Sacred tobacco and American Indians, tradition and conflict

“Everyone in my dad’s family smoked,” Brown said. “Chain-smoked a pack a day — grandma, grandpa, aunts, uncles, cousins, dad, all of them.”

And at 9 years old, Brown had his first cigarette. He took it from one of his mother’s packs.

“Mom didn’t even notice because she worked 16-hour days,” Brown recalls. “She wasn’t counting how many smokes there were in there. Me and my friend, we chain-smoked about 10 straight.”

But for Brown and many American Indians, there’s another side to tobacco.

As a kid, Brown split his time between Seminole County and the family homestead in Sasakwa, Oklahoma, where his great-grandmother, a traditional medicine woman, would burn tobacco in the house.