The Revival of Yaupon: How Indigenous Women Are Bringing Back America’s Forgotten Tea
A Return Rooted in Memory
For generations, Yaupon holly — North America’s only native caffeinated plant — grew quietly in the understory of Southern forests. It survived storms, colonization, and silence. Once central to Indigenous ceremony and community life, it was pushed aside by imported plants that became the symbols of “civilized” trade.
But the land kept it alive.
And now, women are listening again.
Across the Southeast, Indigenous women are reviving Yaupon as a living link between culture and ecology, not a trend or commodity, but a continuation of care.
Restoring Relationship
To reclaim Yaupon is to remember an older way of living with plants — one guided by reciprocity rather than extraction. These women are re-learning what their ancestors knew: that tending, harvesting, and preparing Yaupon is a ceremony in itself.
Revival means more than bringing something back to market. It means restoring a relationship, where economy follows ecology and every act of creation is an offering to place.
Plants as Relatives
Yaupon thrives without chemicals, irrigation, or manipulation. It grows where other plants struggle in dry, sandy soil and longleaf pine savannas. It shelters birds and deer, stabilizes roots after floods, and stays evergreen when the forest browns.
To work with Yaupon is to learn from its resilience. It teaches patience, adaptability, and balance, lessons we need now more than ever.
Women Carrying the Fire Forward
From the Carolina coast to the Gulf, Indigenous women are gathering, roasting, and sharing Yaupon once more. Some tend wild stands that have grown since their grandmothers’ time. Others build small collectives that teach the next generation to harvest with gratitude.
Their work is not about nostalgia. It’s about continuity, keeping a relationship alive that colonization tried to sever.
Among them is Angela Locklear (Lumbee), founder of Native Yaupon Tea, who sees Yaupon as a bridge between ancestral knowledge and present responsibility. Through her work, she honors the women before her who carried seeds, stories, and survival across generations.
From Erasure to Remembrance
Imported teas and coffees once defined what was valuable, while Yaupon — a native plant of strength and ceremony — was dismissed. Its near disappearance mirrors the broader erasure of Indigenous presence in Southern landscapes.
Bringing it back is not revival for the sake of novelty. It’s remembrance as resistance, an act of returning voice to the land and visibility to its original caretakers.
A Cup That Carries Memory
When you drink Yaupon, you share in that story.
Each leaf carries memory: of fire tended in clay bowls, of hands roasting over embers, of voices speaking to the land before sunrise.
To sip Yaupon is to participate in a lineage that never disappeared, only waited to be remembered.
Learn More About Native Yaupon Tea →
Read: The Indigenous History of Yaupon →