A small evergreen shrub native to the southeastern United States that produces red berries and is sometimes used to make a caffeinated beverage.
From Timucua cassina, a Native American language spoken in Florida; the word traveled into English through early colonial contact and naturalist accounts of indigenous plant use.
Native Americans were making caffeine-rich drinks from cassena centuries before European coffee culture took over—it's a forgotten example of how colonization erased indigenous plant knowledge and replaced it with 'exotic' alternatives from Africa and Asia.
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