Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: "Peace" Pipes

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2? Extremely. Listen to Health Stuff on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 piece pipes, but as it turns out, that's not the right word for it at all.

So although we'll probably accidentally call it piecepipes, a bunch of things. of times, they're really called sacred or ceremonial pipes. That's right. That whole notion of passing the peace pipe is 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 of a misnomer. 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. And so, like, they found old ones from Florida up to 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. 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 chateomé, like Timothy? Yeah. all right and that means read or flute and timothy shallamee he's like a little flutty read himself he really is i wonder if that's a stage name now maybe uh 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 a situation. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. 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. Yeah, I also saw, and 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. And it can be a combination 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. I like that. And they carry the person's prayer with them.

So it's a very, they're very sacred and solemn occasions when they're smoking a ceremonial pipe, even though exactly what they believe about it is, it varies. 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 still. Yeah, the Lakota call, there's the Chinumpa, 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. things, but they come in pieces. They're not actually just one single piece, especially with the Dakota and the Lakota, both Sue. They're 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 exploded on display, separated the different parts.

They should call them pieces pipes. Very nice. Should we take a break? That was very nice. Yeah, I got to let that gel with me from that. All right, we'll be right back after that bad pun, right after this. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician.

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with CalPenn on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 specific kind of rock. And there's different variations on this kind of rock, but they're all generally called pipe stone. Yeah. You know, we talked about the pieces.

There's that wooden stem, and then you've got your bowl. It's like an L-shaped bowl or a T-shaped bowl. And that is that pipe stone. There are different colors of pipe stone, 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 pipe stone from Pipestone National Monument, which is southwest Minnesota, and apparently it's that particular pipe stone is considered sacred by a lot of indigenous tribes. Yeah, like they'll come from all over North America to get the red pipe stone. It's a kind of Catlinite, 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 going to take you a while to get there because the red pipe stone at that park only exists underneath a thick quartz layer. And you're only allowed to use hand tools like pickaxes, 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 pieces. but 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 pipe stone and you had to start over. Yeah, I thought you were going to say you finally make that beautiful bowl out of the pipe stone and then your friend Gary knocks it off the kitchen counter. Either way. Either way. It was probably Gary who used your hole in the first place, too. So either way, Gary's to blame. Gary, notorious hole user. So it's not always that pipe stone. Sometimes it's limestone, sometimes it's bone or pottery or shale. But that pipestone's what you're really after. The stems are generally wood, maybe alder or ash, and they're usually decorative, not always, because like we said, They're all different 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 dogwood. Maybe it's a ground shrub if you're out on the prairie. 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.

So that, um, yeah, in our crumb strip. Yeah, maybe. Fritz the cat. Um, so that, that ground shrub from the prairie you mentioned is called Kinnikinik. Um, and it's spelled like it sounds. It's also called bear berry, but actually both of them are really fun to say as well. Um, that's a sacred plant. And then the, the tobacco, um, that they'll smoke, uh, 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 that's not that. AKA the good stuff. Yeah, exactly. So I also said that you're not supposed to keep the pipes stored put together. Yeah. In addition to the stem and the bowl, 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 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. 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. Yeah, that's great. I love what it symbolizes, and it's something that's not, you know, something's still happening. And, I mean, I think this is from House StuffWorks.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.

Yeah, her name's Gabriel Drapo, and she's with the Yankton Sioux tribe of South Dakota. 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. It's like, oh, they used to smoke these ceremonial pipes. And she's like, no, we still do this. We still have her culture and it's still sacred to us. Yeah.

Pretty cool, man. I love it. Well, I guess short stuff is out, everybody. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.