Native American Baseball

Chris Cohlmeyer , the reason I give for having a beard is God. If God didn’t want me to have a beard then I would have been born a female.

I feel compelled to reveal the number one best mosquito repellent, fly repellent, and repellent of any biting flying insect.

And that is sweetgrass.

Sweetgrass is a type of grass that grows in the wild in the far northern realms of the Great Plains of North America. It grows in northern North Dakota and in northern Minnesota as well as the southern Great Plains of Canada.

It happens to be one of the four sacred herbs of the Lakota — as well as other tribes. For hundreds of years the native peoples knew that nothing in the natural world repels mosquitoes and other biting insects better than sweetgrass. They burned sweetgrass braids and they boiled sweetgrass to gather sweetgrass oil, which they spread over their teepees (or tipis if that is how you prefer to spell it). They would also spread the oil over their skin to keep from being bitten.

It works and I can personally attest to this. The goshdarn Surgeon General, who represents the pharmaceutical industry, refuses to acknowledge this fact because sweetgrass is natural and Big Pharma cannot make any money from it. So we are taught that to avoid mosquito bites we must buy toxic chemicals to spread over our skin (which then gets absorbed into our bodies).

The Lakota were also intense sticklers about language. They believed that every word they uttered was heard by the Creator. In the Lakota/Siouxan languages there was no word nor phrase for, ‘bite me.’

Seriously, there is no mosquito repellent more effective than sweetgrass and sweetgrass oil. Bananas and banana peels work well, too, but not nearly as well as sweetgrass. Burn a little desert sage in addition and you will be guaranteed of a mosquito-free outdoor experience. And if you insist on playing baseball or softball rub a little sweetgrass oil into your mit and you just might catch more grounders than normal.