The Cherokee Herbal: Native Plant Medicine

Book Preface

The use of Cherokee words in The Cherokee Herbal is intended to add a cultural and historical dimension to this book. Although some direct translations of Cherokee words have been lost over the past several hundred years, I wanted to preserve words in the original language as provided by the elders themselves, and by old documents that otherwise end up collecting dust in some archive. Common names of plants in the Cherokee vernacular local to North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Arkansas would be based on the plant’s use in a formula, so some plants would be referred to by more than one name.

This book is not intended to teach the Cherokee language or to record every Cherokee word. I simply want to offer the reader a taste of this unique cultural dimension to the plant world and the uses of plants as helpers from a Cherokee perspective. A Cherokee language dictionary can be used to find many words not mentioned in this book. I also realize the importance of keeping certain words and plant uses sacred. Some of what I learned from the elders therefore does not appear in this book.

A list of syllables from the Cherokee syllabary follows, along with the corresponding sound in English that will assist in the Cherokee pronunciations.