February 25, 2004

Tobacco is sacred to most Native Americans. We use it in ceremonies and individual prayer, and we believe it carries our words to the creator. My mother and I regularly use it in our prayers. We used it on the day my brother died from lung cancer. A heavy smoker, he died at age 56, just two years ago this spring.

My big brother was beautiful. He was a powerful man, handsome, invincible, charming and a little bit dangerous. He embodied the mystique of the Indian warrior, which prides our young people on their ability to live hard and believe foolishly that they are somehow immune from injury and disease.

At the time of his death, my brother had no regular physician. For him, seeking medical help would have been an admission of weakness. By the time the cancer was found, it was far too late.

When I saw him in the intensive care unit, I would not have recognized him if not for his many tattoos. Those jailhouse rebel markings looked so incongruous now against his thin grey arms full of tubes.

He had signed a do-not-resuscitate order but had changed his mind at the last minute when the breathing tube was taken from him. It's one thing to sign such an order and quite another to slowly drown in dry air. Only after a long, painful procedure in which a stent was placed in his lungs, allowing him to breathe on his own for a short time, could he let go.

We took him to a hospice and gently bathed him and combed his hair. And we sat with him as he passed. We offered tobacco to the creator in prayer for him. His brave, embattled struggle ended with so little dignity, nothing of the mythical warrior spirit to which he so aspired.

Our ancestors never intended that tobacco be abused as it is today. With its chemical additives and ready availability, cigarettes have turned tobacco into a deadly substance. It is a dreadful irony, then, that native people have the highest percentage of cigarette smokers, 40 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's January 2004 report. Fifty-three percent of our men and 33 percent of our women are smokers.

The reasons for the high rates of smoking among native people are not simple. Social and economic class plays a major role in the problem, as it does among other groups. The role of tobacco in the cultural life of native people, however, adds an especially challenging aspect to programs aimed at smoking cessation.

Fortunately, native communities are beginning to address the problem from the inside with programs such as "Keep Tobacco Sacred," a project sponsored by the University of Montana and created by native people to fight tobacco abuse.

One additional irony is that many tribes earn income from sales of tax-free tobacco products. Several tribes use income from tobacco sales to underwrite health programming.

On the day my brother died, my mother and I used tobacco in the way our ancestors used it, as a gift from the creator to take our hopes and wishes to him. I will use tobacco today when I pray for a new warrior mystique to emerge, one like the warrior ideal of our ancestors who were brave enough to honor that most sacred gift -- our lives.

Mary Annette Pember, Red Cliff Ojibwe, is past president of the Native American Journalists Association. She is currently lives and works as an independent journalist in Cincinnati. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.