Common juniper may be low-growing, and in swamps, bogs or muskegs can be so thick as to make getting around hard going. When it grows in more open spaces, it is at first low-growing, but if the soil is good for it, will grow into a conical shape. Eventually, if it continues to grow (to about 40 feet), side branches will begin to spread out. So this species, growing in a sunny, open glade may resemble Red Cedar in its general conformation. On rocky areas, ridges, cliffs, the cedar that grows there will usually be the sacred Red Cedar. There is another species of it -- common name Rocky Mountain Red Cedar -- that flourishes to the west of us in drier hills and mountains.

Red Cedar burns with the strong aromatic smell of ceremonial or private purifications. Red Cedar's wood is beautiful and aromatic -- used to line chests, drawers, and closets to perfume clothing and keep moths away. White cedar lacks those qualities, but its wood is rich in preservative oils. White cedarwood makes strong frames, sidings, shingles that weather to a beautiful pale-striped grey, and last a long time against harsh weather. All the cedars are gifts to us people, but for Anishinaabeg peoples, the Red Cedar is especially sacred.

All this seems to me more important than the chemical components of this biological organism. In comparison, I feel those are true but trivial.

Katsi discusses, without giving the botannical name that would zero in on it, a Navajo and Zuni usage of a cedar-juniper plant she ID's by the Navajo name of Gad. In searching the big databases, I found many more Navajo women's and childbirth uses of a species called Juniperus monosperma. Oneseed Juniper is its common name. But I don't go just by old ethnobotany reports, especially when they didn't record the Native names of plants (no native names are recoverable from either the AGIS or University of Michigan databases, even if they might have been mentioned in the reports cited).

Rough Rock Tribal Demonstration School was the first Native-controlled cultural survival school. It was started by parents (with a lot of opposition from the BIA) around 1969, at Chinle, AZ on the big Navajo rez. In 1986, Rough Rock School put out a cultural cookbook, edited by Regina Lynch. It includes traditional recipes for an infusion (tea) of new branchlets and twigs of the Oneseed juniper to strengthen mothers after childbirth, and several recipes that include grinding its seeds into meal and using them in bread and corncake doughs, as well as using this juniper's leaf ash to make lye water to turn corn and corn meal into hominy. So this species of juniper -- which doesn't grow around here and which I've been uable to find a picture of -- is most probably the Navajo Gad whose berries and foliage Katsi discusses. Its berries and foliage probably contain the same vitamins, minerals, and numerous oils and compounds of the species that is analyzed on the USDA