| things in this post are dangerous to speak of or even to think of. if you believe that speaking of bad things can make them so, please stop reading right here. also, the name of the medicine man has been altered but if you know the area you can figure out who it is. i hope it is obvious that i write about him to honor and respect him, but feel the need to point this out just in case... ------------------------------------------------------------------ i can't remember how long ago it was but let's just say it was about a
year ago that the hospital laboratory failed some sort of quality
assurance something or other and they had to shut it down, which meant
they had to pretty much shut down the whole hospital, transfer out the
patients, and turn the ambulances away. once the lab fixed whatever it
was that was the problem and the hospital re-opened, nobody would go
in. people talked. someone had seen a coyote in the parking lot a
couple of days before it happened. coyotes are not good if you're
Navajo. but it gets worse. they say the coyote wasn't just bad luck in
some general sense-- it was a skin walker. |
skin walkers are people who put on animal bodies. skin walkers are the
black magic side of Navajo medicine. people will be wary of medicine
men around here, some of them are not on your side. some of them do
mischief. some of them are skin walkers.
they had to do a ceremony to re-open the hospital, and by "they" i
mean Arthur, the medicine man, our medicine man, the one that works
at the hospital.
Arthur is maybe about sixty, although it's hard to tell. he wears a
ponytail and a bolo tie with the marine corp logo on it. he's also got
a marine corp watch. maybe now would be a good time to tell you he's a
vietnam vet, which is how he got into medicine manning in the first
place.
the Navajo draw your life like an open circle. on one end of the open
place is your birth, the other is your death. the line that connects
the two ends is your path. the ceremony is there to help you get back
on your path when there is a disruption.
you can tell there is a disruption when people are disconnected from
their environment, meaning the earth, the water, the sky, but also
their family and friends, their crops, their land, their cattle.
in order to figure out where the disruption took place, the medicine
man asks about what has been happening in your life. he draws a family
tree like we draw a pedigree and asks about your relationship with
each of the people. he asks about jobs, addictions, jail. he asks
about fights, loneliness, alienation.
you will probably need different ceremonies to help with different
type of problems, but the point of any of the ceremonies is to help
you reconnect with your environment. this is what will put you back on
your path.
for Arthur, he needed the enemy way. there are ceremonies for
warriors, at least two of them. for warriors who are shipping out to
Iraq or Afghanistan, they perform a ceremony to protect them. they ask
that the warrior be able to see his enemy, smell his enemy, hear his
enemy before the enemy is aware of him. when the warrior returns, they
have another ceremony: the enemy way. when Arthur came back from
Vietnam, he was disconnected from his wife, from his family, from his
cattle, from his land. he went to the medicine man who performed a
ceremony honoring the enemy, his path, his weapons, his blood, his
land. the medicine man sent the enemy back to enemy land and brought
Arthur back home. then Arthur asked if he could study medicine. for seven years he came
to the medicine man whenever he could. when he was done, they gathered
supplies from the sacred mountains and performed the ceremony that
made Richard a medicine man. he shows me pictures of his grandson on the same journey.
the pictures are of the family, taken in the sacred mountains. he
shows them to clients to make them feel relaxed. he's showing them to
me so i will relax. i watch his grandson on the mountain, wrapped in
cloth bands, decorated with turquoise, intense dark eyes on his
grandfather the medicine man on the other end of the camera, but they
look like they're looking at you, from another world. |
