Terms — and Continuance

• In general only. Documented fact: the record describes one small family of methods, stated with no quantities, strengths, or followable steps, by design under this entry's caution: leaves, needles, twigs, bark, or berries, fresh or dried, infused or simmered in hot water and drunk hot or cooled — bark and root preparations more often as boiled decoctions, leaf and needle preparations as infusions (Cartier, in Biggar, 1924; Moerman, 1998; Dampc & Luczkiewicz, 2015). Settler adaptations added sweetening, milk in the saloop trade, and fermentation for spruce beer (Durzan, 2009; Elwes & Henry, 1908).
• Continuance. Documented fact: Labrador tea is gathered and drunk today in the Nunatsiavut and Cree studies that document it (Tam et al., 2014; People and Plants in Nunatsiavut, 2021), and cedar, spruce, and mint teas stand in the living record (Moerman, 1998; Uprety et al., 2012). Tradition — the people's own account: in the communities these drinks are inherited knowledge, taught person to person; the sources below are the archive of that teaching, not its source.

Sources

• Arnason, T., Hebda, R.J. & Johns, T. (1981). "Use of Plants for Food and Medicine by Native Peoples of Eastern Canada." Canadian Journal of Botany 59.
• Bartram, J. (1751). Observations… from Pensilvania to Onondago, Oswego and the Lake Ontario (journey of 1743).
• Biggar, H.P., ed. (1924). The Voyages of Jacques Cartier. Public Archives of Canada.
• Carnegie Museum of Natural History (n.d.). "A Plant Popular During the Revolutionary War."
• Crown, P.L. et al. (2012). "Ritual Black Drink Consumption at Cahokia." PNAS 109(35): 13944–13949.
• Dampc, M. & Luczkiewicz, M. (2015). "Labrador Tea — The Aromatic Beverage and Spice." Journal of Ethnopharmacology 172.
• Dictionary of Canadian Biography (n.d.). "Donnacona." biographi.ca.
• Duke, J.A. (1983). Handbook of Energy Crops (Purdue hosting). Thuja occidentalis.
• Durzan, D.J. (2009). "Arginine, Scurvy and Cartier's 'Tree of Life'." Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 5:5.
• Elwes, H.J. & Henry, A. (1908). The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 3 (Sargent on sassafras).
• Flora of Newfoundland and Labrador (n.d.). Rhododendron groenlandicum (citing Porsild, 1953; Moerman, 2009; Dampc & Luczkiewicz, 2015).
• Hamel, P.B. & Chiltoskey, M.U. (1975). Cherokee Plants and Their Uses. Herald Publishing.
• Hudson, C.M., ed. (1979). Black Drink: A Native American Tea. University of Georgia Press. (Incl. Merrill, W.L., "The Beloved Tree.")
• Kuhnlein, H.V. & Turner, N.J. (1991). Traditional Plant Foods of Canadian Indigenous Peoples. Gordon and Breach.
• Moerman, D.E. (1998). Native American Ethnobotany. Timber Press.
• Monardes, N. (1569). Historia medicinal de las cosas… de nuestras Indias Occidentales. Seville. (Frampton translation, 1577.)
• Mooney, J. (1891). "The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees." Bureau of American Ethnology, 7th Annual Report.
• People and Plants in Nunatsiavut (Labrador, Canada) (2021). Economic Botany.
• Smithsonian Magazine (2012). Report on Crown et al., 8 August 2012.
• Tam, T.W. et al. (2014). "The Effect of Cree Traditional Medicinal Teas on… Cytochrome P450-Mediated Metabolism." Journal of Ethnopharmacology 155: 841–846.
• University of New Hampshire Extension (2018). "Sassafras — The Big Tree."
• Uprety, Y. et al. (2012). "Traditional Use of Medicinal Plants in the Boreal Forest of Canada." Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 8:7.
• USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (n.d.). Plant Guides: Monarda, Ceanothus, Pycnanthemum. plants.usda.gov.
• Virginia Native Plant Society (2019). "Ceanothus americanus — 2019 Wildflower of the Year."
• Vogel, V.J. (1970). American Indian Medicine. University of Oklahoma Press.

Weakest-sourced points in this entry (flagged): (1) Annedda — genuinely unresolved; "Scots pine" rests only on Durzan's European sapinette parallel, with no Stadaconian evidence. (2) Oswego tea — Bartram's journey is documented, but the line from Haudenosaunee teaching to the Revolutionary substitute rests largely on secondary literature. (3) Spicebush's Civil War substitution rests on secondary summaries of the Moerman record, not a dated primary account located here. (4) Sassafras's "second only to tobacco" ranking is the standard Sargent / UNH summary; customs figures were not re-verified from primary records. (5) The modern yaupon revival is press-sourced only, carried as Claim. (6) Mountain-mint beverage detail is the thinnest here and should be deepened before publication. No dosages, quantities, or preparation instructions appear in this entry, deliberately, under the medicine caution.