The Native-American Peace Pipe (or Pipe of Peace). Two Terms Often Used as Symbol, Idiom, and Metaphor: Difference between revisions

“War and Peace Pipes. Commemoration and Remembrance” (''Pipes & Tobaccos'' magazine, Spring 2008) was my report about pipes of another era. In this story, I examine the history of the peace pipe and pipe of peace beyond the colloquial “Put that in your peace-pipe and smoke it.” This essay the whole what’s what about these two terms.  

According to David Steel, this World War One, London-made clay pipe depicting Lord Kitchener, found on Scotland’s May National Nature Reserve in May 2022, is a peace pipe!  Unlikely!  

This 19th-century, walrus-ivory pipe in the Allen Memorial Art Museum (Oberlin College), attributed to the Iñupiat of Alaska, is catalogued as a peace pipe. Borrowing the title of René Magritte’s 1929 surrealist painting, “Cec i n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”), I say: Ceci n’est pas une calumet de la paix!  

I subscribe to the studied opinion of George Catlin’s Letters and Notes on the North American Indians: “Two of the tomahawks that I have named, marked e, are what are denominated ‘pipe-tomahawks,’ as the heads of them are formed into bowls like a pipe, in which tobacco is put, and they smoke through the handle. These are the most valued of an Indian’s weapons…deadly weapons of war.” “Although the pipe is frequently called a Peace Pipe, there is also a War Pipe used to organize and lead war parties. A Tomahawk Pipe was also used both in connection with peace and war” (Paul B. Steinmetz, The Sacred Pipe, 1998). At one end of the tomahawk pipe is the lip for the pipe; at the other end is the ax blade and a pipe bowl, indicating the warrior’s willingness to use the one side that allows him to offer the other.

“The war is over. The lawyers are being paid and the pipe of peace actually has been smoked. It was smoked at the annual dinner of the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, which occurred in the Hotel Astor, New York, on Thursday last, 12th inst. …The sentiment was well received and loudly applauded, and then to cement the newly formed friendship the pipe of peace was smoked. It was a long church-warden pipe at which President Clifton took the first pull” (“Pipe of Peace Smoked at A.L.A.M. Banquet,” The Motor World, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, January 5, 1911).  

This pipe was used at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, in the early 1900s during Class Day ceremonies. Seniors would take a puff from this clay pipe, identified as a peace pipe. Unfortunately, the ceremony was deeply problematic, because it stereotyped and appropriated Native peoples.  

[[File:PeacePipe-7-Bates-ClassDay-PipeG2-121130 archives-artifacts 032-900x600.jpg|thumb|center|600|Courtesy, bates.edu.]]

[[File:PeacePipe-8-IUAA-Marketing FY20 Pride 5-Facts-Commencement 1050x700 PeacePipe.jpg|thumb|center|600px|Photo, courtesy, myiu.org]]

There was a Pipe of Peace ceremony for the class of 1921 to 1922 and 1922 to 1923 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where members of the senior class would pass down words of wisdom and guidance to the juniors and then engage in the ritual smoking of the peace pipe as an act of togetherness, while typically wearing historic Native American attire. This photo depicts nine Wisconsin University juniors and seniors, dressed as Native Americans, going through the motions of smoking the peace pipe on the Mendota lakeshore, Madison, Wisconsin, in June 1931.

[[File:PeacePipe-9-WisconsonU-1618000099-l.jpg|thumb|center|600px|Courtesy, wisconsinhistory.org]]

The ritual seems to have spread to other American universities. This photo of Yale graduates is dated June 17, 1935. They’re not participating in a sit-in cum peace-pipe ceremony; they’re puffing clay churchwardens, not Calumets, to celebrate their passage from college.

Pomona and Claremont McKenna College in eastern Los Angeles County had exchanged a Native-American peace pipe at every football game since 1959, but this tradition ended in 2013, when both schools recognized the inappropriate use of a peace pipe as a trophy.

This is the opening line of the Introduction to “[[Dunhill]], The Pipe of Peace” at pipedia.org: “For the everyday smoke what more is there to say than this, that it is, in its essence the Pipe of Peace?” I may not agree with the appellation, but I agree with the sentiment.

The Sterncrest ad exhibits its interpretation of the Pipe of Peace.

==== A gallery of interesting examples ====