Cattail

Cattail: what was it used for?

In the Lake country the cattail was shelter, bedding, and medicine before it was food. The Flambeau Ojibwe women, Smith says, sewed the leaves with bone needles and nettle or basswood fibre into wind- and rain-proof mats for the sides of the medicine lodge, the wigwam, and the sweat lodge, rolled and carried from camp to camp; the fuzz of the fruit was a war medicine thrown into an enemy’s face to blind him. Densmore saw the down put around an infant in its cradle and the leaves made into toys; the Forest Potawatomi, by Smith, pounded the fresh root into poultices for inflammations and called the fruit the baby’s bedding. Rafinesque, for the food: “Roots subastringent febrifuge, esculent, yield one tenth of a fine fecula similar to salep, eaten by Indians of Oregon”; the seeds kill mice, and the plant “ought to be cultivated in swamps.”

Cattail: what does modern science say?

One laboratory study bears on the rhizome as food: flour of the narrow-leaved cattail’s rhizome, fed at ten percent of the diet, prevented the colonic damage of a chemical model of colitis in rats as well as prednisolone did, with less of the enzyme of inflammation in the tissue and less loss of glutathione; saponins, flavonoids, and coumarins were found in the flour. It is a rat study of the sister species, not a trial.

Cattail: what did the older authorities say?

Huron H. Smith

“The Flambeau Ojibwe women use the cat-tail leaves to make wind and rain-proof mats to be placed on the sides of the medicine lodge or any temporary wigwam or sweat lodge. They sew with a bone needle and nettle or basswood fiber with a hidden stitch, and bind the edges securely with their sewing cord.” Not quite rain-proof as a roof, so birchbark rolls serve for that. The fuzz was thrown into the eyes of their enemies the Sioux.

Frances Densmore

Among the Chippewa the cat-tail furnished mats and baskets; “the down of the cat-tail rushes was put around an infant in its cradle board,” and the outer covering of the rushes was shaped into toys.

C. S. Rafinesque

Four species, “all equally useful. Roots subastringent febrifuge, esculent, yield one tenth of a fine fecula similar to salep, eaten by Indians of Oregon”; the leaves serve coopers and mat-makers; with lime they make a cement as hard as marble; “Seeds kill mice. Ought to be cultivated in swamps.”

O. W. Thomé

The broad-leaved reed-mace: leaves twelve to eighteen millimetres wide overtopping a flowering stalk of one to two metres, the male and female spikes touching or nearly so, the fruiting spike black-brown and about as thick as a thumb; flowering July and August on pond banks and in ditches, not rare.