Sacred plant, deadly commodity: Tobacco’s deep history and indigenous heritage in the Americas

How did a plant revered as a sacred medicine by Indigenous peoples across the Americas become one of the leading causes of death in contemporary society? The historical journey of tobacco reveals both its profound cultural significance and its troubling evolution into a global health crisis. Yet, as Inskip and Hughes (this volume) acknowledge, much of tobacco research has been Eurocentric and focused primarily on recent post-colonial history. This narrow focus has often obscured the deep time history of humanity’s interactions with tobacco, which spans thousands of years prior to European colonization in the Americas the arrival of European settlers in the Americas.