The study of so-called ‘primitive’ cultures is both fascinating and of the greatest benefit to those who plan a career working with people; not least because Australia is home to the oldest culture of all. 

Over several hundred years the white colonisers of the Americas set about destroying the native cultures. In the US after World War Two the process took on the far more insidious and successful forms of sedation by TV and junk food, ‘dumbing down’, and obsessive money and personal health cultures that were working on the whites. One apparent outcome of this was the emergence into the media of Medicine Men from across the country. These men, and women, revealed certain fragments of American Indian teachings on the subjects the white dominators were seriously failing in: spirit; environment; wealth creation; medicine. 

There are many books and readings from the 16^th century on. To me it seems that more and more is being steadily revealed to us. Sometimes Medicine men and other Indians mock the consumer society and white people in general. However, ‘white man’s’ literature has spiritual roots as deep and complex as anyone else’s. In the Buddhist world-view, which like ancient Chinese thought has much in common with Amerindian teachings, this attitude represents a small failure of compassion.  

Compassion is different to empathy: it is the ability to allow all things to be as they are. Our so-called ‘white man’s’ culture is a voracious assimilator of the intellectual treasures of other cultures. It has taken many beliefs and practices from around the world, and is continually integrating these into an increasingly sustainable world-view. Practically, as a doctor, you will frequently meet people who embrace a different world-view to that of your own. This may, by the way, manifest as an expressed hatred of scientific medicine (whilst submitting to the treatment). It would be helpful to consider how you are going to accept people’s ideas, no matter how strange. The famous psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein calls this ability the ‘suspension of disbelief’.  

The whole point of this listening. The more you listen as a doctor, the more you will hear. In other words, if patients trust you not to laugh at their world-view of health, they will tell you, for example, what other treatments they are taking from ‘alternative’ practitioners. This will help you avoid drug interactions. It will also teach you about a given patient’s health network. Good communication is vital to recovering health! 

With that in mind, enjoy some brief readings:

This fragment from a ‘Change Song’, is a modernised translation of a ritual chant from an unknown tribe published early last century:

 

Death’s first snows are drifting on my cheek…

…sing my kinsman, when the oldest man

takes his lone trail through the forest

He will wear no mourning-blanket when he comes home again tomorrow!

He will say “Rejoice-

I have borne your grief afar,

I have buried it deep,

the place is not known.”

 

It is clear that only fragments of much longer holy stories were revealed to early collectors. Anthropology, often condescending, was very popular after Darwin’s Origin of the Species, and no doubt Indians revealed fragments to get people off their backs! This piece of a Doctor’s Song of the Chippewa, for example, reveals a world of Shamanistic practice. Perhaps this was brought over the Bering land-bridge from Russia in prehistoric times.              

 

I am singing and dreaming in my poor way

over the earth

I who will again disembark

upon earth 

 

This is a record of the Blackfeet of the Great Plains in the 1830’s: 

“The fur traders in this country are nearly all French. In their language, a doctor or physician is called “Medecin.” The Indian country is full of doctors. They are all magicians, and skilled, or professed to be skilled, in many mysteries. The word ‘medecin’ has become habitually applied to anything mysterious or unaccountable. The English and Americans, who also trade and pass through this country, have easily and familiarly adopted the same word, with a slight alteration, to convey the same meaning. “Medicine- men” means something more than merely a doctor or physician. Medicine-men are supposed to deal in mysteries and charms, which are aids and handmaids in their practice. Yet it was necessary to give the word or phrase a still more comprehensive meaning, as there were many personages among them, and also among the white men who visit the country, who could deal in mysteries, though not skilled in the application of drugs or medicines. All such men who deal in mysteries are included under the comprehensive and accommodating phrase ‘medicine-men’. For instance, I am a ‘medicine-man’ of the highest order among these people*, on account of the art which I practice, which is a strange and unaccountable thing to them, and of course called the greatest of ‘medicine’. My gun and pistols, which have percussion locks, are great medicine. No Indian can be prevailed on to fire them off, for they say they will have nothing to do with white man’s medicine. 

The Indians do not use the word medicine, however. In each tribe they have a word of their own construction, synonymous with mystery or mystery-man.  

The ‘medicine bag’, then, is a mystery-bag. Its meaning and importance must be understood, as it may be said to be the key to Indian life and Indian character. These bags are constructed of the skins of animals, or birds, or of reptiles, and ornamented and preserved in a thousand different ways, as suits the taste or freak of the person who constructs them. These skins are generally attached to some part of the clothing of the Indian, or carried in his hand. They are oftentimes decorated to be exceedingly ornamental to his person, and always are stuffed with grass, or moss, or something of the kind. Generally there are no drugs or medicines within them, as they are religiously closed and sealed, and seldom, if ever, to be opened. I find that every Indian in his primitive state carries his medicine bag in some form or other, to which he pays the greatest homage, and to which he looks for safety and protection through life. Feasts are often made, and dogs and horses sacrificed, to a man’s medicine. Days and even weeks of fasting and penance of various kinds are often suffered to appease his medicine, which he imagines he has in some way offended.

  

Professor Jack Coulehan at Stonybrook in New York is an internationally renowned poet and doctor with strong ties to Australia. He is a major contributor to the NYU database on literature and medicine. 

“As a young doctor [he] headed out to a Navajo Indian reservation, in the central arid region of the USA. Like the Greek physician Asclepius, the Navajo believe that illness is a disharmony between the inner and outer cosmos. Healing rituals take days, and involve lengthy sessions of chanting poetry, singing sacred sequences and the construction of complex sand paintings. The purpose of this is to retell the life story of the ill person so that it follows a right path, along which the behaviour that causes the illness does not occur.”

”Traditional medicine men coexist with physicians and hospitals on the 25,000 square mile Navajo Indian Reservation. Most seriously ill Navajos utilize both systems of health care. This natural experiment of coexistence emphasizes several general characteristics of all healing. Traditional ceremonies are successful because they are integrated into Navajo belief systems and meet needs of sick people not dealt with by the available Western medicine. ..Reductionism limits the spectrum of obstacles considered relevant (eg, causes of illness), but an alternate model might include emotional, social, or spiritual phenomena …” 

In the early 1930s Black Elk, a great Sioux Medicine Man who witnessed the battle of Little Big Horn and the massacre at Wounded Knee, spoke about the healing ceremony performed around a sick person in a tepee:

“You want to know why we always go from left to right like that. I can tell you something of the reason, but not all. Think of this: Is not the south the source of life, and does not the flowering stick truly come from there? And does not man advance from there toward the setting sun of his life? Then does he not approach the colder north where the white hairs are? And does he then not arrive, if he lives, at the source of light and understanding, which is the east? Then does he not return to where he began, to his second childhood, there to give back his life to all life, and his flesh to the earth whence it came? The more you think about this the more meaning you will see in it.”

In 1972 Lame Deer, also of the Sioux, spoke with a sharp wit and, especially considering the decimation of his people, a wonderful humour: 

“I believe the only real medicine man in the wicasa wican- the holy man, Such a one can cure, prophesy, talk to the herbs, command the stones, conduct the sun dance, or even change the weather, but all of this is of no great importance to him.”

“The Sioux have a name for white men. They call them wasicun: fat-takers. It is a good name, because you have taken the fat of the land. But it does not seem to have agreed with you. Right now you don’t look so healthy- overweight, yes, but not healthy. Americans are bred like stuffed geese- to be consumers, not human beings.” 

“I would like to talk about one more thing. I have been to New York, Chicago and some other big places, stayed in your house many times, met a lot of people and kept my eyes open. So I know a little about what you call psychology. I have heard about group therapy and encounter meetings and found out that some white people have a way of acting out their troubles as in a play. Well, I must tell you that we Indians knew about these things a long time before you did. For longer than anyone can remember, many Sioux ceremonies always ended with a kind of Indian ‘group therapy’- with everybody taking his turn in a circle, talking about his problems, about what’s wrong with him. And a heyoka, a thunder-dreamer and clown, always has to act out his dreams in public, no matter how embarrassing that may be. At least it doesn’t cost him 35 bucks an hour.

I also think that it is a very wise sort of Indian psychology that a medicine man doesn’t dress up fancy with feathers and war bonnet when he performs a ceremony.” 

Lame Deer also gives us a sketch of herbal lore with his charactersitic sense of humour: 

“Tate canuga-a kind of snakeroot- is for treating poor appetite. But with no jobs and no money on the reservations, that’s one herb we don’t need right now. 

Can hlogan wastemna- a ragweed- helps a woman during a bad child-bearing. It will also make a man fall asleep so that you can steal his horses, but it’s no good for stealing cars.”

References and further reading 

Caitlin G (183?)Letters and Notes on the North American Indians in Carmichael AG and Ratzan RM (1991) Medicine in Literature and Art   Konemann  pp176-7 

Coulehan JL. Navajo Indian medicine: implications for healing.  J Fam Pract. 1980 Jan;10(1):55-61. 

Coulehan J www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/prevmed/mns/imcs/contexts/

altmed/coulehan.html  (essay on Navajo experience and alternative medicine good and bad) 

Coulehan J: His poetry books are The Heavenly Ladder and Medicine Stone.

Cronyn GW(ed.) (1918/1991) American Indian Poetry: An Anthology of Songs and Chants  Fawcett Columbine NY There are numerous fragments in this collection. 

Lame Deer & Erdoes R (1972) Lame Deer Seeker of Visions   Washington Square Press  chs 3 and 9

Neihardt JG (1932, 1972) Black Elk Speaks  Pocket Books NY p180 

Sarris G 1993  Keeping Slug Woman Alive    University of California Press

A holiday? 

If you feel like being swept away by all this stuff, why not go rafting down the Grand Canyon on the Hero’s Path with Zen poet and paediatrician Ted McMahon. It’s on the web. His book of poems is called ‘The Uses Of Imperfection’ (2003 Cat’n’Dog Productions, Seattle)