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October 7, 2002
 Photo by Graham Ramsay |
Respecting Navajo Medicine May Collide with Preserving It
I was first struck by Casey's long hair as he strode down the dim hallway. Most Navajo men with long hair wear it in the traditional style, gathered into a tight roll at the nape of the neck and bound with yarn. But Casey's coarse hair streamed below his waist, waning to uneven, wispy tendrils. He held out his right hand in the traditional Navajo greeting, a softer version of the all-American handshake. He wore turquoise and silver wristbands on each arm, but that was his only nod to traditional dress.Casey was not at all what I expected of a medicine man. He looked to be barely out of his 20s, and despite his chiseled nutmeg features and penetrating black eyes, he had a quiet softness about him. He was a startling blend of old and new, modern and traditional. I had invited him to the clinic to speak about traditional Navajo ceremonies to round out an enrichment program introducing local high school students to medicine.
Integrative Medicine
Just by looking, it's hard to tell who is a medicine man. Many medicine men seek out our services at the government clinic. They sometimes even refer a patient to the clinic after performing a ceremony.Occasionally one of my Navajo staff will whisper in my ear before I go in to see a patient, "He's a medicine man." For the most part, they are older men, with their thinning white hair pulled tight, clothed in smart Western-style button-down shirts with pointy collars and opalescent buttons and pressed blue jeans. Inevitably they wear jewelry, either a turquoise wristband (sometimes holding an incongruous Western watch face) or a silver conch belt or a turquoise necklace.
Casey practiced the Male Mountain Way Ceremony. Because the ceremonies are so complicated and long, some running continuously for up to nine days and nights, most medicine men specialize in only one or two different major ceremonies. Casey said he would be happy to come and talk to my students. "Our children are our future," he said. And since this would not be an actual ceremony, he felt it would be all right to take pictures of him with the students. Usually photographs, which create a permanent record, are taboo.
The following week only 20 minutes after the appointed time (which is punctual by Navajo standards), Casey entered the clinic's hogan to give his talk. The hogan is the traditional Navajo dwelling. Vermilion clay heaped on a wooden frame forms a simple dome without windows, and there is a single door facing east. Rough logs stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a chest-high circle around the outer rim. Above this base, logs weave together around the circumference in ever narrowing octagons until they reach the small opening at the top that ventilates the pot-bellied stove.
This time, Casey had his long hair bound in the more traditional bun. He wore more elaborate turquoise cuffs than he had worn the previous week, with jeans, a button-down shirt, and worn work boots. His brother, who accompanied him, was heavyset, with a pageboy haircut and a large silver cross draped across a faded black T-shirt.
As Casey began to talk, his brother periodically nudged him if he felt we strayed too close to sacred information. "We shouldn't talk about that, Casey," he said.
Casey believes his ceremonies have cured many patients. "The doctors in the hospital would have a severely burned patient who wasn't getting better despite all their medicines. So they would call us in, and we'd perform our ceremony in the hospital. After that, the patient always got better." He also believes that his ceremonies helped put his mother's advanced breast cancer into remission in conjunction with Western chemotherapy. When I asked how he felt about performing a traditional rite in the heartland of white man's medicine, he said, "I go where I need to go. I want the person to have the benefits of the traditional healing no matter where they are. We're an adaptable people."
Preserving the Sacred
Although Casey had originally agreed to photographs when I invited him, when I pulled out the camera, Casey's brother gravely shook his head. "Even what we've been doing here today--including Anglos--and talking about the ancient traditions, it's kind of on the edge."Casey concurred. "My grandfather asked us, on his dying bed, to take a video of the hogan just as it was, from the smoke hole looking down, because he felt that what we had would be gone within a few generations. Just for the family, not to publish anywhere. And we refused. We said, 'No. It's not right.'"
Casey believes that the Navajo are straying from the traditional ways, losing touch with the heart of their culture. "Do you see my hair?" he asked, pointing to his bun. "I wear it long, in the traditional way. This strand of yarn is a sunbeam, and the two ends"--he pointed to the rolled edges of the bun--"are clouds. Maybe if we all wore our hair long, in the traditional way, the gods would smile down on us again and treat us kindly." Yet his brother, who seemed to be the more traditionally diligent of the two, wore his hair cut short and a cross on his chest.
I cringed at the thought of Casey refusing to videotape his grandfather's hogan even though I respected his decision. Casey recognizes that the children represent the perseverance of traditional Navajo culture, and he eagerly reaches out to them. Yet he cannot bring himself to leave the permanent record that would help the old traditions survive without the elders. In his eyes, preserving the traditions through modern methods risks the heart of Navajo spirituality even as it protects the outer shell of the culture.
--Ellen Rothman, HMS '98
After graduating from HMS, Ellen Rothman completed a residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital in Boston. Now she is in her second year in northern Arizona, working as a physician on the Navajo Reservation. To preserve privacy, the people's names she uses are pseudonyms.
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Harvard Medical School, its affiliated institutions, or Harvard University.