11/18/2025
Peace and power, family.
Today I want to lift up the name of a man who walked the medicine road long before most of us were ever born — an Oklahoma legend whose story sits at the crossroads of African American Hoodoo and Indigenous Creek healing traditions:
✨ Island Smith (1877–?)
African Creek Root Doctor • Herbal Healer • Community Medicine Man
Born outside Taft, Oklahoma in 1877 to Hannah and Isaac Smith, Island grew up during a time when Black and Indigenous people blended survival, spirituality, and land-based knowledge into a single way of life. After his father died young, Island moved with his mother and stepfather to the area southwest of Okmulgee — a region still pulsing with Creek culture, Freedmen history, and frontier survival.
Smith’s family lived the way many African Creek families did in the late 1800s:
🌾 Growing just enough corn for themselves
🐖 Raising hogs, cattle, and horses
🌿 Foraging wild foods
🎯 Hunting deer, rabbits, raccoon, and squirrel
Back then, money wasn’t the center of life — the land was. As Smith said, “We seldom had use for money in the early days… and spent it as soon as we got it.” When the family needed flour, coffee, or sugar, they simply rounded up hogs and traded in Okmulgee.
What truly set Island apart, though, was his gift — his inherited, ancestral knowledge as a healer. He learned the old ways of identifying roots and herbs, preparing medicine, and administering healing through the traditional Creek method, which included the use of a sacred cane or hollow reed to channel healing energy into the body.
Island described his abilities as coming from his mixed African and Creek ancestry, saying:
> “Cross blood means extra knowledge.
I can take my cane and blow it twice
and do the same as a full-blood Creek doctor does in four times.
Two bloods means two talents.”
This mindset reflects a deeper truth many of us know: Black and Indigenous traditions have always overlapped, shared, and evolved together — especially here in Oklahoma.
Creek medicine ways, African rootwork, hoodoo conjure, herbal healing, and ancestor veneration all blended into a uniquely Black-Indigenous spiritual science.
Island Smith wasn’t just a “root doctor.”
He was a cultural bridge, a community healer, and a living example of how our ancestors combined knowledge systems to survive in a world that tried to erase them.
His legacy reminds us that:
✨ Our people have always had our own doctors and healers
✨ Our traditions didn’t disappear — they went home with us
✨ Black and Indigenous knowledge have ALWAYS walked side by side
✨ Spiritual medicine has been present in Oklahoma for generations
As we continue our own revival of Hoodoo, ATRs, and ancestral practices, it’s important to honor men like Island Smith — healers who carried the old ways through Jim Crow, allotment, land theft, and American erasure… and kept them alive so that we could pick them back up today.
I’ll also be dropping two videos from Witch Doctor Alex that give even more context to medicine men and rootworkers like Island Smith. 👇🏾
Feel free to drop your thoughts, reflections, or any Oklahoma-based family healing stories below. Our history is deep… and it’s ours to reclaim. ✊🏾🌿
— Trai
Rootworker • Grittin' Griot • Cultural Keeper
