Build Date: Sun Aug 9 22:50:15 2026 UTC
You're still mad because I nailed you. 'GAR GAR (unprovoked unrelated personal attack) GAR GAR you suck etc.'
-- H. R. Pufenstuf
Upstart American Spirits Puts Ancient Wisdom in Every Pack
Reported 1999-06-20 14:27 by Mr. Bad
| It's not often that in the hardscrabble tobacco industry a new kid on the block can make a dent in the market share of the Giants of Smoking like RJR and Philip Morris. And yet, that's exactly what scrappy upstart American Spirit has done, gaining 15% share in the all-important 18-24 target demographic in the 5 years since they entered the fray. | |
| How do they do it, you ask? The New Mexico-based corporation has a secret weapon up its sleeve: the traditional cigarette-making wisdom of an ancient and noble people. | |
| American Spirits cigarettes are the collective pride of the citizens of the Waiala Pueblo Tribe, located 150 mi. northeast of Santa Fe. The Waiala have created tobacco products by hand since time immemorial. | |
| "Our elders say that the first cigarette was created by our Father the Sun after begetting all the things of the earth by our Mother the Moon," Waiala leader Sam Tchakaiolo informed Pigdog Journal during a recent visit to the Great Southwest. "We celebrate the post-coital glow of the All-Father each time we make a relaxing American Spirit cigarette." | |
| Tchakaiolo, the wiry, sun-wrinkled 54-year-old kapa or "cigarette big man" of the Waiala, led us on a tour of the scenic Waiala Pueblo where American Spirits are made. PJ was surprised to see that cigarette production on a massive scale goes on side-by-side with traditional tribal living. | |
| "This is our way of life," the kapa explained. "Sooner ask us to stop eating coyote-gut stew, to stop selling firecrackers and anatomically-correct novelty statuettes by the roadside, than to stop producing 50,000 gross of regular, light, wide and menthol cigarettes per day." | |
| American Spirits begin in the terraced tobacco fields of Waiala Pueblo, hand-carved into the 4000-foot high walls of the Waiala Mesa. The back-breaking labor of tending the fields is performed by the married women of their tribe, who can often be seen bent in a permanent agonizing stoop over the green, leafy tobacco rows, and occasionally falling to their deaths on the canyon floor below. | |
| No chemical pesticides or fertilizers are used on the plants. "We fertilize them with corn husks, fish skeletons and human dung," says Tchakaiolo. "This gives American Spirit cigarettes their unique 'close-to-nature' flavor." | |
| Once the tobacco is harvested, dried, and chopped, it's on to the rolling kiva. It's here that we find the traditional rolling paper, made from mesquite wood chewed for hours by the tribe's virgins, stamped flat by foot and dried in the life-draining desert sun. Also on hand are filters made of finest lambs' wool, sheered from the nether regions of the newborn females on the night of the first full moon in the Spring. | |
| Rolling the cigarettes themselves, though, is the province of the tribe's warriors. | |
| "The men of the tribe prepare for hours in the kiva, or religious trailers, of our reservation," explains Ivan Kachumoro, the garana or "rolling big man" of the Waiala. "We fry on all kinds of crazy-ass desert plants for, like, _days_. You ever try to roll 100,000 cigarettes? You'd wanna be heap big fucked up, too." | |
| Once spiritually and physically prepared for the task of rolling, the men sit in the circular rolling kiva and begin their task. Taking a filter and a handful of tobacco between the fingers of his right hand, the warrior tears off a square of paper in his left, and with a flick of his wrist, a perfect cigarette is made. This is repeated thousands upon thousands of times per day. | |
| Finally, the finishing touches are put on the cigarette itself. A thin gold band is painted around the filter end of the butt. "We had some problem coming up with all that gold," admits Tchakaiolo, "We made a deal with the Mexican government to use the melted-down remains of Aztec ceremonial masks. Turns out there's international indigenous peoples' agreements out there that allow us to desecrate priceless works of all humanity for our own gain. Who'd a thunk it?" | |
| As cigarettes are made, they are gathered into packs of twenty (a holy number to the Waiala) in the hands of small, dirty children who run them over to the Packing Pueblo. Here, the eldest, wisest women in this matriarchal society put the cigarettes in their final packages and seal the closure with a brief chant and wave of a smudge stick. | |
| The packages themselves are made by hand by in Waiala Pueblo. Tin ore for the foil is mined on ancestral lands 200 miles away and carried by llama back to the Pueblo, where it is smelted over dense, hot buffalo-dung fires. | |
| The cellophane wrapper is harvested from the plentiful ana'i, or cellophanus cactus -- it's peeled like sunburnt skin off the plant's outer husk. Finally, the paper shell of the package is lovingly hand-painted by a skilled artisan after much prayer and fasting. | |
| But what about the logo on the American Spirits package, a silhouette of what is obviously a Plains Indian smoking a peace-pipe, not a cigarette? | |
| "Well," Tchaikaolo says, "our most revered elder was visited in a dream by Kahi'iki Pa'ona, the Kachina of Marketing. He was told that having a picture of one of us Southwest Indians with our traditional Moe the Stooge haircut just wasn't gonna get us anywhere. So we use the Chief, there, instead." | |
| Yet more proof that modern wisdom, matched with ancient ways, makes for good business! |
T O P S T O R I E S
John Dvorak has passed. I’m of mixed emotions. First off I’m more positive about his contribution to the overall technology journalism of the early PC days through the 90s, despite how many things he got wrong. He was a firebrand and commanded attention. (More...)
America's National Recording Registry Inducts Culturally Significant Artist - Weezer!
America's Library of Congress calls them "defining sounds of history and culture" and "audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time based on their cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage." Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Weezer! (More...)
The Crossroads are real and The Blues is a place; The enduring myth of Robert Johnson (More...)
California Glory Hole attracts huge crowds
A glory hole at Napa's Lake Berryessa is drawing huge crowds. According to Chris Lee, the general manager for the Solano County Water Agency, the glory hole hasn't been active since 2019, and only restarted operations on Feb 4. (More...)
Republican State Senator busted after soliciting a teenage girl
Republican State Senator Justin Eichorn of Minnesota was arrested for soliciting a teen girl on Monday just hours after he introduced a bill proposing "Trump derangement syndrome" (TDS) as a form of mental illness. (More...)
Parents claim measles is not that bad after having only one child die
The parents of a Texas girl who died from the measles are defending their decision not to vaccinate their daughter. "She says they would still say 'Don't do the shots,'" an unidentified translator for the parents said. "They think it’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be." (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
A Day in the Life of a Beverotologist
It was starting to look like a very boring Saturday, trapped as I was in the suburban wastelands of the outer Bay Area, so I called my Able Assistant (AA) and proposed that we perform some Spocktail field tests. For some time I've been working on creating the quintessential cinematic beverage and even tho' SMRL does most of its testing during nocturnal hours, this seemed an opportune time to roll up the sleeves of our labcoats and get some science done. While the beverotology creation tested this day (The Neurotoxin) must be deemed a success, this article focuses more the journey of the experimenters, rather then the science of beverotology. (More...)
Three Days and 25 Spocktails: A Cautionary Tale
Johnnie Royale picked me up from the dental surgery. I felt warm, safe, cradled in the anathesia's loving embrace. The pharmacy downstairs gave me a bottle of Vicodin and a few instructions: take it with food, don't mix with alcohol, don't operate heavy machinery. I put it in my pocket and we left. "Do you want to go home, or do you want to go to a bar?" asked Johnnie. (More...)
Australian Troops Set for Days of Debauchery to the Tunes of Kylie Minogue
This weekend Australian troops in East Timor will be able to put their feet up and push all the images of mass graves and charred remains from their minds as they relax to the giddy melodies of Kylie Minogue - including exclusive unplugged performances in the militia-ravaged and blood-spattered border towns of Balibo and Suai. (More...)
It was early in May last year when I first heard about Spock Mountain Research Labs. I was working on a story about a Hungarian scientist's new approach to nucleopeptide synthesis when I got a call from my friend Albert. (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)
The Walken / Country Bear Conspiracy
As has been recently reported in the PDJ, Christopher Walken, evil s00per villain extraordinaire, will be appearing next month in Disney's newest release, The Country Bear Movie. Always playing some wicked and very disturbed badass in movies like Sleepy Hollow, Illuminata, The Prophecy I, II, III, Pulp Fiction, Batman Returns, The Milagro Beanfield War, A View to a Kill, The Dogs of War, Heaven's Gate, and The Deer Hunter, Walken is unsuprisingly a big favorite in the PDJ news room. (More...)
