November 5, 2025 • 10 mins
Did Native Americans really smoke peace pipes? Well yes and no. They smoked pipes for many reasons, sometimes to commemorate peace. But they never called them peace pipes.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here for Dave. So it's a
short stuff, and we're talking about what you might know
is peace pipes, but as it turns out, that's not
the right word for it at all. So although we'll
probably accidentally call it peace pipes a bunch of times,
they're really called sacred or ceremonial pipes.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
That's right. That whole notion of passing the peace pipe
something that American settlers and soldiers saw and they thought like, hey,
they're smoking that thing during a treaty signing, so that
must be a peace pipe. And while it's true that
they might have smoked those during treaty signings, it turns
out they smoke them a lot, so it's a bit
(00:43):
of a misnomer.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Yeah. They come up in all sorts of different parts
of Native American culture. Something I thought was really interesting
is that I could not find a mention of any
North American tribe that doesn't use ceremonial pipes. Yeah, and
so like they found old ones from Florida up to
(01:04):
the Midwest. I think they found it in the Hopewell
culture in Ohio from the southwest up to the Pacific northwest,
like all over they use peace pipes, which tells you like,
this is a really old tradition and it predates some
of the tribes that eventually kind of grew out of
other tribes that were older.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, for sure. And again they just call them pipes.
I think there's a broader term that you can use,
if you want to get more specific, called a calumet.
And apparently that's from the French word. Would that be
shadow may like Timothy, Yeah, all right, and that means
read or flute, and Timothy shallo may. He's like a
(01:45):
little flutie read himself, he really is.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
I wonder if that's the stage name.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Now maybe, And you know, depending on the tribe and
the culture, they each have their own name for it,
perhaps in their own language, and generally they take them
out during some kind of ceremony, maybe a prayer, maybe
a treaty signing thing, maybe just a party or maybe
a monarchy situation.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Oh yeah, I forgot about that.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
But it is a sort of a physical representation of
a connection to God or maybe the smoke flowing out
in all directions to nature and connecting in that way.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, I also saw what it means specifically definitely depends
on the tribe. They have different meanings for it, even
though it's generally used for some sort of prayer solemn occasion,
like you were saying. One explanation I saw is that
the plants that are smoked in there, it's not always tobacco,
it's never marijuana, but and it can be a combination
(02:47):
of a bunch of different plants. Those plants have roots
in the earth, but their smoke travels up to the heavens,
to the spirit world, and they carry the person's prayer
with them. So it's very they're very sacred and solemn
occasion when they're smoking a ceremonial pipe, even though exactly
(03:07):
what they believe about it is it varies.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, for sure. And where they come from berries, I
think the Lakota, you know, the ideas that they were
given it by the white buffalo calf woman and it
was used for prayer in their culture generally, and that's
why the white buffalo calf is very much a sacred
thing to the Lakota.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Still, yeah, the Lakota call there's the chinoonpa, which is
a cool word to say, Yeah, And one other thing
about any ceremonial pipe is there's like different parts represent
different things, but they come in pieces. They're not actually
just one single piece. Especially with the Dakota and the Lakota,
(03:49):
both sue they are meant to stay apart, and when
they're put together, that indicates a ceremony or a prayer
session is beginning. You don't keep like if you're storing it,
or say, if you're a museum who gets your hands
on one of these and you're displaying it, you do
not show them put together. They're just kind of like
(04:11):
exploded on display, separated the different parts.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
They should call them pieces pipes.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Very nice? Should we take a pipe? Very nice? Yeah?
I gotta let that gel with me from all right.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
We'll be right back after that bad pun, right after this.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So one of the other things that a lot of
ceremonial pipes have in common in North America is that
they are made from a spe zip kind of rock.
And there's different variations on this kind of rock, but
they're all generally called pipestone.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Yeah, you know, we've talked about the pieces. There's that
wooden stem and then you've got your bowl. It's like
an L shape bowl or a T shaped bowl, and
that is that pipestone. There are different colors of pipestone,
so they're often very pretty pipes and pretty bowls. But
there's one apparently that's a little more revered, and that's
the red pipestone from Pipestone National Monument, which is southwest Minnesota,
(05:33):
and apparently it's that particular pipestone is considered sacred by
a lot of indigenous tribes.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Yeah, like they'll come from all over North America to
get the red pipestone is a kind of catlanite, which
is a stone made from clay, and it's actually fairly
easy to work with. But to get to it at
Pipestone National Monument, number one, you have to get a permit.
Number two, you can't get a permit unless you're enrolled
in a North American tribe. And then number three, it's
(06:00):
going to take you a while to get there because
the red pipestone at that park only exists underneath a
thick quartz layer and you're only allowed to use hand
tools like pick axes, chisels, sledgehammers to get to it,
and the park rangers recommend expecting to do at least
a weekend's worth of work with multiple other people, but
(06:23):
that some people end up having to get an annual
pass because they have to just keep coming back and
coming back and to finally get to it. And can
you imagine if you dedicated months to this and you
came back for that last time, you're like, this is
the one, and to find somebody else had just used
the rest of your work, dug through it and got
to the red pipestone you had to start over.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Yeah, I thought you were going to say you finally
make that beautiful bowl out of the pipestone, and then
your friend Gary knocks it off the kitchen counter.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Either way, either way, it was probably Gary who used
your hole in the first place too, So either way
Gary's to blame.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Gary notorious hole user. So it's not always up pipestone.
Sometimes it's limestone. Sometimes it's bone or pottery or shale,
but that pipestone is which are really after The stems
are generally wood, maybe alder or ash, and they're usually decorative,
not always, because like we said, there are all different
(07:18):
kinds of pipes, some for different ceremonies, some just personal pipes.
A lot of times I'll have feathers and beadwork. Some
are just plain though, and like you mentioned, they smoke
of a variety of things, not always tobacco. Sometimes it's
dried bark of maybe a red oyster dog wood. Maybe
it's a ground shrub if you're out on the prairie,
(07:39):
And like you mentioned, it's never marijuana. That is just
some dumb joke made by white people at some point,
probably in a cartoon strip or something.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
So that, yeah, in our crumb strip. Yeah, maybe Fritz
the cat. So that that ground shrub from the prairie
you mentioned is called kinnikinnick and it's spelled like it sounds.
It's also called bearberry, but actually both of them are
really fun to say as well. That's a sacred plant,
(08:08):
and then the tobacco that they'll smoke is also considered sacred.
But it's not that standard Virginia tobacco strain. It's an
older indigenous strain to the United States that's much more potent,
just stronger tobacco. So I'm sure in a pinch you
could use the Virginia kind, but there's apparently a preferred kind.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
That's not that aka the good stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah exactly. So I also said that you're not supposed
to keep the pipe stored put together. In addition to
the stem and the bowl, there are there's also often
a mouthpiece too, So these three separate parts are brought
together to begin a ceremony. It might be in a
sweat lodge like you said, it might be as part
(08:54):
of a wedding. There's all sorts of different times to
use it. But in some Native American cultures they were
used to basically seal a peace treaty between warring nations.
And there was a process for doing this, and there
would be a medicine man involved, and then you would
bring together the chiefs of the two warring tribes. Yeah,
(09:14):
and the cool thing about it is the medicine man
and each of the warring chiefs brings a piece of
the pipe, the medicine man puts it together, and then
it's kind of like, all right, we're all connected again.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yeah, that's great. I love what it symbolizes. And it's
something that's not you know, something still happening. And I mean,
I think this is from HowStuffWorks dot Com. They interviewed
I think a woman from the Lakota maybe, and she's like,
you know, this stuff is not past tense, like we
still have our culture and we still do these things.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yeah. Her name's Gabriel Drapeau and she's with the yank
tan Sioux tribe of South Dakota.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Oh okay, Well, she just makes a point like this
stuff is not in the past tense, like we still
I think a lot of people look at it that
way as like, oh, they used to smoke these ceremonial pipes.
And she's like, no, we still do this. We still
have our culture and it's still sacred to us.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Yeah. Pretty cool man. I love it. Well, I guess
short stuff is out everybody.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here for Dave. So it's a
short stuff, and we're talking about what you might know
is peace pipes, but as it turns out, that's not
the right word for it at all. So although we'll
probably accidentally call it peace pipes a bunch of times,
they're really called sacred or ceremonial pipes.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
That's right. That whole notion of passing the peace pipe
something that American settlers and soldiers saw and they thought like, hey,
they're smoking that thing during a treaty signing, so that
must be a peace pipe. And while it's true that
they might have smoked those during treaty signings, it turns
out they smoke them a lot, so it's a bit
(00:43):
of a misnomer.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Yeah. They come up in all sorts of different parts
of Native American culture. Something I thought was really interesting
is that I could not find a mention of any
North American tribe that doesn't use ceremonial pipes. Yeah, and
so like they found old ones from Florida up to
(01:04):
the Midwest. I think they found it in the Hopewell
culture in Ohio from the southwest up to the Pacific northwest,
like all over they use peace pipes, which tells you like,
this is a really old tradition and it predates some
of the tribes that eventually kind of grew out of
other tribes that were older.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, for sure. And again they just call them pipes.
I think there's a broader term that you can use,
if you want to get more specific, called a calumet.
And apparently that's from the French word. Would that be
shadow may like Timothy, Yeah, all right, and that means
read or flute, and Timothy shallo may. He's like a
(01:45):
little flutie read himself, he really is.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
I wonder if that's the stage name.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Now maybe, And you know, depending on the tribe and
the culture, they each have their own name for it,
perhaps in their own language, and generally they take them
out during some kind of ceremony, maybe a prayer, maybe
a treaty signing thing, maybe just a party or maybe
a monarchy situation.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Oh yeah, I forgot about that.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
But it is a sort of a physical representation of
a connection to God or maybe the smoke flowing out
in all directions to nature and connecting in that way.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, I also saw what it means specifically definitely depends
on the tribe. They have different meanings for it, even
though it's generally used for some sort of prayer solemn occasion,
like you were saying. One explanation I saw is that
the plants that are smoked in there, it's not always tobacco,
it's never marijuana, but and it can be a combination
(02:47):
of a bunch of different plants. Those plants have roots
in the earth, but their smoke travels up to the heavens,
to the spirit world, and they carry the person's prayer
with them. So it's very they're very sacred and solemn
occasion when they're smoking a ceremonial pipe, even though exactly
(03:07):
what they believe about it is it varies.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, for sure. And where they come from berries, I
think the Lakota, you know, the ideas that they were
given it by the white buffalo calf woman and it
was used for prayer in their culture generally, and that's
why the white buffalo calf is very much a sacred
thing to the Lakota.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Still, yeah, the Lakota call there's the chinoonpa, which is
a cool word to say, Yeah, And one other thing
about any ceremonial pipe is there's like different parts represent
different things, but they come in pieces. They're not actually
just one single piece. Especially with the Dakota and the Lakota,
(03:49):
both sue they are meant to stay apart, and when
they're put together, that indicates a ceremony or a prayer
session is beginning. You don't keep like if you're storing it,
or say, if you're a museum who gets your hands
on one of these and you're displaying it, you do
not show them put together. They're just kind of like
(04:11):
exploded on display, separated the different parts.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
They should call them pieces pipes.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Very nice? Should we take a pipe? Very nice? Yeah?
I gotta let that gel with me from all right.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
We'll be right back after that bad pun, right after this.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So one of the other things that a lot of
ceremonial pipes have in common in North America is that
they are made from a spe zip kind of rock.
And there's different variations on this kind of rock, but
they're all generally called pipestone.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Yeah, you know, we've talked about the pieces. There's that
wooden stem and then you've got your bowl. It's like
an L shape bowl or a T shaped bowl, and
that is that pipestone. There are different colors of pipestone,
so they're often very pretty pipes and pretty bowls. But
there's one apparently that's a little more revered, and that's
the red pipestone from Pipestone National Monument, which is southwest Minnesota,
(05:33):
and apparently it's that particular pipestone is considered sacred by
a lot of indigenous tribes.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Yeah, like they'll come from all over North America to
get the red pipestone is a kind of catlanite, which
is a stone made from clay, and it's actually fairly
easy to work with. But to get to it at
Pipestone National Monument, number one, you have to get a permit.
Number two, you can't get a permit unless you're enrolled
in a North American tribe. And then number three, it's
(06:00):
going to take you a while to get there because
the red pipestone at that park only exists underneath a
thick quartz layer and you're only allowed to use hand
tools like pick axes, chisels, sledgehammers to get to it,
and the park rangers recommend expecting to do at least
a weekend's worth of work with multiple other people, but
(06:23):
that some people end up having to get an annual
pass because they have to just keep coming back and
coming back and to finally get to it. And can
you imagine if you dedicated months to this and you
came back for that last time, you're like, this is
the one, and to find somebody else had just used
the rest of your work, dug through it and got
to the red pipestone you had to start over.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Yeah, I thought you were going to say you finally
make that beautiful bowl out of the pipestone, and then
your friend Gary knocks it off the kitchen counter.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Either way, either way, it was probably Gary who used
your hole in the first place too, So either way
Gary's to blame.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Gary notorious hole user. So it's not always up pipestone.
Sometimes it's limestone. Sometimes it's bone or pottery or shale,
but that pipestone is which are really after The stems
are generally wood, maybe alder or ash, and they're usually decorative,
not always, because like we said, there are all different
(07:18):
kinds of pipes, some for different ceremonies, some just personal pipes.
A lot of times I'll have feathers and beadwork. Some
are just plain though, and like you mentioned, they smoke
of a variety of things, not always tobacco. Sometimes it's
dried bark of maybe a red oyster dog wood. Maybe
it's a ground shrub if you're out on the prairie,
(07:39):
And like you mentioned, it's never marijuana. That is just
some dumb joke made by white people at some point,
probably in a cartoon strip or something.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
So that, yeah, in our crumb strip. Yeah, maybe Fritz
the cat. So that that ground shrub from the prairie
you mentioned is called kinnikinnick and it's spelled like it sounds.
It's also called bearberry, but actually both of them are
really fun to say as well. That's a sacred plant,
(08:08):
and then the tobacco that they'll smoke is also considered sacred.
But it's not that standard Virginia tobacco strain. It's an
older indigenous strain to the United States that's much more potent,
just stronger tobacco. So I'm sure in a pinch you
could use the Virginia kind, but there's apparently a preferred kind.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
That's not that aka the good stuff.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah exactly. So I also said that you're not supposed
to keep the pipe stored put together. In addition to
the stem and the bowl, there are there's also often
a mouthpiece too, So these three separate parts are brought
together to begin a ceremony. It might be in a
sweat lodge like you said, it might be as part
(08:54):
of a wedding. There's all sorts of different times to
use it. But in some Native American cultures they were
used to basically seal a peace treaty between warring nations.
And there was a process for doing this, and there
would be a medicine man involved, and then you would
bring together the chiefs of the two warring tribes. Yeah,
(09:14):
and the cool thing about it is the medicine man
and each of the warring chiefs brings a piece of
the pipe, the medicine man puts it together, and then
it's kind of like, all right, we're all connected again.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yeah, that's great. I love what it symbolizes. And it's
something that's not you know, something still happening. And I mean,
I think this is from HowStuffWorks dot Com. They interviewed
I think a woman from the Lakota maybe, and she's like,
you know, this stuff is not past tense, like we
still have our culture and we still do these things.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yeah. Her name's Gabriel Drapeau and she's with the yank
tan Sioux tribe of South Dakota.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Oh okay, Well, she just makes a point like this
stuff is not in the past tense, like we still
I think a lot of people look at it that
way as like, oh, they used to smoke these ceremonial pipes.
And she's like, no, we still do this. We still
have our culture and it's still sacred to us.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Yeah. Pretty cool man. I love it. Well, I guess
short stuff is out everybody.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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