Native American medicine, cancer and spirituality. Tim Batchelder According to an online article entitled "Native American Traditional Medicine" by Subhuti Dharmananda at the Institute for Traditional Medicine, in Portland, Oregon, medicine men were actively pursued and imprisoned as leaders of traditional Native culture during colonial days yet the Lakota who recently helped lead the American Indian Movement (MM), have been very resistant to encroachment by Europeans and as a result their traditional medicine has been the most studied of all the Native Americans. Lakota Deer Medicine for example comes from watching deer and the greens they eat and the water they drink. But it also involves praying to the deer because they are able to communicate with the Creator and so there is a spiritual element as well. NAM healers consider themselves "hollow bones" through which the power flows. In addition, Navajo herbalism is increasingly studied. The author adds that even though tobacco has been heavily adopted by whites from Native people and then was re-borrowed back by natives (who currently favor Bull Durham in their healing rituals), red willow bark was the preferred herb used in healing ceremonies such as the sacred pipe ceremony among many nations such as the Sioux. Despite the renewed interest in NAM herbalism Dharmananda adds that herbalists that "fix symptoms" were considered less important in NAM and hospital doctors were considered a type of these remedial practitioners. Yet some herbalists who use herbs ceremonially are highly valued. For example, among the Lakotas burning and inhaling sage smoke is used for exorcising evil influences, while sweetgrass is used to induce the presence of benevolent influences. White men use NAM herbs without their ceremonial context (such as infusing the plant material in water while singing a prayer and blowing into the infusion) which is considered to make them "useless. The dislocation of tribes in the 19th century divorced native people from herbs that grew only in their home range which caused a decline in use of herbs in current NAM. Dharmananda notes that divorcing native people from their medicinal plants was only one of the root causes of the increase in disease affecting native people. He adds that the white man forced the Lakotas and other native people to live without migration which had brought clean surroundings and spiritual renewal compared to the evolving contamination and relative emptiness of the owned land. They also forced them to rely on nutritionally inferior food sources such as cattle meat which is considered inferior to buffalo meat and government rations of starch and cheese. Finally, they confined these people to square houses rather than their circular tipis which interrupted their whole cosmology based on circularity (especially among Plains Indians) in all their ceremonies which also led to disease. Further, Dharmananda notes that many native people consider the white man's word "medicine man" an insulting term like "squaw" since there are so many types of healers under this category including herbalists (pejuta wicasa in Lakota), conjurers (wapiya) and others. Moon Women and Snakebite Remedies Women are very powerful during menstruation and must be allowed to retreat and meditate in separate moon lodges during their "moon time," to engage in their own cyclic ceremonies of purification as preparation for childbirth. Menstruating women in traditional cultures were considered to be so powerful they could "kill a rattlesnake by spitting on it" (a Lakota belief). During the Sundance dancers would feel exhausted if there was a woman "in her moon" around since her intense energy overwhelmed them. In addition, women were seen as less susceptible to death than men and had time-consuming roles in childbearing according to some Lakota authors, which limited their role in NAM since becoming a healer takes years of training beginning at age 20. Today, however, more and more women are becoming NAM practitioners and are focusing especially on herbalism and childbirth treatments that don't require as much of an emphasis on ceremony according to Dharmananda. Dharmananda adds that renewed interest in native American herbs such as echinacea (Echinacea angustifolia), black cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa), cascara sagrada (Rhamnus purshiana), and goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis) among "Western herbalists" is often a misapplication of NAM. For example, Echinacea, used to boost immunity in the natural products industry, due to European backed research on anti-infection properties of the root, was used by the Sioux as a leaf for treating toothache and other pains by topical application and for snakebite. Drought Apparitions, The Gulf War, and Peyote Healing Finally, I'll turn to Thomas Csordas who has written an arresting article entitled "Ritual healing and the politics of identity in contemporary Navajo society" in Ameri can Ethnologist (Feb. 1999) based in part on a presentation he made to the Seminar in Clinically Relevant Medical Anthropology at Harvard University. In this article he points out that medical imperialism continues on the reservations as modern health professionals blame the Navajo for their susceptibility to various diseases such as the Hanta virus as a result of their lifestyle (in this case living in dirt floored hogans which are considered unsanitary by industrial standards and shelter mice which are labeled as the vectors of this disease.) Csordas notes that many native Americans consider that their illnesses are the result of white man's environmental pollution and they may indeed be correct, as extensive military testing has been recently revealed on the reservations while uranium mining has long contaminated the water supplies. Indeed the mice were seen by Navajos as messengers bearing a warning against the white man's disease rather than carriers of disease, revealing the fundamental difference between the two group's world views. In addition he notes the growing tension among the Navajo about preserving traditional medicinal rituals. Some feel that chanters "aren't chanting enough" which is leading to droughts and apparitions while others are concerned that peyote is being abused. Csordas provides a series of intriguing case studies of patients undertaking NAM for various health problems and shows how one 30 year-old woman used it to cure her shoulder pain. Another woman used a Blessingway ceremony to help her treat breast cancer. The chanter told her to "forget about her past" which included an ex-husband who left her when she got sick and to just focus on herself. She felt it helped her immensely. She also tried a peyote ceremony for her illness and became involved with a Christian church which had prayer meetings on the reservation which also helped her. Another man in Csordas' article who was raised as a member of the Native American Church and as a sheep herder on the reservation, by an alcoholic father who became a Marine and traveled throughout the Far East and Middle East, where he fought in the Gulf War, using peyote ceremonies before and after the fighting for protection. He suffered from respiratory problems and general fatigue that began in the Gulf War and used to run regularly, as is prescribed in traditional spiritual discipline but became too fatigued. He asked for help, along with his mother, from his family road man (healer) and participated in a fullscale all-night peyote meeting that restored his sense of identity, allowed him to release emotional baggage, and say things out loud to his girlfriend who was there that he couldn't say before. Three months later he felt much more energy, began to excel in school and his relationship with his girlfriend improved and she became pregnant. He felt "new Navajos" were blind and materialistic and were denying their language and culture. Csordas brilliantly sees NAM as a form of cultural power following similar work by Arthur Kleinman (1980, 1986) who studied traditional healing in the aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Thomas Ots (1994) who examined qigong in relation to democracy movements in China. Many other writers have described similar politically empowering effects of traditional medicine for the individual such as Marina Roseman (1996) on the Malaysian state of Kelantan, David Gellner (1994) on Nepal, Jean Comaroff(1985) on Zionist healing in Africa who points to this method as a means of healing a body tormented by political oppression, and Lesley Sharp (1990, 1993) on Madagascar who finds that traditional medicine allows women to work as healers, liberating them from harsh industrial agricultural labor. Michael Taussig (1980, 1987) notes that shamanism in southwest Colombia serves to heal the aftermath of colonialism. Libbett Crandon (1989) writing on Bolivia, suggests that traditional healing served to protect indivi duals during the transition from a colonial society to a class-based agricultural society. Csordas notes that cultural representations of the "mystery illness" (hanta virus) and the drought apparitions are part of what Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) term the "body politic" of Navajo society as it interacts with the dominant white society, while the case studies he provides constitute the "individual body" as a person with a contemporary Navajo identity in the politically charged space between tradition and postmodernity. Cohen also mentions additional useful references including Beck and Walters' work on witchcraft, Eliade on shamanism, Kalweit, and Krippner and Welch (who provide great information for health professionals such as nurses interested in incorporating Native American medicine into their practice.) Irwin, Bahr et al, Hines, Jilek, Lewis, Miller, Mooney, Powers, and Sander all provide additional resources in this vein. I also covered some of the work of Moerman, Herrick and Snow in previous columns on ethnobotany but should also mention Croom and Moore (very clinically relevant), Gunther, Cochran, Gilinore, Hamel, Curtin, Densmore, and Tantaquidgeon. Please see my website or email me for additional resources or previous articles. Native American medicine, cancer and spirituality. (Medical Anthropology). Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, June, 2003, by Tim Batchelder Remember we are NOT Doctors and have NO medical training. 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