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Ceremony, Medicine, Caffeinated Tea: Unearthing the Forgotten Faces of the North American Stimulant Yaupon (Ilex vomitoria)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2021

Christine Folch
Christine Folch*
Affiliation:
Cultural Anthropology and Environmental Science and Policy, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
*
cfolch@gmail.com; christine.folch@duke.edu
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Abstract

Yaupon (the unfortunately named Ilex vomitoria) is a holly commonly used as yard décor in the southeast United States, but many North Americans will be surprised to learn that it is the source of a stimulant tea that has been in continuous use for nearly a millennium. Yaupon is more than a drink; it is a window into questions of identity, community belonging, and how the New World was inserted into the global economy. From Cabeza de Vaca's sixteenth-century brush with the beverage, yaupon has iterated between ceremony, medicine, and caffeinated tea as inhabitants of North America—Indigenous, enslaved, and settler colonial inhabitants of North America—have harnessed the leaf's properties to different, culturally situated aims. This article traces narratives, recipes, and medical descriptions of yaupon from contact to the present, and compares these against material and archeological records to explore differences between settler and extractive colonial encounters with Indigenous psychoactive substances (and thus indigeneity). The story of yaupon reveals contests between regimes of knowledge, the political economy of colonialisms, and the fraught intersections of identity and cuisine. Despite abundant ethnographic, documentary, and scientific evidence to the contrary, the scientific and medical literature long mislabeled yaupon as emetic. This raises questions about how knowledge is transferred and how scientific authority is constructed. I argue that indigeneity, race, and class have steered how yaupon has been understood, and help to explain why a popular caffeinated product waned at a time when the use of stimulants was increasing, and “proletarian hunger-killers” were on the rise.

Keywords

commodity chainsplant relationsscientific knowledge and ignoranceIlex drinksAtlantic worldsettler colonialismindigenous foodcaffeine
Type
Tea Leaves
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 63 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 464 - 498
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

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References

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2 Lenoir Family Papers, Personal Correspondence, 1861–1865 ca. 120 p., Inventory #426, Manuscripts Department, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Camp Lee, South Carolina, 2 Mar. 1862. A note on terms: There are various spellings of “yaupon” and “cassina” that are geographically marked and also the result of varied literacy. I have chosen to use the most common spelling of “yaupon” from North Carolina, where I live, teach, and research. When I discuss a hot beverage made from yaupon, I sometimes refer to it as “yaupon tea” with yaupon as a crucial modifier. Any other use of the word “tea,” unmarked, refers to the beverage produced from Camellia sinensis, commonly called “tea” or “Chinese tea.”

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86 M.S.B., “Letter 7” [no title], Scientific American 5, 15 (1861): 230. Note the misapplication of Ilex cassine to yaupon, which is Ilex vomitoria.

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103 Brimley, “Yaupon Factory,” 10.

104 Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 60.

105 See also Andrew K. Frank, “Red, Black, and Seminole: Community Convergence on the Florida Borderlands, 1780–1840,” in Andrew K. Frank and A. Glenn Crothers, eds., Borderland Narratives: Negotiation and Accommodation in North America's Contested Spaces, 1500–1850 (Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2018), 46–61, 57.

106 Ralph Holt Cheney, Coffee: A Monograph of the Economic Species of the Genus Coffea L. (New York: New York University Press, 1925), 207.

107 Fett, Working Cures, 65.

108 Roman Johnson, “Our Grandmothers’ Ways: Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use by the Gullah-Geechee in McIntosh County, Georgia,” MA thesis, Georgia State University, 2016, 61. See also Faith Mitchell, Hoodoo Medicine: Gullah Herbal Remedies (Columbia: Summerhouse Press, 1999).

109 Paul E. Lovejoy, “Kola in the History of West Africa,” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 20, 77–78 (1980): 97–134.

110 Mintz, “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness.”

111 I have reached out to many African American churches to query their senior Bible study members on their memories of use of this plant.

112 “Holly Tea,” Chambers Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts 10, 487 (29 Apr. 1893): 262.

113 Hale, “Bulletin no. 14,” 7.

114 George G. Groff, “A Forgotten Plant,” Independent 44, 2 (5 May 1892): 38; Hale, “Bulletin no. 14,” 7.

115 Hale, “Bulletin no. 14,” 22.

116 George Mitchell and J. W. Sale, “Beverages Produced from Cassina. Reproduced from Type-Written Copy” (Washington, D.C.: USDA, Bureau of Chemistry, 1922), 2.

117 Fairbanks, Charles, “The Function of Black Drink among the Creeks,” in Hudson, Charles, ed., Black Drink: A Native American Tea (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972), 120–49, 144Google Scholar.

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120 Catspring, “People First,” n.d., https://www.catspringtea.com/working-with-dignity (accessed 2 Nov. 2019).

121 Fett, Working Cures.

122 Boone, Elizabeth Hill, “Introduction: Writing and Recording Knowledge,” in Boone, Elizabeth Hill and Mignolo, Walter, eds., Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 3–26Google Scholar.