While doing this, dismiss from your mind everything which would cause you worry. Slowly but surely you will find yourself to be a different man if this is repeated yearly. Thus you will have learned to “magnetize” your soul and preserve yourself for the many years before you, as most Indians do.
How to be free from daily annoying trivialities, which only serve to undermine one’s health, weaken one’s body and render one an easy prey to disease and misery, the Indian understood thoroughly. Instead, he cultivated poise, and reached such perfection that he became the envy of the white race in that respect.
Antivenin for rattlesnake and tarantula bites.
DATURA METELOIDES.
(Ind. Qui-qui-sa-waal)
American Jimson Weed. This plant is an inhabitant of the California coastal region and is not particular as to the nature of the soil or its fertility, but thrives anywhere. This tuberous, bushy plant is highly narcotic and when the leaves are properly cured they can be used either in the form of tea or smoked, but withal, very sparingly, since an overdose may very likely cause one to be committed to an insane asylum, as it is a rank poison and its effect may even land one in an undertaker’s mortuary. Therefore, my advice is to leave it alone.
My Indian brothers, being unable to give correct information to hard-shelled scientists and writers through a poor knowledge of the English language, were made objects of criticism, and science deliberately declined to acknowledge the medicinal value of this cousin to Datura stramonium which in modern medical practice is of great value at the present time.
Considering, however, the value and uses of Datura meteloides, I assert that this decision was very irregular and out of all proportion as to what it was intended. We know that everything can be abused, yet some of our Indian brothers who wished to live in ignorance and superstition had a perfect right to do so. In truth, it wasn’t so with all Indians and there were really some great minds amongst them.
When, for instance, the Chinaman wishes to see the beautiful lotus and cherry blossoms of his native land, he does so through the smoke of the opium-pipe.
Then, how about our boasted white civilization which is supposed to be superior to all? Some, of course, like to see Yankee Doodle marching down the street, others draw the hypodermic from its case to stimulate the vision of desire—or sniff cocaine through the nostrils for the same purpose.
How much, I ask, has present-day civilization to offer the Indian? Kind readers and hard-shelled scientists, I pray you, let us be rational and let us go deeper into the field of investigation. And I advise you for your own good to do so even if Datura meteloides has failed to make its appearance in the pharmacopoeia with its commercial mark [*Rx] prefixed with the “M.D.” As I have said once before, there is very little in the drugstores today for which the Indian cannot find a substitute in the great field of nature. The plants I am writing about in this book represent just one-fourth of the medicinal botany of our Indians of the Pacific Southwest.