Note 7 — APPENDIX 2: PEYOTE AND THE MESCAL BEAN

Gilmore, Uses of Plants, 99 writes: “The Omaha traveling into Oklahoma have found them [chinaberry] there, and have taken up their use. They already had employed for beads as well as for a good-luck charm the bright red seed of a species of Erythrina. They say it grows somewhere to the southwest, toward or in Mexico. They call it ‘red medicine,’ makaⁿ zhide (makaⁿ, medicine; zhide, red). When the seeds of Melia (azerdache L.) [chinaberry] were adopted for use as beads, they likened them to makaⁿ zhide, and so call them makaⁿ-zhide sabe, ‘black red-medicine’.”