Peace Pipe: How a Symbol Became an Idiom

The peace pipe is the name that became established in Western languages for the ceremonial pipe of North America's Native peoples; it appears in English as both peace pipe and pipe of peace. The name did not emerge from within the tradition it describes, but from the perspective of outsiders looking in. This is why the term lives on two separate planes today: on one hand it refers to the sacred object known as the calumet, and on the other it has settled into everyday language as an idiom meaning "to end a grudge."

The Origin of the Name

According to the U.S. National Park Service, the name arose because early settlers and soldiers most often saw the pipe at treaty-signing ceremonies; believing the pipe was simply a symbol of peace, they gave it this name. In fact, the ceremonial pipe served functions tied to war just as much as to peace, trade, and social and political decisions; sealing a treaty was only one of the roles it played among the peoples who used it.

The name's one-sidedness is best seen in the pipe tomahawk. This tool, with a tobacco bowl at one end and an axe blade at the other, was made by European and American craftsmen as a trade good and diplomatic gift; carrying both a smoking implement and a weapon in the same object made it a symbol of conflict just as much as diplomacy. Viewed against the world history of the pipe, the name "peace pipe" is considered the lasting result of a misreading born from the first encounter between two worlds.

From Literature to Popular Culture

The text that carried the term to a wide audience is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic The Song of Hiawatha, published on 10 November 1855. In its opening section, "The Peace-Pipe," the Great Spirit Gitche Manito carves a pipe at the red pipestone quarry, calls all peoples together with the rising smoke, and tells them to wash off their war paint, bury their war clubs, and make their own pipes from the same stone. The book reached a wide readership as soon as it appeared. Folklorists, however, criticize the text for gathering the heroes of separate source stories into a single figure and for inventing entire sections outright; in Stith Thompson's assessment, the poem is, as a whole, not a Native work at all.

In the 20th century, both terms appeared frequently in music as well. "Pass That Peace Pipe," written by Ralph Blane, Hugh Martin, and Roger Edens for the 1947 film Good News, was nominated for Best Original Song at the Academy Awards ceremony held on 20 March 1948. Paul McCartney's album Pipes of Peace, released on 31 October 1983, and the single of the same name, released on 5 December 1983, detached the term entirely from its Native context: the song's video re-enacts the 1914 Christmas Truce of the First World War, showing two soldiers meeting in no man's land between the trenches and showing each other photographs of their loved ones.

Idiom, Ceremony, and Criticism

In English, "to smoke the peace pipe" has become a fixed expression for two estranged parties reconciling. Records show this expression didn't remain purely figurative but also gave rise to actual ceremonies. A trade magazine published in early 1911 reports that at the annual dinner of an association of automobile manufacturers gathered in New York, a long-stemmed churchwarden pipe was passed around the table to mark the end of a lengthy legal dispute. In these same years, many American universities held graduation and inter-class reconciliation ceremonies built around this same idiom; students would imitate Native dress and pass the pipe from hand to hand. In later years these ceremonies were dropped one by one, considered an imitation of a sacred object and a culture.

The term has also been challenged by Native artists and writers. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025), an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, addressed the reduction of Native culture to commercial clichés with irony in her work; records note that she titled one piece "Ceci N'est Pas Une Peace Pipe," a nod to René Magritte's phrase "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Today, museum and archival records generally refer to the object as a "ceremonial pipe" or "calumet"; "peace pipe" lives on mostly as an idiom that has largely forgotten its own origin.