Three Sisters Garden
“The Three Sisters” refers to the Native American agricultural practice of growing corn, beans, and squash in the same mound with each one protecting the others. The corn stands tall so that the beans have a pole to climb. The beans help keep the soil fertile with nitrogen and keep the corn from falling over when it’s windy. Shallow-rooted squash vines act as a living mulch, keeping weeds from invading and protecting the soil’s moisture. Spiny squash plants also help discourage predators from approaching the corn and beans.
Corn, beans, and squash also support each other nutritionally. Corn provides carbohydrates, the dried beans are rich in protein, and the squash gives us both vitamins from the fruit and healthful oil from the seeds. By retelling the Indigenous origin and creation stories, and performing annual ceremonies such as the Busk or Green Corn ceremonies, Native Americas have passed down the knowledge of growing, using, and preserving the Three Sisters over the generations.
Medicine Wheel
Thousands of years have been spent gaining knowledge of plants, minerals and their uses by Native Americans in medicinal remedies and cures for many common ailments. Their contributions to pharmacological medicine is unmatched anywhere in the world. Often, when the Native people visited a healer to treat their ailments, the healer always suggested a proper remedy for the disease. If the traditional healer was in doubt, he communed with the spirits of the plants. We now know that plants must be prepared using exact methods. Otherwise, the results may be ineffective, dangerous, or life threatening.
The plants and herbs that have been planted in our Medicine Wheel Garden are just a small sampling of plants that Native Americans used to relieve and cure common ailments.
The Cardinal plant was used to relieve fever, sores, and stomach aches. Native tobacco was used to help coughs, bronchitis, and bee stings. Mountain Mint was used to relieve back pain and fever. Indian Pink flower helped to prevent worms and relieved children’s fever. St. John’s Wort helped stop diarrhea. Catnip was used as a gastrointestinal aid and to help with colic. The Purple Cone flower was used to relieve insect and bee stings.
The Butterfly Milkweed was used to get rid of warts. The Goldenrod flower helped relieve bee stings. The Sage plant relieved pain from sores and prevented conception.
The Native Sunflower plants in the barrel pot beside the gardens relieved back pain.
In the back parking lot of the Native American Studies Center are four potted Cross-vine plants supported by bamboo trellises. The Cross-vine’s leaves were used to purify the blood, the stem was used to relieve headaches, and the roots helped cure diphtheria.
Image: DeAnn Beck (Catawba Nation), Bird with Sunflower, 2023, copyrighted by artist
List of Herbal Remedies Historically Used by the Catawba and other Indigenous peoples of South Carolina
Plant Name: Sycamore (Platanus accidentalis)
Catawba Name: yap hį tuwii "tree (of) burrs" also yap takčé hįčuwii hɛre, or yabwe "tree white (of) many burrs"
Malady: Salve, poultice, to draw out inflammation; tea taken for indigestion
Preparation: Scrapings of the roots are dried, boiled and beaten to make a poultice. It is mixed with grease and applied to burns. Bark is boiled to make a tea.
Plant Name: Jimson weed (Datura stramonium)
Catawba Name: įti bé "rock immovable" (because it is commonly found growing on rocks?)
Malady: Swelling, fever
Preparation: Leaves are applied to parts of the body affected with swelling. An infusion of the leaves is used for allaying fever in a bone fracture.
Warning: Jimson seeds and the leaf infusion are poisonous.
Plant Name: Peach (Prunus persica)
Catawba Name: turiiyéʔ "fruit", also triié
Malady: Relieves swelling
Preparation: Seeds are eaten after being cracked from pits. They are used to relieve swellings known as "kernels" which result from a bruise. The kernel is called iksάʔ suwí, "hand swellling" or iksάʔ hité hísure, "hand vein swelling." Kernel is apt to appear in the armpit or on the leg and often causes a sick feeling all over.
Plant Name: Poplar- Eastern Cottonwood (Populus deltoids)
Catawba Name: yɑp yεniré
Malady: Childbirth
Preparation: Unknown, most likely the roots were used for the above-mentioned malady
Plant Name: Yellow Poplar (Tulip tree) (Liriodendron tulipfera L.)
Catawba Name: yap sikąʔ "tree red"
Malady: Stomach worms
Preparation: Root scrapings boiled to make tea given to children. Symptoms of worms are loss of appetite and lassitude.
Plant Name: White Beech (Fagus grandifolia)
Catawba Name: yap tukse
Malady: Backache, rheumatism, pain from broken limbs
Preparation: A) Tea made by boiling the bark is drunk to cure weak back/backache.
B) Tea is also mixed with hog lard to form a salve rubbed on to relieve "bone rheumatism" C) Same salve also used for pain relief of broken limb. The Catawba sold this remedy to African-Americans.
Local oral histories on food and beverage preparation, farming and growing small family gardens in South Carolina
Growing Fruit Trees
Dr. Stephen Criswell's Interview with Lisa Collins
Lisa Collins: “We grew all our own vegetables. We had watermelon and cantaloupe, and strawberries. We picked blackberries. And fruit trees! Do you remember Aunt Marion with all of those fruit trees? and pear trees – plums and figs and all those things. Oh, those were good days.” (0:15:48)-(0:16:08)
Lisa Collins: “Gardens were galore – everybody had gardens. And I’m not talking about a little patch. I’m talking about a field of crops you know. And we would just stop and eat right out of the garden.” (0:19:10)- (0:19:29)
Blumer, Thomas J – Interviews Brindle Jennie 12, 24, 1983 CD 2A. Catawba Nation
In parts discusses crops of corn in relation to the great flood of 1916. Says they were growing corn in the river bottoms and most of it got wiped out but thankfully they had a few patches of corn on higher dry land that survived. (Track 7 01:12-2:00)
Jennie Brindle: “That water really did get up into our house”
Thomas John Blumer: “Did you loose a lot of crops?”
Jennie Brindle: “Yes we did, corn and stuff like that. We didn’t plant the cotton down in the bottoms as bad as we did the corn you know. And we did loose a lot of corn like that.”
Thomas John Blumer: “What would happen when that happened, did you go hungry?”
Jennie Brindle: “No we wouldn’t go hungry because we had corn up on dry land, where the water didn’t hit it”
Thomas John Blumer: “So you had two patches?”
Jennie Brindle: “We had more than two patches – we had two- three places – maybe more for corn. But when that flood came that one time it ruined lots of stuff.”
Image: Jennie Brindle, Rebecca Pitcher, Thomas Blumer Collection, USC Lancaster, photo by Sharon Norton
Blumer, Thomas J – Interviews Brindle, Jennie 12, 24, 1983 CD 2B- Catawba Nation
Discusses catching fish and selling vegetables to make extra money. Track 8 ( 00:06 – 00:38)
Thomas John Blumer: Now you got the catfish out of the river?
Jennie Brindle: Out of the river.
Thomas John Blumer: Would the boys go and do that?
Jennie Brindle: My stepdaddy used to catch them and have them by the box full and he would take them to town.
Thomas John Blumer: Oh really?
Jennie Brindle: We don’t know what he got for them, he took them to the boarding house and what he didn’t sell to the boarding house he would sell to the people.
Thomas John Blumer: Uh-huh. I see. So, he would make a little extra money that way.
Jennie Brindle: Oh yeah, he would make money that way. He would take vegetables, he’d take corn – tomatoes – beans; anything we had.
Image: Jennie Brindle, Jar, Thomas Blumer Collection, USC Lancaster, photo by Brittany Taylor-Driggers
Blumer, Thomas J – Interviews Brindle, Jennie 12, 24, 1983 CD 2B- Catawba Nation
Discusses the locust tree (possibly honey locust) and making a fermented beverage with bean pods and persimmons. Track 8 (02:43-
Thomas John Blumer: Do you know anything about a locust tree?
Jennie Brindle: Oh, you make beer – locust beer out of it we made that many-a-time.
Thomas John Blumer: Now how do you do that? Give me the recipe so I can go home and do it.
(laughter)
Jennie Brindle: You’d like it because we did.
Thomas John Blumer – Uh-huh.
Jennie Brindle: Have you seen a locust tree? With those big long locusts – about that long?
Thomas John Blumer: It’s like a bean?
Jennie Brindle: It’s like a bean only it’s about that wide.
Thomas John Blumer: Yeah.
Jennie Brindle: And they would be hanging down off of that tree.
Thomas John Blumer: Right.
Jennie Brindle: And you get that down, and you look them real good now and don’t see no holes in them. If you do you cut that out because there might be a worm in that.
Thomas John Blumer: Yeah.
Jennie Brindle: And uh – put that in a big ol’ barrel he had – and then he would put persimmons in it – and then he would put meal in it and then it would work off and it would be like what people would call making home brew.
Thomas John Blumer: Would it have a little?
Jennie Brindle: It would have a kick to it.
Thomas John Blumer: So it was an alcohol?
Jennie Brindle: It was alcohol. That’s what they say. But he let it stand for about a week to ten days and then he would strain it out and he would put it in glass jars and jugs and it had the best taste of anything you ever tasted.
Thomas John Blumer: I’ll bet it was good. What would you do with the persimmons?
Jennie Brindle: Put them in with it.
Thomas John Blumer: Did you have other things you did with them?
Jennie Brindle: No – only eat them
Thomas John Blumer: But you didn’t cook with them?
Jennie Brindle: Oh no.
Image: Jennie Brindle, Canoe, Thomas Blumer Collection, USC Lancaster, photo by Brittany Taylor-Driggers
We are grateful to the Native American community for sharing their expertise and knowledge!
Catawba Language translations provided by Beckee Garris
Public domain images were used as visual reference for most of the medicinal plants. Cone Flower image by Ashley Lowrimore; Garden images within the background by Katie Shull; Images on the title page by Elisabeth Avelar; All other images are noted within the text.
Curator: Brittany Taylor-Driggers
Assistant Curator: Sharon Norton
Copy writer for the medicine garden and three sisters garden: Elisabeth Avelar
Copy writer for Herbal Remedies Historically Used: Fran Gardner
Transcriptionist for oral histories: Katie Shull
Copy editors: Dr. Stephen Criswell, Dr. Brooke Bauer, Ashley Lowrimore, and Brittany Taylor-Driggers