DCHP-1 Online

kinnikinik Various spellings [< Algonk.: Cree or Ojibwa "that which is mixed"]

• 1 n. a smoking mixture varying as to ingredients from tribe to tribe and place to place, but including bearberry or sumac leaves, the inner bark of red-osier dogwood and, often, tobacco.

  See also: Indian tobacco (def. 2)  red-osier dogwood  

  • 1858  (1860)  A sandy ridge . . . was covered with the bear-berry from which kinnikinnik is made.
  • 1863  . . . husband and sons looked on tranquilly, and smoked 'kinne-kanik' in short stone pipes.
  • 1920  The air was suffocating to white lungs--what with human emanations combined with the thick fumes of kinnikinnik.
  • 1960  [Caption] Bearberry leaves were dried and mixed with other plants or white man's tobacco. This was known as kinnikinik.

• 2 n. the bearberry, especially its leaves as used for smoking.

  See also: bearberry  Yukon holly  

  • 1863  (1958)  We had not had tobacco for months, but now obtained the flavour of it by pounding up one or two black and seasoned clays, mixing the dust with "kinnikinnick." But this was killing the goose with the golden egg, and as pure kinnikinnick did not satisfy the craving, we laid our pipes by for a happy day.
  • 1906  (1910)  Nor should we omit . . . the berry of the kinnikinik . . . which is prepared for eating by roasting in a frying pan and mixed with salmon oil or the grease of any animal.
  • 1963  The rolling hills along the Kootenay, Bull and Elk rivers are parklike with their copses of fir, tamarack, poplar and willow, dotted through open stretches of bitterbrush and kinnikinnik, or left standing in old log slashes or burns.

• 3 n. certain other shrubs from which a smoking mixture is made, such as the red-osier dogwood.

  See also: red-osier dogwood  

  • 1878  (1955)  The Indians were inveterate smokers and the odour emitted from that horrid weed they smoke (the dried bark of the red willow, called kinnikanic) is very unpleasant.
  • 1890  . . . the bark of the red willow [is] known amongst them as "K'nick K'neck," corrupted into Killikinek in English.
  • 1954  The half-breed then seated himself . . . and filled his red-clay pipe with Kenik-Kenik, the bark of red dogwood.
  • 1957  . . . they went another day, and another, eating nothing but rose hips, leaves, kinnikinnik bark, moss, water cress.