NAVAJO MEDICINE MAN

By Dr. Joseph G. Lee Photographs by Josef Muench Do medicine men really have a care for rabies in animals and in men? How many centuries have they vaccinated against smallpox? Just how effective are their quantities of native herbs as medicines? Could Indian medicine men have secrets which science might well investigate? These are unanswered questions, but ones which raise their heads when one sees the strange equipment of a medicine man's basket and the many Arizona plants which they and their Indian followers still use trying to cure all manner of ailments. There is a universal natural factor which operates in Both modern medicine and that practiced amongst the primitive people of the world. It is an emotional factor of belief or faith; as the ultimate force, it may operate as religious ecstasy to cure as at Lourdes an occasional simple, uncomplicated soul who was deemed so incurable as to have been given up by doctors of medicine, In most medical treatment a very special emotional relationship exists between physician and patient which is known as “rapport.” Rapport is by no means confined to medicine, but exists in all close relations, such as may occur between teacher and pupil; leader and follower. Without it nothing is deeply significant. When rapport is present immense power is given to the medicine man -sufficiently so that patients are helped or cured quite independently of special method. From the beginning of time this power has been used to relieve symptoms, to inspire courage and to aid in bearing burdens. The blindness to the meaning of rapport on the part of the medical profession has been nothing short of extraordinary. The force which it represents has been better grasped by the quack healer and the primitive medicine man, who knows that it can influence people quite regardless of the worth of his professed agency of cure. If it were necessary to choose between method and rapport in treatment there is little question that rapport would be the more useful agency. To be sure, no one knows of what rapport consists. There is magic and mystery in it. Its absence leaves words of logic and wisdom fruitless and sterile. With this term is often the implication of the dynamic, authoritative, and dominant leader . . . such as the Indian medicine man. My guide at the University of Arizona at Tucson once showed me the contents of the Navajo medicine man's bag . . . leaves, bits of rock, a frog's leg, toys, trifles. “Do you see anything funny about that?” he said. “I have seen too many strange things about Indians to see anything funny,” I replied. “That is psychoanalysis - centuries before we ever heard of it.” The Indian conceives the created world as a vast harmony—a symphony in which each plays a part. It is a perfect fitted whole. He believes literally that “not a sparrow falls . . .” If you are sick, it is because you have fallen out of harmony. The medicine man's task is to find out with what you have ceased to fit. “Is it the bird, the rock, the tree, the coyote?” Setting up the rhythm or harmony or rapport which induces understanding, he asks and asks until he finds out where the seam has ceased to fit... just as does the psychoanalyst.

The white man may be amused that the thigh bone of the wildcat is used for earache, the owl's feathers against illnesses caused by ghost or "love trouble," and a bundle of ocotillo sprouts against baldheadedness, which is serious, for "if you get baldheaded it goes down to your heart and causes heart trouble."

But the serious white man cannot but wonder what the medicine man uses against rabies. Something is done but no Indian will tell. A few years ago an Indian woman was badly bitten and chewed by a "mad" coyote.. which was killed and its head sent to the Arizona State laboratory where its brain was reported to contain Negri bodies. The woman refused the Pasteur treatments by the white doctor on the reservation, preferring aid from the medicine man of her village. The white doctor, as a rule, is never able to make contact with the medicine man. Weeks went by, her wounds healed quickly. Months went by and she showed no symptoms of human rabies. What happened when the medicine man treated her? "Our treatment is all right for Indians, but it would not do for white people," an Indian girl answered when questioned. "The medicine man draws a circle-but I cannot tell you," she broke off suddenly on the verge of revealing what happened.

Something is done, however, for there have been too many cases of "mad" dogs and coyotes to shrug off the matter. In northern Sonora the Papago people cut and burn crosses in their dogs' foreheads during a medicine man's treatment after the dogs have been bitten by mad animals. There, and on the southern Arizona reservation the people receive some strange treatment about which white men know only that it begins "with drawing a circle!"

What about smallpox A few years ago when the reservation had a smallpox scare, nurses and doctors had no difficulty vaccinating 400 children. The Indians knew all about vaccinating. All the elders proudly displayed on their wrists scars from their own vaccinations.

They either couldn't or wouldn't tell us how many, many years they have been vaccinating themselves. All the old people agreed it had been "many years." They inform us that their medicine men take the well Indians to the bedside of a person sick with smallpox. There the medicine man dips a devil's claw into a pustule on the person's body and then draws the claw over a small scratch on the well person's wrist. The result is a slight sickness for a few days; but they say "it is better than white man's way; it doesn't make us sick."

Some of the Navajos have hinted that they learned vaccination from Indians in Mexico. Records state thatthe Spaniards brought smallpox to the Americas in the 16th century. Perhaps the very priests, Father Kino, Garces and the many others, who introduced them to Christianity and smallpox, taught them vaccination. Who knows?

The Indian people are far keener than most believe. There are three kinds of medicine men: those who treat diseases with natural herbs; those who chant and sing with a strange array of symbolic items to break the spells causing illness; and those called "bone, doctors," who have established a reputation for efficient skill in setting broken bones. All three are "Mah-kai Ootahn" or Indian doctors. Many of the Indians on the reservations still prefer their aids to white doctors, but slowly and gradually the white doctors are being sought. Nurses get their patients to more readily take white man's medicines by using the Indian name for the drug the medicine contains.

The "Mah-kai Ootahn" using herbs has a wide variety from which to choose. Creosote, palo verde and mesquite provide favorite medicines. A tea made from a "girl" creosote root, boiled with fat and applied warm, is good for earaches. The creosote bush provides them their antiseptic and is used in powder form for sore eyes or open wounds, as a salve (with animal fat) for sores, the inner bark for de-worming and an outer parasitical growth becomes an opiate or sedative. Tea from creosote leaves is used to reduce fever, stomach ache, labor pains in childbirth and as a laxative.

Palo verde and mesquite have as many forms and uses. But in addition there are: manzanita tea to induce labor pains; burnt wheat seeds to cure burns, saguaro seeds in a gruel for sick babies; "alle gugul" root for cramps and afterbirth pains; cachanilla used as a cure for syphilis; snakeweed tea for snakebite; night blooming cereus for bladder trouble and diarrhea, tansy mustard seed for a stimulant and appetizer.

Many of these plants are also used for foods as salt sage for seasoning, jellies from all the cactus fruits, buds of the cholla pickled as a relish and as a salad; saguaro fruit as a syrup, jelly and candy; and the seeds for a sweet cake, peppergrass seeds or "shohowat" as lemonade-like drink, and pumpkin seeds parched, salted and eaten as nuts.

On the word of one of the medicine men some of the most potent and dangerous items have great power. In fact, their power is so tremendous that all the articles must be wrapped in rawhide and not touched except by a medicine man. These items include a deer's tail, used for "the headache that goes through the eyes to the brain"; "ne-wee" or buzzard feathers, used against boils; hawk's feathers or "visak" for nosebleed; "kahuan" or badger clay for swelling of neck glands; a crystal stone for heart trouble, fatigue and loss of appetite; eagledown for rain making and Tizwin ceremonies; "Moh-k," or a lock of Apache hair taken by the person who killed the Indian and used by the medicine man to keep the killer safe "unto three generations" from the sickness which the dead Apache might visit unto him and his descendents.

There is an amusing and truthful story told on the reservation about one of the attempts to cure a sick man from a ghost illness. The medicine man went to the sick man's hut only to hear him say: "It is no use. Let me die. I did wrong to a man now dead. He brings me sickness." He had it bad, and that's not good. The medicine man learned the location of the grave and said he would placate the restless, mean spirit causing the illness. He set off to the grave with some assistants. But a group of boys had overheard, and since they knew how Americans celebrate Halloween, they too sashayed off toward the grave in the dark. As the medicine man approached the site, alone and chanting, to his terror a grinning, yellow face shot up over the grave. He screamed in horror and The bone doctor has a whole series of efficient splints for all manner of breaks in bones. These are fashioned from saguaro ribs, polished very smooth so they will not make flesh wounds, and shaped to fit wrists, upper and lower arms and legs. What they can do with broken collar bones, skulls, spines or hips is guesswork on the part of nurses and doctors.

The equipment of the medicine man who chants and sings is almost the most interesting. His basket of symbolic cures and spell breakers is no less sensible than the cures used in England in the 17th century when toads, snakes, dung, minerals and many others were mixed into liquids and taken internally.

Fled back to Sells, leaving behind the urchins and their de-lighted pumpkin. Whether the sick man recovered is not known.

Owl feathers are also used against illness caused by ghosts that trouble the living, producing heart trouble or "love mania." The feather is used in connection with a carved symbol of a man to represent the ghost.

Some of the Indians believe that "sea-foam" or "shu-dtak" is good for "inside pain" and "horse's sickness." The medicine men claim to secure the solidified sea-foam from the Gulf of California, but it looks more like a piece of porous skull bone. Rabbit tail is used against "that kind of sore" or cancer. Butterfly and sun symbols also have their purposes, as does a quail skin, stretched over a dime store chicken, which is said to relieve eye troubles. Of course, there is the ocotillo sprouts bundle for the baldheaded. The sprouts are the symbol of a porcupine and "one must never see a porcupine face to face or look at him," for more than health reasons.

A twist of hair from a wild horse's tail is a foil for insanity, as "insanity is likely to attack anybody working around horses" and the devil takes the man who works with horses. Rattlesnake weed and La Golondrina plants have been investigated to learn their efficacy in curing rattlesnake bites. It has been shown that canutillo plants contain ephedrine, which always has been imported from China. It is this shrub which is used for syphilis, rheuma-tism and other ills.

To me the study of the Indians has proved an endless fascination. Their reservations extend for many miles across the cruel splendor of a barren land. And so it reaches-vast, silent, mysterious.

I watched an Indian gazing into the distance. His narrowed eyes surveyed the vastness steadily, his chin uplifted. His profile seemed to me equivalent to the rugged land smoothed by space. In this sombre figure I saw the calm dignity of their race. The loneliness, the enforced simplicity, and the precariousness of life faced with perpetual drouth have made them sturdy and resourceful, and have implanted in them an abiding sense of the tragic nature of man's fate.