Katsi Cook, a wolf clan Mohawk, is a prominent midwife, environmentalist, and women’s health advocate known for her impactful work in the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne. Born on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation in 1952, she embraced traditional practices after attending Catholic boarding school and later became a trailblazer at Dartmouth College. Cook’s passion for midwifery was ignited at the Loon Lake Conference in 1977, driving her to address reproductive health and environmental justice issues. Founder of organizations like the Women’s Dance Health Program, she tackled PCB contamination in the St. Lawrence River. Cook’s influence extends globally, collaborating with Mayan midwives and founding the Six Nations Birthing Centre in Canada. A respected academic, she held positions at SUNY Albany and Dalhousie University. As the Program Director of Running Strong for American Indian Youth, Cook continues to empower Native women through community-based health projects. Her dedication makes her a key figure in indigenous rights, environmentalism, and women’s health.
In this talk, she shares, among other topics, a deeply edifying look at the cultural context of Native American plant use in general and then of peyote use. Her descriptions of indigenous views of plants and their relationships to humans and how crucial a deep respect for the spirits of other species is in such relationships offer the non-indigenous among us very important cautions about the risks of arrogant and disrespectful use of plant medicines and sacraments (not to mention most other species and the entire biosphere!). Her accounts of her own cross-cultural, pan-tribal plant knowledge learning process and of the use of peyote in childbirth are also fascinating, especially since these are rarely discussed topics.
A version of this piece was originally published in Visionary Plant Consciousness: The Shamanic Teachings of the Plant World.
My community is the Mohawk reservation on the St. Lawrence River, right on the U.S.-Canadian border. It is trisected by three governmental jurisdictions: Quebec, Ontario and New York State, so we’ve had many complexities to deal with in our growth as a people. As part of that growth, in my own life, I’ve committed to that area of our sovereignty that has to do with control of production and reproduction. I am very focused on the protection of indigenous knowledge and ways and of other areas of our sovereignty, such as the control of our land base, our education, our psycho-religious life and our power to solve the disputes among our own people.
I feel privileged to come from a people whose very creation story begins in a world where there is no death, the Skyworld. In our story a young woman there takes on the responsibility of fulfilling the dream of a leader, and she has to go gather certain flowers for that purpose. She goes to a great tree that has many of these beautiful flowers, but when she gathers some of those flowers, she unintentionally pulls up the roots of this tree, and a hole in the Skyworld appears. She looks in that hole and she falls in, and as she falls she grasps at the edges of that hole and embeds under her fingernails the seeds of those sacred plants–medicines, tobacco and other things that we now use here in this place. In fact this Skywoman’s name means “mature flowers,” what could be thought of as herbal medicines
As she fell through that hole and through the sky, she saw below her a vast ocean, and she was assisted by the birds and the winged ones to land on the back of a great turtle. She landed on the back of this great turtle with the help of the bird life and began to dance in the direction that the sun goes around a plot of earth that was brought up to the turtle’s back by the little muskrat who gave his life to bring that soil from the bottom of the ocean. When her daughter was born, she too followed that reproductive ecology that her mother showed her, dancing in the direction the sun goes. Those women put into place the cycles of continuous creation, of continuous birth, and the daughter, as she came of age, became impregnated by the West Wind and brought into this world twins, who in their dialectic, their argument with each other about the way this world should be organized, became the Creator Twins who created the world as we know it.
Our creation story teaches us that there is no complete good or complete evil, that in order for this world to exist, there has to be a balance. We live in a universe of relatives, and the universe is kept alive by those relationships. I have heard people define ecology as a science of relationships and that’s certainly how I perceive my own work in keeping those relationships going to continue the work of our celestial mother. I’m grateful to think that my name, Katsijakwa, which means “she picks up the flowers,” is a medicine name in that way.
The strength that I carry comes to me from my grandmothers. My grandmother delivered me at home in 1952 to a woman who was told not even to have children because she fell in the river when she was a little girl and got rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease at a time when there were no antibiotics. She brought me, her fourth one, into this world at great risk to her own life. These women that I come from are the ones who taught me at a very young age to believe in our medicine, to use our medicine and to relate to our medicines in the way that we were instructed. In my community, my relationship to the families is what is called in Mohawk “lewirokwas,” “one who pulls them from the water,” or “she helps him with his first breath.” The word midwife is a German word meaning “with the woman,” and it’s a good word, but to begin to institutionalize our traditional teachings in a real way, we’ve had to go back to our language and to those things that grandma taught us. To use real medicine means that you respect all of those relationships in that reproductive ecology that is this great universe, this great womb that we are all related to.
One of the things we have tried to do is to restore the strength of our medicine societies, so they can do the work that they were given to do for our people. To improve the respect, the equity and the empowerment of that sector of our knowledge base has been one of my goals. We started to pay attention to our own medicines and to improve how health care is done. We put our clinicians through a six-week training with our medicine people, sharing with them the principles and the teachings behind the use of our plants. One of the barriers that we have is that we still have to follow those old ways of collection, of prayer, of relationship that go with using these medicines. As a midwife, when I ask a mother to begin to use, say, slippery elm two weeks before the baby is due, there’s a whole protocol to be followed to find an elder in our community who’s going to fix that medicine for her, because it isn’t just about stripping inner bark and beating it into a powder. It involves the right approach to the tree, and the plant needs to be gathered at the height the woman is and her Indian name used.
The road to know about plants is long. In my communities, you usually can’t even ask directly about plant use. It’s considered disrespectful. Most people come around plants because they’re sick and dying or they have a need in terms of protection. We have seven Mohawk protection medicines that I’m not going to tell you, because you’re not Mohawks, but I will tell you from my own personal experience that knowledge comes to you in titrated doses. Like everything else in a culture, you can’t separate language and cosmology and all of those aspects of culture from whatever particular body of knowledge within that culture you want to know. And every indigenous culture of which we all eventually come from has its body of plant knowledge.
But it’s never plants alone that cure. Knowledge and healing come through dreams and through tradition and through family ways. This information moves along through family lines, and certain families hold certain medicines. So, for instance, in my community, because healers are always open to new knowledge, it’s my clan family that holds the peyote medicine that just came to us in the last 20 years from the Lakota and from the Huichol people. So not every plant is for everyone. Not all knowledge is for everyone. That’s just the way my people think. There are those in our community, usually women past the time of menopause, who are the ones to go to when you need a medicine. Because I’m young yet, I’ll often send my mothers to these different healers to help them, and they’re quite capable people, but they say, “We keep our knowledge close to us because that’s something you learn after a life of struggle and trial and commitment-it’s not for everyone.”
Our people also believe that you can’t communicate with the spirits of these plants unless you have an Indian name, and for that purpose when our babies are named in our long house, there’s only one of that name given, so it won’t confuse the universe. The clan mothers hold these names in a metaphorical bag; they are like property. You can’t just pick up any old name and use it. So there are many traditions that are valuable but are in a way a barrier to getting more of our plant medicines available to our people reliably and in sufficient quantities. And the Indian Health Service spent 20 years trying to get our people away from our plants and traditions, so a lot of people lost touch with this knowledge, to such an extent that, for example, young mothers no longer know the difference between a sick baby and a baby they can care for themselves at home.
I work with a Harvard-trained physician who feeds lab rats the four conjoiners of PCBs most commonly found in Mohawk mothers’ milk to identify effects on the rat litters. He had, for about six months, walked around with a respiratory ailment. He couldn’t stop coughing. You couldn’t make him laugh at meetings because he’d begin a coughing fit he couldn’t stop. And when he started coughing up blood they quarantined him and tested him for animal and human forms of TB because he works with lab animals. While he was in quarantine, I gave him some Sweet Flag (calamus acorus) and told him, “It’s not like the medicine you’re used to. You have to respect it in a certain way,” and I told him how to use it. About two weeks later he called me and asked, “What is that stuff you gave me?” For the first time in six months he had stopped coughing. I told him what it was and how useful it was and how all my life I’d been using it.
He said he was really happy to use a medicine that was a root that came out of the earth. It made him feel good. He said it improved his mood. I’d never heard that, that it could improve your mood, so I went to Jim Duke’s database on medicinal herbs, and I read that there’s a chemical constituent responsible for mildly hallucinogenic properties in this plant. I went back to some of the elders including the one on whose property I’d collect it with my sister every fall and asked them. They knew that. They said that’s part of its healing power. Somehow the Creation knows that when you’re not well, it affects the way that you think about yourself. It makes you depressed that you are weak.
Medicines are not just plants; they are also the dreams and those relationships that we maintain. We have a relationship with a Mayan village in Guatemala that my people are sending a team of ambassadors to this December, but that my husband and I have related to since 1981. In learning aboriginal midwifery, as distinct from licensed midwifery, I made a serious effort not to become a nurse, not to become a doctor, because I wanted to believe in our own ways and our own knowledge and our own medicines, which is not to say I didn’t take the responsibility to gain the medical skills necessary to be a safe practitioner, but that my focus is on our own indigenous ways, because none of this knowledge has been lost. It is recovered in the practice of doing, of using it, of believing in your medicine. So my medicines come from the four directions: from the south I study the ways of the days of the Mayan people, the Mayan ways of the days that are still used among their midwives and spiritual leaders.
In my training, I also went to my sister-in-law’s people in South Dakota. Her mother, Weaselbear, was a midwife. In my journey to become a midwife I had gone to the Farm in Tennessee to study with Ina May Gaskin and then to the University of New Mexico Women’s Health Training program for my clinical training. I’d seen so many native women in these clinics, Zuni, Pueblo, Navajo, Hopi, who had caesarian scars and had no clue why they had had a caesarian, and I thought, “This isn’t right. We have such beautiful traditional knowledge, but our women can be so dumb sometimes.” So I went to my mother- and sister-in-law’s people in South Dakota, where for 100 years their family has been holding the peyote medicine that came to them from the Osage and the Kiowa and the Huichol.
My mother-in-law said, “Daughter-in-law, if you want to learn midwifery, you have to go in that tepee.” I said, “Where I come from in the long-house we can’t use any mind changers.” And she said, “Well, I don’t know what you believe over there, but here this is the heart of the creator, our grandfather, and holy mother.” She told the story of when she was in labor for my sister-in-law’s little brother, Aloytius Weaselbear, while she was in a peyote meeting, and they made peyote tea for her to help her. And so I went in that tepee. My sister-in-law promised me that whatever I wanted to know, this medicine would show me, so during the night I asked this grandfather medicine, “How do I know I can be a midwife? That’s a big responsibility. How will I know what to do?” And that medicine said in my mind real clearly, “You’ll know. Just do it.” (Way before the Nike ad came out.) That was about 21 years ago; I’ve been using the medicine in my own life. And more recently I was also lucky to be able to spend time and learn more with Grandma Guadalupe de la Cruz, a Huichol midwife and healer, before she left us this past year. You have to be a Native American enrolled member to legally use lophophora williamsii, in this country. Thanks to Kwana Parker, who in the late 1800s started what became the Native American Church, it’s legal for card-carrying members of the Native American Church to use it.
So as part of that, in my own practice as a midwife, I use the peyote. It can be used to induce labor or for assisting in pain control. Recently a nurse from the Navajo Hospital in Arizona came to our annual organizational meeting and begged the Native American Church of North America to send someone to her hospital to do a training for the caregivers there because when healthcare workers at the hospital noticed a Navajo woman using the peyote medicine, they would refer her to child protective services, who in some cases removed the infant from the family. This is the kind of cultural denigration that Native American people still have to endure for something we call the heart of the creator. I can’t say enough about its efficacy, not just in childbirth, which is the foundation of its use in my own mind, but for every disease that there is.
It can heal anything, and when I say that, I don’t mean it’s a panacea. I mean that it can restore people to a place where they can allow the homeostatic work of their own body’s healing. So we do a lot of work with it in our community, but we also stick to the rules and regulations set by the DEA and the governments. I hope to conduct some research on it, maybe do some randomized control trials, not just in my community but several other Indian Health Service Hospitals where native women are using this without the knowledge of caregivers.
But plants are like people. You can only have so many relations that you keep alive. You can’t possibly use every plant on the planet. Some people are even running to the rainforest in Peru to find medicines, and I do have to admit I’ve been to the Mayan people of Belize, and they do have beautiful medicines, but it’s the knowledge itself that is strong and powerful in the use of the green medicines. Not everyone can use all of these medicines. Peyote, for example, doesn’t belong to everyone. I ask you in a humble way to protect the exemption in the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. We are looking for a niche in our worlds to continue to survive, and this medicine has come to us in a very organic way, not through the forces of markets and economics. We take that very seriously.
The other medicine I use is, of course, the medicine of my own people. We use medicine not only to get a specific bio-active effect. There are groups of medicines that like one another, that work together. In doing our ecological analysis of how toxics move through our environment, we were shocked, for example to find that at Akwesasne, along the St. Lawrence River, there’s an increased uptake of methyl mercury by plants in the wetlands areas, especially in another one of our very powerful medicines, the yellow pond lily. That medicine is supposed to be picked in a certain way. Someone who picks this medicine can only be someone who has never known the heat of sexuality. Usually they’re young people who have to keep their mind a certain way when they gather it because the root grows way deep into the muck of the wet areas, and if your mind isn’t strong and your heart’s not pure about the person that you’re trying to help, that root will pull you under and take your life instead of helping you to assist with another life. We take these teachings very seriously.
At the same time, I know that the availability, the access to our own medicines is diminishing with the increasing encroachment of development and the loss of land-base to toxic contamination. We are looking to land claims to try to solve the problems of access to our own medicines, but we need to be propagating and growing these medicines. Part of my training as an aboriginal midwife was to raise, for four years, a field of corn from seed that came with Skywoman in her fall, taking care of it, singing to it, dancing with it. The Mayans teach that women learned midwifery from corn, and the kind of corn we grow can’t be harvested by machine. It has to be hand-collected, and we’d have about 20 people out in our fields to harvest this corn, and when you pull back the husk, it’s like seeing a new baby. You might make a comment like: “Oh, look at this one red kernel in it among all white kernels. It must be related to the Tuscarora corn.”
When I had the wife of one of our Wolf Clan chiefs come to visit my home, I was telling her about this, and she said, “Well you know, the word in Mohawk for describing bundling a new baby means in English, ‘she’s putting the husk back on the corn.’” And every part of corn is a medicine, including the silks. A soil scientist, a Ph.D. agronomist at Cornell University from Nicaragua told me how the gestation of the corn and the gestation of the human being are very similar, so that in that way, corn teaches us about midwifery, about genetics, about the secrets of the plants.
The strongest teaching that we have is, “Believe in your medicine.” I find that whether we’re talking about indigenous knowledge or the new knowledge that’s called scientific knowledge, it’s the same truth. The medicines and their uses must be restored to our people so that we can again be healthy. In my community we have very limited health care dollars and environmental health impacts are going to drive up the prevalence and incidence of diseases that have an etiology in the immune system. A lot of the medicines we used were protective of health. We need to restore those behaviors, those attitudes and those practices that 500 years of colonial oppression have drummed out of us in our communities and that have been kept underground and need to be supported so they can flourish. We have to find ways in our communities to make a place for the medicines to sit with us once again.
Originally published at Bioneers
Connect with Katsi Cook and dozens of Indigenous speakers at the 7-Day The Eternal Song Gathering hosted live by SAND, June 3-9, 2025
