Native Healers

A significant part of health care in the Navajo Nation deals with native/traditional healing. Western medicine is a more recent development on the reservation, and while the native people understand its importance, they incorporate traditional medicine into their care. We wanted to get an insiders perspective on native healing, so we had a meeting with the hospital's healer. (The Indian Health Service has incorporated traditional medicine into the free health care services provided to all natives.)

We met with Sheila Goldtooth, the medicine woman at Chinle Hospital, in the hospital's designated hogan. I thought this would be cool because we've all seen hogans from the outside while we've been here, but a lot of us have never been inside. But I don't think it was quite as exciting as we thought it would be. No one had been in there since the wind/sand storm from a few days earlier, so it was really dusty with dirty chairs, and it was pretty plain looking. We did have to follow the traditional rule of walking to the left around the fireplace. I'm not sure if any of us ever figured out why going left was important. I think we just had an educated guess that it was simply tradition and respect. Marcos asked if he could take a picture inside the hogan, and Sheila said he could but that he couldn't take a picture of her. This was interesting, and Vickie later told us that the natives sometimes believe having a picture taken of them takes a piece of their soul. Needless to say, Marcos did not attempt to get a picture of Sheila.

This looks similar to the hogan we were in. It had dirt floors (to be closer to Mother Earth) and bare walls.

While we were in this meeting with Sheila in the dusty hogan, we learned about the many different kinds of healers, or medicine men. When someone gets ill, they will go to a diagnostician who will use hand trembling, crystal gazing, or star gazing to diagnose the problem. Almost all the time the illness is a result of something that happened in the individual's past. For instance, the 25 year old patient looked at a snake when he was 14 and now has some sort of mental illness. Once the patient is diagnosed, special ceremonies are performed depending on the diagnosis. We also learned about how Sheila got into healing. Surprisingly, her story wasn't too different from a lot of ours. She wanted to help people from a very young age and worked hard to be able to do that. We also learned how native people access the hospital's native healing services, the variations in ceremonies, what the hogan is used for, and many more things. Toward the end of the meeting, another healer came in to speak to us, Linda Ross. She talked about a lot of the same things.

Burning incense is part of a ceremony in which something/someone is blessed.

Overall, I think it was a good experience. I asked some of the other students what they liked about it. Responses I got include: good explanations which were clear and understandable, questions answered well, able to understand what healers do and what the ceremonies are as well as where they occur, gave a good history of native healing, very informative, instructors were knowledgeable, interesting topic, the people telling us about it were actual healers.

There were a few suggestions on how to make this experience better for future groups, and they are as follows. It should have been planned on a day without as many scheduled things and should have had some more time between clinical. Students also felt that the second instructor was repetitive, so both instructors should have been in the room the whole time or there should have only been one instructor. It would have also been more enjoyable with an interactive activity.

Once these changes are made, we agreed that this is an activity that should be repeated in the future. This activity was important to get a better understanding of the culture and understand how traditional and Western medicine collaborate for the health of the Navajo people.