MEDICINE MEN

It takes years to become a traditional healer and that's part of the problem Shirley Warren had heard voices for years. A single woman in her 40s, she imagined that evil men constantly confronted her. The hallucinations drove her into a deep depression, and she became antagonistic to her family and neighbors on the Navajo Indian Reservation in northeastern Arizona.

She was persuaded to seek help at the Indian Health Service Clinic in nearby Winslow, where Dr. Frank Armao, a psychiatrist and director of the clinic's medical staff, prescribed medication for her. For a while, she seemed to improve, according to Armao.

But then her condition worsened considerably. She suffered almost constantly from the delusionary episodes and was in a continuous state of agitation. Her family feared she would take her life.

At that point, Dr. Armao took a step that might have seemed strange in a more conventional medical setting. Drawing upon his knowledge and 20 years of experience treating Native Americans, Armao referred Shirley to a medicine man.

In a hogan a few yards from the IHS clinic, medicine man Jones Benally conducted his own diagnosis of the woman's illness. Following procedures handed down through generations of natural healers, Benally looked for signs of an imbalance in his patient's mind, body, or spirit. Medicine men believe that the cause of many physical and mental illnesses is a disharmony with nature; perhaps the result of an inopportune sighting of an animal, exposure to lightning or windstorms, an invasion of evil spirits, or violation of a taboo. Medicine men also believe nature can correct such an imbalance. Their medications are herbs and poultices; their spiritual aids may be eagle feathers or corn pollen; and their instruments might include drums, Medicine men also believe nature can correct such an imbalance. Their medications are herbs and poultices; their spiritual aids may be eagle feathers or corn pollen; and their instruments might include drums,

But Benally doesn't employ all of these, for just as there are specialists in the con-ventional medical community, the same is true among medicine men. Depending on the tribe, there are ceremonial leaders, dreamers, seers, trance doctors, healers, hand-shakers, herbalists, and dispellers of witchcraft. Benally is primarily a diagnos-tician. Traveling three days a week to the clinic from his home in Flagstaff, he inter-views patients, then conducts his exami-nations in a variety of ways, such as passing his hands above the patients, manipulat-ing bones and muscles, or gazing into a sacred rock crystal. Benally often determines the source of the problem and treats it with the aid of herbs he collects and blesses. He disdains the conventional system of issuing the same pills to everyone diagnosed with an illness. “To cure an illness,” he says, “herbs must be selected, blessed, and prepared for just that person.” Benally soon discovered that earlier in life, Shirley Warren had miscarried and had never had a ceremony to release the spirit of the unborn child, which he believed re-mained inside her body to haunt her. Benally performed the Ghostway Ceremony, an over-night ritual that employs a special moun-tain tobacco herb. After treatment, Shirley gradually improved and is now beginning to live a more normal life.

When cases are more complicated, Benally refers them to a hataalii, or singer, a highly trained practitioner who conducts more complex ceremonies, rituals, and prayers, some of which may last as long as 10 days and be attended by as many as 200 rela-tives and tribal members. They take years to learn and may require special skills, such as sand painting or hoop dancing.

Here, however, a problem arises. A severe shortage of medicine men has developed. The Navajos, the largest tribe in the United States, today have fewer than 150 practi-tioners to serve the needs of 175,000 peo-ple spread out over a three-state reservation.

Similarly, on the Fort Apache Indian Reser-vation, which covers more than 1.6 million acres, there is only a handful of medicine men to serve a nation of 12,000 people. And the Hopis, whose spiritual center is on the Second Mesa around Oraibi and Shungo-povi, also face a severe shortage.

When a hataalii accepts a patient, he fre-quently must spend two weeks or more away from home, collecting and blessing herbs, preparing the family's hogan, per-haps creating a sand painting, and organiz-ing the appropriate ceremony. Conducting