Sumac

Sumac: what was it used for?

Among the Flambeau Ojibwe, Smith says, all parts of the smooth sumac are medicine: the root-bark tea a hemostatic, the inner bark of trunk and twig an astringent in combinations, the blossoms steeped for sore eyes, the leaves in poultices, and the fruit “a throat cleanser as well as being the basis of a beverage” much like lemonade, the tart berries sweetened with maple sugar and soaked in water, or dried and cooked with maple sugar for a hot drink in winter. The Wisconsin tribes generally, by Smith’s Potawatomi volume, used the staghorn’s root bark to stop bleeding and its leaves for a gargle in sore throat, tonsillitis, and erysipelas. Densmore gives the dried ripe fruit as astringent and refrigerant; Millspaugh a cold infusion of the berries as a cooling drink in fevers, the root bark as a dressing for ulcers and a wash for sore mouths; Rafinesque the berries in dysentery, sore throat, and putrid fevers, and the efflorescence on them, which is malic acid, “used as salt and vinegar.” The leaves tan morocco and dye black; the dried berries were smoked under the names sacacomi and kinnikinnick.

Sumac: what does modern science say?

The burgundy fruits of the staghorn sumac owe their colour to an unusual set of anthocyanins, 7-O-methylated and galloylated, isolated and named in 2013, two of them pyranoanthocyanins previously unknown. The tannins of its leaves, hydrolysable ones, protected red blood cells in the laboratory against oxidative and hypotonic stress as well as the condensed tannins of grape seed and stiffened their membranes more. Both studies are of chemistry and cells; neither is a trial.

Sumac: what did the older authorities say?

Huron H. Smith

The Flambeau Ojibwe “gather the berries to make a pleasant beverage much like lemonade. The berries are tart and are sweetened with maple sugar, soaked in water until required for use. They also gather and dry them for winter use.” Staghorn sumac grew about Leech Lake, Minnesota, where the smooth was absent, and the Pillager Ojibwe used it in the same ways and stored the dried seed-heads for winter. With bloodroot, the inner bark and pith gave an orange dye.

C. S. Rafinesque

“All the species medical, two series of them. 1. Harmless. 2. Poisonous.” Of the harmless, the roots were used by Indians and dye wool reddish; the leaves, full of tannin, make the Morocco leather; the berries “have an agreeable acid taste, make a cooling drink infused in water. Efflorescence on them used as salt and vinegar: it is malic acid.” Sucacomi, the berries dried in ovens after bread, was an article of trade in Canada, “fine substitute of tobacco, those who use it loath tobacco!”

Mrs. M. Grieve

“The berries should be gathered before the rain has removed their downy covering, for they are no longer acid when this has been washed off. They have a sour, astringent, not unpleasant taste, and are eaten freely by the country people.” The non-poisonous sumacs have fruit clothed with acid crimson hairs in dense terminal panicles; the poisonous have axillary panicles and smooth fruit.

Charles F. Millspaugh

“One of our least nocuous species,” of rocky or barren soil throughout North America. An infusion of the berries furnishes an unequalled black dye for wool; the Western Indians smoke roots and leaves with tobacco as kinikah. “I have known the juice of the root to remove warts,” he adds, and known them to vanish as readily from a neighbour’s potato rubbed on and thrown over the left shoulder.