The circle goes round; sickness and disease give way to healing, decay is balanced by renewal. The previous chapter spoke of the near devastation that resulted when worlds and worldviews met. This chapter must therefore deal with the processes of healing.
Modern medical science, with its biochemistry, X-rays, and biopsies, is a marvelous triumph of our technological prowess, yet it is representative of a worldview that has fragmented mind and body, the individual and society, spirit and landscape. From this perspective, dominated by the linear relationship between cause and effect, it is difficult to understand the nature of healing within Indigenous science.
Yet, increasingly, there are indications that we are becoming of one mind. If I have stressed the gulf between the two worlds, it has been in part to illustrate and make points. A chasm exists because my Native American friends hear and see a profoundly different world from mine. At the same time, however, we must not forget that we share a common humanity. Ernie Benedict, a Mohawk Elder, once reminded me that Natives and non-Natives have married, they have loved each other and raised children together. At a certain level we all experience the same loves and pain, the same hopes and anger. It is for these reasons, I believe, that we can come to understand the meaning of healing arts within Turtle Island.
Recently the West has been calling for a different quality of healing. While we acknowledge the wealth of knowledge inherent in modern medicine it does not present us with a truly convincing account for the ways in which we get sick, how we are healed, and the ways in which we are able to remain healthy. It is true that many infectious diseases have been eliminated and miracle cures developed, but in other ways people feel that medicine does not reach them at the personal and experiential level.
My friend Paul Grof, a psychologist who is interested in why some people get sick and other remain healthy, asks how it is that when one hundred people drink water infected with the hepatitis A virus only a certain percentage develop the symptoms of the disease, others experience flulike symptoms for a few days, while the rest remain perfectly healthy. Hepatitis A perfectly fits our Western scientific model of cause and effect. The cause is a virus ingested from fecally contaminated food or water. The effect, following an incubation period of two to six weeks, is fever, nausea, enlargement of the liver, and the symptoms of jaundice.
But why, if it is a matter of cause and effect, do only some people get sick while others remain perfectly healthy? And why, in an emergency ward or after major surgery, do nurses “know” that, irrespective of the official prognosis, some patients are going to die while others will recover? It is possible that the answer to these questions cannot exclusively be found at the level of matter, cause and effect.
The same questions intrigued the psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl who, as an inmate of the Auschwitz, Dachau, and Theresienstadt concentration camps, asked why some people continued to survive, irrespective of their general physique or state of health.
Frankl's answer became the basis of a new treatment he called logotherapy; it is a psychiatry concerned not simply with being, ontos, but also with meaning, logos. For Frankl, we are “oriented towards meaning” and the essence of our lives is “the tension betweer, being and meaning.” Indigenous scientists would perhaps rather speak of the human as inhabiting a world of both matter and spirit, and of the process of renewal and relationship that grows out of the entire society. Thus, if we are to understand the nature of health and healing we must learn to enter a reality that contains additional dimensions to the purely material.
The stereotype of Indigenous healing is that of a beaded and befeathered medicine man or medicine woman carrying a medicine bag. But just what is “medicine” in Native context? Certainly it is not synonymous with the capsules and tablets of a Western pharmacy. A medicine person may refer to the herbs and plants in her bag as being medicine, but Native Americans will also say that a ceremony they attended, an experience they had, or the food they are eating is “good medicine”.
So what is “medicine”? The problem is that this is an English word, an attempt at translation, and not a word in a Native language. So much Indigenous science and worldview is enfolded within the languages spoken by the people. Medicine is an attempt to convey within a single word a whole spectrum of concepts that belong to a profoundly different vision of reality and the human body.
English, and for that matter French, German, Italian, and the other European languages are noun-oriented. They are employed to divide the world into physical objects (nouns), and thinking into separate concepts (again, nouns). Many Native American languages do not work this way. They are verb-based. Thus, when in English we speak of “medicine” we automatically seek a referent, a substance, an object, something tangible, something that can be conceptualized. But suppose we begin with something verbal, with activity, process, a movement of harmony and balance. Medicine could then be felt in the beating of the heart, sensed as a movement around the sacred circle, the wind blowing through the leaves of the trees, the growing of green plants, and the astronomical alignments of the medicine wheel.
Even food can be good medicine. This reminds me of what I was once told by a medical officer who worked in Labrador. He said the incidence of cancer and heart disease was very low among those Native people who still hunted and trapped their food, but once they began to purchase meat and other foods from stores the rate of these illnesses rose to that of the general population. Scientists have discovered that the fat content of wild animals differs from that of their domesticated counterparts. While the latter appears to contribute to heart disease the former contains substances that appear to protect against the same disease.
Medicine could be approached as energy, power, spirit, relationship; as movement, balance, a way of life; and as walking the Good Red Road.* Yet, at the same time, a medicine bag may contain plants, roots, herbs, fungi, pieces of bone, fur, feathers, and other things used in doctoring that are also referred to as medicine. We are not really going to be successful in capturing the essence of Indigenous science within our comfortable logic of “either/or”.
At one level the contents of a medicine bag relate to what we in the West know as drugs or medicines. As an example, one of the first explorers within North America, Jacques Cartier, traveled along the St. Lawrence River in winter until his men contracted what we would now diagnose as scurvy. Fortunately, the local Indigenous population taught Cartier how to make tea from the bark of the birch tree. Today we know that birchbark tea is a good source of vitamin C.
Sa'ke'j Henderson smokes a mixture containing red willow bark for muscular pains in his back. Willow bark contains, among other things, the molecules directly related to aspirin, or acetylsalicylic acid. Thus, the smoking mixture quickly provides the level of pain relief required for muscular tensions.
Inca runners were required to travel with messages for long distances and chewed the leaves of the coca plant, which contain cocaine, to suppress appetite and increase endurance. Hunters dip the points of their spears or arrows into plant or animal preparations (the secretions from toads, for example). Derivatives of one of these, curare, are used in modern anesthesia to block the breathing reflex of the patient and permit “breathing” to be performed by a machine that controls the flow of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and anesthetic.
Substances used by Indigenous peoples all over the world have subsequently been found by Western scientists to contain valuable pharmaceuticals. An appeal that is some times made to save the rain forests and other threatened areas is that valuable cures, at present known only to isolated Indigenous tribes, may be destroyed in the process. People speculate in a romantic way about miracle cures for cancer or for AIDS being discovered in a remote forest, or within the bag of a Native healer.
This raises an interesting question that touches yet again on the differences between Western and Indigenous science. If certain traditional medicinal herbs contain biologically active substances related to drugs used in modern hospitals, does this mean that Native medicine is a more primitive form of what Western technology has developed?
To answer this question we first have to enquire as to what philosophers would term the ontological status of Native medicines. What, in other words, is the nature of their existence? Sa'ke'j Henderson once asked me what I thought a molecule was. I offered him an explanation from modern science, that a molecule is a geometrical arrangement of atoms. Of course, he knew this sort of answer, but replied that a molecule was an alliance of spirits, and that when taken into the body this alliance dissolves and takes up new configurations.
At the time I was inclined to bridge the gap between our two ways of thinking by calling on concepts from modern quantum physics. A molecule is an arrangement of atoms but it can also be represented by a wave function, which is, in a way, a sort of vibration of matter and energy. Maybe it is possible to think of the molecules that make up medicines as patterns of vibrations or more subtle forms of matter-energy.
But, in that case, the same description would apply to a chair or a table as to a medicine. The more I thought about it the more I realized that “spirit” cannot really be reduced to our words energy or matter as they are currently understood in Western science. The idea of using plants and herbs to cure sickness may at first sight appear close to our scientific idea of “medicines,” suggesting that the powers of animal and vegetable substances lie in their biologically active molecules. But this cannot be the whole of the story. For example, the way in which these plants are collected is important, and before the medicine bag is used, the bag must be smudged with the purifying smoke of sage, sweet grass, tobacco, or cedar. Medicine itself has a life of its own. It is the tangible manifestation of alignments with the world of powers, energies, and spirits. Trying to understand how and why a particular plant is “medicine” stretches our Western paradigm to its limit.
Let us push this question of the ontological status of “medicine” a little further. I buy brand-name nondrowsy hay fever tablets at my local drugstore. They tend to be fairly expensive, but next to them is a “no-name” package whose active ingredient is chemically identical. According to our current view of science, a molecule that has been synthesized in one laboratory is identical in its effects to the “same” molecule made in another laboratory even when the two manufacturers have synthesized their products in totally different chemical reactions. And most westerners find both will work equally well to relieve their hay fever.
A Native medicine may contain the same biologically active molecule and yet, as far as I understand it, Native healers would not consider these two medicines to be identical. One way in which they differ is that, in addition to the significant biologically active molecule, the plant medicine contains a wide variety of other chemicals. It is possible that, in their natural form, some of these act in complex ways to enhance each other's effects. Physicists and chemists are now coming to realize the very complicated nonlinear effects that can occur when substances interact together. This could, in part, account for the reason that certain naturally occurring substances are so effective.
But this avoids the full issue of ontological status—the way in which a Native medicine exists. Traditional people speak of a plant as “having spirit” and in a landscape in which largescale logging, mining, or road building has taken place, may claim that the plant has lost this spirit. Analytic chemists may dispute this as superstition, but healers will argue that the medicine has lost its effectiveness.
Spirit is part of the ontological existence of medicine. When medicine is passed around the circle there is an exchange of this spirit, with some people giving spirit to it and others taking spirit. As the medicine circulates a balance must be maintained; thus everyone may give their energy to the medicine so that it is available for the sick person. A woman who is “on her moon” (menstruating) will step back and not touch the medicine. The reason is, I have been told, that a woman has such power during that time of the month that she would disturb the balance of energy and spirits within the medicine.
To approach medicine herbs only in terms of biologically active molecules is to see them in only one dimension. Within the dimensions of chemical analysis this may be correct, but it leaves out the other dimensions of spirit, energy, and relationship.
Clues as to the ontological nature of a plant can be found in the way it is gathered. At certain times of the year people collect sweetgrass, sage, and many other medicine plants. Suppose a non-Native person spends several hours searching for a particular rare plant and finally spots one. His or her natural inclination would be to pick it at once, but the Native person will pass it by. It is only when they discover the third such plant that they will feel able to take it.
This third plant is a gift from Mother Earth and, as with all gifts, if a person is to take it, it can only be as part of an exchange. The spirit of the plant must be acknowledged, for the medicine person seeks to come into relationship with its power. No one would wire up a house without having the correct knowledge of electrical polarity and circuitry. In a similar way a Native person makes contact with the powers of nature in the proper manner; to act in an unthinking way would indicate a lack of respect and could also disturb a person's equilibrium and energy.
When a person reaches the third plant he or she will speak to it, offer a prayer, and request the aid of that plant. Then, after taking the plant from Mother Earth an offering will be made into the hole that has been left—a bead, perhaps, or some tobacco.
Back at home the plant is handled in an equally respectful way. When a powerful object is passed round the circle, for example, there may be someone present who desires to use that energy for his or her own personal power, or who may be corrupt in some way. Such a person may take part of the spirit from the Medicine and, in exchange, impart something of him or herself. Thus others are cautious in touching the object when it is handed back to them and may first purify it with the smoke from sage, cedar, or sweetgrass.
The gap between the two worlds, of molecules and of spirits, is illustrated in this story of a traditional healer who acts as trickster. A Native person asked that a medicine man should be allowed to visit him in the hospital. The doctor agreed but the Native healer was uneasy about working in a non-Native environment. Nevertheless, the healer visited the man and spent some time with him. When he left, and being careful to do this within the doctor's hearing, he handed the patient a bottle and told him to take the medicine it contained, but to be very careful that no one else should touch it.
The next day when the Native healer arrived he encountered a very angry doctor. “What's going on here?” he asked. “We analyzed the bottle and it contains nothing but tap water. You're a fake!”
The medicine man smiled back. “You see,” he said, “when I left that bottle I knew all along what you would do with it”.
The nature of Native medicine lies both in the plant and the ceremony in the way that plant was picked, the exchanges and relationships that were entered into that would lead to its use, and in the relationship between that plant and other people in the circle and the relationship to the sick person.
Sometimes this word spirit is used interchangeably with words like power and energy. As we seek to understand the nature of Medicine it is natural to ask if energy, when it is used by Native people, has a connection with energy as it is used in Western science. It is interesting to note that ancient healing traditions from many parts of the world also make use of what is translated into English as energy. In India there is kundalini, or serpent fire, an energy that circulates through the body, ascending from the bottom of the spine up to the top of the head and then descending again. Activating and maintaining the proper circulation of the kundalini ensures continued health and is also said to open up extraordinary powers within the individual. Japan has its ki or qi energy which somewhat corresponds to the Chinese chi. These energy flows are activated through body movements and can be balanced with traditional medicines such as acupuncture. The !Kung of the Kalahari make use of the boiling Num that is activated during their healing ceremonies.
The fact that concepts from the traditional medicine of several different cultures have been translated by this word energy does not necessarily mean that they are all equivalent, or identical to the spirit of Native American medicine and the energy of Western physics. Sometimes the distinction is deliberately made by speaking of “subtle energy”.
Energy is experienced as a feeling of internal power and an underlying movement and transformation. It may also be connected with a meaning and integration within the body. Recently, Western medicine has begun to take the idea of subtle energy seriously; indeed an International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine has been established and boasts fifteen hundred subscribers. Although not part of the mainstream, some scientists have begun to study claims made by traditional medicines of the East as well as those made by Western healers who claim to be able to “balance energies” in the bodies. Most of their investigations involve attempts to measure energy flow or to correlate traditional practices with changes in neurotransmitters, metabolic function, and the immune system. Thus Western medicine is using the natural processes of the body as indicators of the functioning of something more subtle.
I have tried to gain some understanding of this field myself by attempting to discover correlations between ideas in Western physics and traditional medicine.* The human body is a complex interrelationship of biochemical processes, it contains flows of matter and energy, the passage of information along nerves and through the immune system. Health could be thought of as the coherent working of these complex properties; it is a constant dialogue within the body, a flow of meaning, and an interchange of information.
Many of the biochemical processes within the body involve exchanges of physical energy, but these grosser forms of energy are not what I take the terms healing energy or subtle energy to mean. Rather, the latter are like the activity of a conductor of an orchestra or the choreographer of a ballet, that integrates and coordinates into one cohesive movement all the biochemical and energy processes of the body. Seen in this way, death is not the cessation of biological function, for many of the cells in the body continue to function after death. It is, rather, the breakdown of this symphony of coherent meaning that differentiates a living individual from a mass of functioning cells.
Let me suggest a metaphor. In a candle flame individual atoms are heated and gain energy to the point where each can emit a photon of light. Throughout the flame individual atoms are emitting photons. The result is candlelight, but in itself it is a random, uncoordinated process and the illumination fades as it reaches the edges of the room.
Now take a laser, whose light is intense and penetrating. What happens in the laser is that energetic atoms, rather than emitting photons of light at random, all fire at the same moment. The result is a coherent burst of light with great penetrating power. The overall energy expenditure may be no more than that in a candle, but by acting cooperatively within the laser the effect is enormous. What happens is that a wave of stimulation, or coordination, moves back and forth within the laser until all its atoms are coupled together. It is at this point of total coherence that the atoms simultaneously emit their photons of light.
Laser light is the manifestation of what could be thought of as a circulation of coordinating relationships, or of an activity of information that relates each atom to the whole. Something similar may operate within the healthy body, involving a circulation of meaning, an activity of information, and the movement of a global form that brings together all the cells, organs, and biological processes within a coherent whole. Thus, subtle energy is itself not so much the physical energy within the body, but rather it is the form, or pattern or activating potential that has been superimposed upon that energy.
Think of watching a film on your television set. The actual processes within the set itself are purely physical, energized by electricity that flows out of a plug on the wall. But the content of the program arrives as a very subtle electrical signal that, while its energy may be negligible, is filled with information. It is this information that acts within the television set to produce particular sound and pictures by modulating the “gross” energy supplied through the power plug.
Likewise, the subtle energy of the body may be important not so much as a material manifestation but in the way its information or “field of meaning” acts to orchestrate the body's functioning.
When you are faced with a daunting physical task you pull from somewhere within yourself the intention to act. You know an instant before you begin if you will be successful or not, for the result does not so much depend on your own physical strength as on the power of that inner will, that “energy” you feel within you. Just as within a laser a small energy can have a tremendous effect, so, too, by coordinating the body's forces one can, in an emergency, lift incredible weights or walk great distances. Likewise, when a people are filled with “spirit” they are able to do great tasks and overcome great obstacles.
Healing is the activation and renewal of spirit in the individual and the group. The operation of spirit may, in some way, be connected with that experience of power we all feel within ourselves, with recovery to health that sometimes comes about when we discover a new meaning to our lives, and with the way in which a small group of individuals can perform great tasks.
If energy can be expanded into the subtle domains of meaning and an activity of information, what then of matter? Is there, as Tibetan medicine suggests, a subtle body that corresponds to our own everyday physical body? And can cures of the physical body be affected by addressing its subtle counterpart?
Again, there are difficulties in moving between paradigms, worldviews, and languages. Our Western minds attempt to categorize and compartmentalize so that the subtle is distinguished from the manifest. It is interesting that the scientific revolutions of this century have all demonstrated the errors of such compartmentalization; thus, matter has been conjoined with energy, and space with time. My experience of Indigenous science has been that Native people do not differentiate and categorize in this way. It is not so much that there is a world of stones and trees and another one of spirits, powers, and energies, but rather that they are all one, and it is our particular human way of seeing, or the limitations to our seeing, that causes us to relevate* one particular aspect over the other.
To the Native healer, matter and energy, gross and subtle, spirit and manifest, may be the only verbal appearances that conceal the flux of the world.
With these reservations in mind, let us look at the concept of subtle matter from our Western perspective of homeopathy. While homeopathy is not part of conventional Western medicine it does have a tradition and a serious following in some European countries. Its philosophy goes back to Paracelsus' maxim of the early sixteenth century that “what makes a man ill also cures him”.
Homeopathic procedures of diagnosis differ from those of more conventional Western medicine. The physician is not so much concerned with labels like goitev, hypertension, or schizo-phrenia as with the individual pattern of a person's life, his or her diet, personality, likes and dislikes, and pevious illnesses. Once this overall life story has been revealed, then, on the principle that “like treats like,” preparations are administered that, when taken in higher concentrations by a healthy person, would produce all the symptoms associated with a particular sickness.
If the treatment is successful, the symptoms the patient originally complained of will begin to disappear. But since those symptoms are only part of a larger overall pattern, the physician may now expect to see others surface and increase in intensity. Using a sequence of homeopathic preparations the overall “cure” could take months or years to affect and is supposed to result in a person who is healthy in mind and body and filled with energy.
One difficulty Western medicine has with homeopathy is that, as the treatment progresses, the preparations become more effective when their dilutions are most extreme. Indeed, the practice of dilution with distilled water is continued to the point where there should theoretically be no active molecules present in the medicine that is being taken by the patient! The end result is a little like the bottle of tap water left by the Native medicine man. How could pure water possibly cure the illnesses of body and mind?
If homeopathy works in the way it claims, then nothing material brings about the cure. Could a form of subtle matter exist in the preparation? Some homeopaths have offed explanations. They suggest that the processes of progressive dilution and sercussion (repeatedly tapping the vial that holds the water onto a table top) introduce subtle information from the active molecules of the “medicine” into the water, information that is then conveyed into the patient's body.
Scientifically speaking, this is not altogether too farfetched. It may come as something of a surprise to most readers to learn that the most common of substances on our planet remains a considerable mystery. We know that water is made out of hydrogen and oxygen and that its building blocks are the molecules H20. But how are these molecules arranged to-gether? It turns out that physical chemists cannot agree. They know that a weak force—called the hydrogen bond—attracts the oxygen atom on one water molecule to the hydrogen atom of another. This tends to make the molecules in water orient themselves. Some chemists theorize that this weak attractive force causes water molecules to congregate and form islands of order within liquid water—the overall effect is something like a collection of loosely bound crystals. Others suggest that water is not unlike a polymer, or even that the astronomical number of H20 molecules in a glass of water order themselves in such a way as to create a single giant macromolecule.
If water does consist of a subtle but complex arrangement of a vast number of molecules, this means that information could indeed be “written into” water by very slightly changing the nature of this arrangement. Just as a Beethoven symphony can be “written onto” an audiocassette by changing the orientations of metal oxide molecules on the tape's surface, so, too, information could be “written into” water through subtle changes of global molecular arrangement. The processes of sercussion and successive dilution that go into the creation of a homeopathic remedy could transfer information from the active molecules in the preparation to the water in the form of, for example, subtle reorientations of its overall geometrical structure. Within the body this information might be “read” by the cells and used to bring about active changes in the whole body.
The more we think of the human body not as a machine, or a set of biological reactions but as the physical manifestation of fields of meaning and processes of information, the more we can be open to the presence of subtle levels of energy, matter, and spirit within healing.
Sa'ke'j Henderson opened up yet another aspect of the meaning of medicine when he told me that the plants, herbs, pieces of bone, feathers, and fur found in a medicine bag allow people to come into contact with a much wider reality that includes the various animating spirits within the world. He gave the example of a piece of bone from a particular animal that allowed a person to enter into relationship with the Keeper of that animal. On another occasion he explained how a certain gourd contained the whole world.
Here it is possible to make connections between Indigenous science and some recent ideas in Western science. In the 1960s the physicist David Bohm began to develop what he called the implicate (or enfolded) order. Bohm has argued that while the classical physics of Newton described what could be called the surface of reality, by contrast, quantum mechanics has forced us to move to deeper levels of perception of the world.
Bohm suggested that, in its deepest essence, reality, or “that which is,” is not a collection of material objects in interaction but a process or a movement, which he calls the holomovement—the movement of the whole. This flowing movement throws out explicit forms that we recognize through our senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. These explicate forms abide for a time and we take them as the direct evidence of a hard and fast reality. However, Bohm argues, this explicate order accounts for only a very small portion of reality; underlying it is a more extensive implicate, or enfolded, order. The stable forms we see around us are not primary in themselves but only the temporary unfolding of the underlying implicate order. To take rocks, trees, planets, or stars as the primary reality would be like assuming that the vortices in a river exist in their own right and are totally independent of the flowing river itself.
For Bohm, the gourd that Sa'ke'j Henderson carries is the explicate or surface manifestation of an underlying implicate order. Within that implicate order the gourd enfolds, and is enfolded by, the entire universe. Thus, within each object can be found the whole and, in turn, this whole exists within each of its parts.*
It is not that difficult to become lost and confused when we venture into worlds of spirit, energy, subtle matter, dreams, and visions and leave behind our familiar territory and what can be held in the hand or grasped conceptually within the mind. But some things stretch across the gaps of culture and one of these is song.
A few years ago I was in San Francisco on the occasion of the launching of a Haida canoe. It was also an opportunity for Pam Colorado to gather several of her Native and non-Native friends together. Pam envisions a science that connects Indigenous peoples all over the world. In San Francisco we were to explore the nature of these connections and two Miwok spiritual leaders, Lannie and Ester, had been asked to conduct a healing ceremony for the circle. Lannie spoke of the Ones who had lived in the old times, of what they had experienced and of the wisdom that could be seen in their eyes. Then, as the Miwok healing song was sung, Lannie approached each person in the circle in a ceremony of healing.
Later that evening we heard one of the stories surrounding the song and its power to heal. As settlers spread out across the continent, traditional lands were claimed for farming, ranching, and mining, as well as for roads, railways, towns, and cities. As a result, many Indigenous peoples were brought to the point of extinction. In the case of the Miwoks things were made even worse by the fact that they were being hunted with guns.
So it was that the last group of survivors was tracked down and surrounded. As the Miwok people faced their executioners they made a last request: Before they died they wished to sing their sacred healing song. As Lannie and Ester told us that while the song was being sung the guns were lowered and the posse turned away and rode off, leaving the Miwoks to survive and carry their songs into the future.
A year or two later I passed this story on to Therese Schroeder-Sheker, a harpist and singer who is using medieval music within a hospital setting for the dying. It evoked for Therese similar stories of the power of song, stories that come from all over the world. She told me how, during the Second World War, a group of rabbis had sung the Kaddish before their execution. She spoke of the shaming songs of Africa—when a man has raped or violated a woman, the women from the surrounding area, carrying their children, gather around this man's hut to sing their shaming song. There is no need to punish the offender, to have him arrested or put on trial; the women simply sing throughout the day and into the night until the man leaves the village and is never heard of again.
The more I have tried to learn about Indigenous science, the more I have heard of the power of songs. Songs come to us from another world, they have their own existence and power. Songs create and renew, they heal and make whole. I have heard people say how, when they arrive at a ceremony or enter a sweat lodge, they may not know the right songs, but as soon as the drumming begins the words enter into their minds without conscious effort.
There are other stories of how a song can be given in a dream or vision. In one case a man dreamed he was seated around a drum with some of the great singers of the past. In his dream one of the singers nodded to him, indicating that it was now time for him to sing. When he awoke the song remained with him and could be passed on to be used in a ceremony.
We would probably say that the song had been composed unconsciously and was the essential product of that individual, albeit from deeper areas within his mind. But this explanation is a projection of our own particular beliefs about the nature of reality and of our separateness and individuality. To others, a song has its own autonomous being apart from human minds and voices and, in exchange for something undefined, it can be given to the singer.
The song sings the singer. A famous Zen koan asks what is the sound of the tree that falls in the forest when no one is present to hear it. One could also ask what is the sound of a song when no one sings it.
Song is spirit. Song is being. Yet song is also a set of physical vibrations moving outward. Many traditional societies speak of the power of such vibrations to operate within the worlds of matter and spirit. Leroy Little Bear related to me how an Elder had told him about the four races—the blue, yellow, red, and white people—and how each one had a special task. It turned out that the blue people—what we call the black races—had been given the song, which he interpreted as being the song of creation.
In many cultures the primal act of creation begins with the word or the song whose vibrations animate the void. In the Sufi tradition, it is said that Allah brought all things into existence by calling out their names, thus, when the sacred names are pronounced one partakes in that primordial act. Mantras from India involve both the repetition of sacred names and the creation of highly specific vibrations that act within the mind-body to bring about transformation.
Sound, vibration, and song are believed by many to be the creative, generative forces within the cosmos. In those societies that understand time as a cycle, acts of creation must be renewed and the songs repeated again and again. Colin M. Turnbull, in his book, The Forest People, speaks of the African people sometimes referred to as pygmies and the significance of their music. In their ceremonies a sacred instrument is taken through the forest to make music. Blowing the instrument produces a variety of sounds that are similar to those heard in the forest itself—sounds of birds and animals. When Turnbull asked why the people did this they explained that it was to make the forest happy; for the forest looked after everything, the insects, the birds, and the people. If the forest slept, maybe it would forget about them, but if they sang to it and made music, then the forest would be happy, and the people would also be happy and not get sick.
When I mentioned this story to Leroy Little Bear, he pointed out that everything has its role to play, everything does what it must. The ants do their thing, the birds do theirs, and so, too, must the people—which is to sing to the forest. When all things act as they should, nature remains in balance.
Songs connect us to the world of dreams and to the visions in which healing can take place. As I understand it, for the Naskapi and the Montagnais of Labrador and northern Quebec, song is the central focus of healing. Again, the nature of this healing is very different from anything we understand in the West.
My friend Clem (Alan) Ford studies the Indigenous languages of northern Quebec and Labrador. One afternoon as I was visiting him I noticed the Apparat Francais et Montagnais, a dictionary compiled in 1729 by a Jesuit priest, Le Pkre Lavre, lying on his desk. It is a very large book and by a curious synchronicity when I opened it the pages fell open to the phrase
which the priest had translated as le jongleur chant un malade, “the magicianlsorcerer sings a sick man.” I passed the book over to Clem, who explained that the translation was not really correct. To begin with, the missionaries of the early eighteenth century believed that all the ceremonies and traditional ways of The People were the work of the Devil. Hence the healer is described as le jongleur, the magician, for it was believed that his powers were a mixture of cheap conjuring tricks and deviltry. But really the mistranslation goes deeper, for it destorts the very thought processes of the Montagnais people.
The importance of the Montagnais phrase is that it is about a process; it is a verbal form that the translator had attempted to transform into our European noun-based, concept-dominated language system.
What is really happening is “singing”—the action, the process. The healer cannot really say that it is “he” who is singing, rather the process of singing is going on.
Within our Western worldview agents carry out actions, nouns/objects interact and bring about changes in each other.
The author of a process is a noun; an object and the verb is its action. But for the Montagnais reality is profoundly different; it is flux, process and change within which individual human beings are transitory forms; and manifest expression of temporary alliances of powers, spirits, and energies. Thus, no human can bring the song into existence. Rather, the singing itself is the primary reality, the vibrational process that floods across the world.
The image that began to emerge from that phrase was of a sick person and a healer, and a process of singing taking place. The singing is the primary reality, for it did not originate with either person, nor was the healing something that passed in a transitive way from one to the other. The singing sings itself. The healing heals.
In our Western hospitals healing is something that is done by the doctor and nurse to the patient. If Western doctors were to employ singing as a treatment, the doctor would sing to, or at, the sick person. But within Montagnais reality, healing is the animating principle within the spirit of the song.
This is reflected in another phrase from the same page of the Apparaf:
which, while it is translated as “he sings in the sweat tent,” is really again an expression of a pure process of singing. It is as if many nouns emerge out of the verbs, the object out of the process.
In a similar way, the Montagnais reality does not need nouns to describe snow, rain, heat, or cold, morning, afternoon, or night. Rather, there are verbs that express the processes of nature, a world of transformation and animation.
This idea of the song that sings opens up the ethical dimension of Native medicine. Within our society it is a high ideal to perform “good works,” which can range from healing the sick to seeking ways to save the planet Earth. The ethical dimension of healing within an Indigenous society appears to be quite different. If a person is suffering or in pain one does not immediately enter his or her home to perform an act of healing, no more than one would without invitation seek to help or improve a person in some way.
Rather, a person only acts in response to being invited and, as with all such actions, a relationship must first be established through an exchange of some sort—tobacco or gifts. The result may be a healing that could, for example, involve sucking or blowing the sickness away. But, as far as I understand it, it is not so much the medicine person who does the healing in an active way; rather, it is the song, or the spirit within the medicine, or the relationship that moves in a circle of balance within the sick person, the medicine person, the plants and herbs, and all the powers of sky and earth.
In his book Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari Kung Dick Katz discusses the healing, through singing and dancing, of the !Kung of the Kalahari. During a long night of singing, dancing, and rapid shallow breathing a special energy called num is generated within the body that enables the dancers to enter the state of kia. It is while they are in this state that healing takes place. The business of healing is no easy matter, for the num can burn and harm the one who is healing. Thus it is important not only to heat up the nurn but, in certain cases, to cool it down and maintain it at the correct temperature. This means that the process of healing cannot be done by a lone individual, for rather all the dancers in the group must support the healer and help control the temperature of his or her num. Healing involves sacrifice and personal danger and can only be achieved through the sanction of the whole group.
When the num is boiling, the healer is given special powers to see into the nature of disease and to cure. In this state, called kia, he or she may also see over great distances and exercise other special powers. Entering kin brings with it pain and fear. Indeed, the state is described as death—and Dick Katz is quick to point out that by death the !Kung do not mean what in our terms would correspond to an ego-death or psychological death but an actual process of death, and later rebirth, with all the fear, pain, and disorientation that this implies. While in a state of kia the healer himself is sick and in great danger, so that the healing process itself must involve the whole group. Indeed, the healing ceremony itself is called num chxi, that word chxi implying a gathering together to sing and to dance.
Healing for the !Kung is a community matter, something that arises out of the group as a whole, and, while the num may be focused into the body of certain individuals, responsibility still lies with the people as a whole. It is important to emphasize this point because many non-Native people are drawn to exotic powers and abilities evoked through altered states of consciousness. But, as Dick explained to me, it is no very special thing to change your consciousness; peoples all over the world have developed well-defined techniques for doing this. What really matters is not the altered state itself, or the special powers, but the ethical dimension—what you do with it and how you act. In an Indigenous context this always means responsibility to the group and relationship to all of nature.
Dick Katz has also told me about the feeling of “a good healing” which is shared by the !Kung and by Indigenous peoples the world over. After a night of singing and dancing people will know that something very powerful has happened, that a good healing has taken place. It may turn out that a person who has experienced this healing power is still left with an illness or body defect, but the illness of the body is not as significant as the sense of wholeness and relationship that the healing produces.
Song provides a way of linking the Western healing tradition to that of Native America. In the tenth century the monks of Cluny France, began to develop Europe's first infirmary practice. Their healing was based upon two sources, plants and song, and it is this latter practice that has been revived by the harpist Therese Schroeder-Sheker and her Chalice of Repose Project at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Montana.
The Cluniac philosophy is in many ways similar to that of traditional healing. Therese is very careful, for example, to dissociate herself from such titles as “healer” or “music therapist,” nor does she speak of having a special ability to heal. Rather, as with Native medicine people, she will only attend when specifically invited into the room and once there will allow the music to do its work.
When a Cluniac monk felt that the hour of his death was approaching he would inform the abbot and meet with his brothers for leave-taking. The monks, in turn, aided his process of dying by chanting a prescribed series of musical modes. Using voice and harp, Therese has continued this practice with many thousands of dying patients. The process is described as “anointing with sound.” Two harpists weave a web of sound substance across the body of the patient, actively responding to changes in skin pallor and other vital signs. Sometimes, when a dying person is in a deep coma, the output from the electronic monitors of her respiration, heartbeat, and blood pressure shows that she is responding to the music. Other patients in severe pain may be removed from a morphine intravenous to die painlessly and in clarity of mind. For Therese, the skin of the entire body is an ear through which musical vibrations enter and do their work.
To the monks, death was such a natural, though marvelous process, that they used the metaphor of birth to describe it, and the musical practice as “sacred midwifery.” The monks also employed the imagery and language of alchemy to describe the way in which music acts to loosen the series of attachments within a person and so allow him to move though the processes of death. Just as in alchemy the repeated processes of sublimation, distillation and condensation, dissolution and recrystalization bring about purification and the separation of the subtle from the gross, so, too, tonal substance works its alchemy within the body to free the spirit from matter and allow its rebirth in a more subtle realm.
Indigenous people consider songs to be living beings, as does Therese, for whom each musical mode is a being in its own right. When she first learned about the tenth-century tradition Therese felt that she was being introduced to each of the particular musical modes and in the process, being given an authorization to use them. In certain cases this sense of relationship, or authorization, did not come and for this reason she will not play those particular modes.*
What is particularly exciting about Therese's work is the way in which an ancient tradition that makes use of alchemical imagery works hand in hand with modern medicine and how the subtle changes brought about by music can be recorded by modern technology. For Therese, there is nothing incompatible in the old and new working together, provided that this is done with respect and sensitivity. This suggests that worldviews and paradigms can indeed be transcended and Western and Indigenous medicine can support and learn from each other.
When Native and non-Native people sit together for the first time anger and pain are not far away. As a Native person relates the story of his life or his people there is often an anger in the heart toward a society that could have done such things. The presence of white people in the room evokes oppressive memories and, in turn, it is extremely difficult for non-Native listeners to maintain their own equilibrium while listening to such a story. Anger, guilt, resentment, rejection, and aggression begin to surface. Yet so often it is out of this emotional chaos that a healing begins, for as people begin to relate at the level of the heart they discover their common humanity. All of us have families; we have watched a child in pain or sickness, have known the stomach-tightening fear when the future of a loved one is threatened. Each of us has the potential for friendship and forgiveness, not only of the other but also of ourselves.
In so many instances the spiritual and political leaders of The People have passed through a dark night of drug abuse, alcohol, and prison. The wheel balances and the darkest shadows are created by the brightest light. Healing wells up out of the pain and fragmentation of our lives.
The previous chapter dealt with the waves of disease that destroyed between 90 to 95 percent of the original population of the Americas. In its wake came further assaults. People were moved from their traditional territories and their land was converted to other uses. In many cases this was accompanied by warfare, in others the weapons were alcohol and appropriation. Behind it all was a deliberate policy designed to break down resistance through the systematic destruction of a culture.
One of the most effective ways to dismantle the order of a society is to cut off its children from their roots. I have often heard Native people speak of their experiences in the residential school system, a particularly effective system of social genocide. In most cases this extinction began with children being removed from their families, sometimes by the use of force. The children's first experience of school consisted of being stripped, having their clothing burned, their hair doused in kerosene, and, in the case of boys, their heads shaved. The schools forbade children to practice their traditional ways, which included prayer, and they were beaten for speaking their own language. In so many cases excessive physical abuse on the part of the staff was coupled with the sexual abuse of both boys and girls. Today, many of these abused children have grown up to become community leaders, Elders, and faith carriers; others are alcoholics or abusers of their own spouses and children. But, in one way or another, all of them bear the scars of that terrible treatment.
Residential schools may now be closed but discrimination continues. At a conference of the Administration of Justice for Native Canadians, held in Banff, Alberta, in 1991, I heard that within that province, 75 percent of adult Native people have been arrested at some time or another; when brought to court, 86 percent of them will plead guilty, and 98 percent of them will be found guilty, figures excessively higher than for any other group. The extremely high rate of convictions and guilty pleas indicate that these are a people who are being exploited by all aspects of the justice system, including those lawyers who, working on legal aid, maximize their profits with a quick turnover of clients.* Alberta Natives joke that they are the best employers in the province, for without them, most police, lawyers, courts, parole officers, and social workers would be out of work.
Indigenous societies cohere and have their being through the power of spirit. It is the source of their existence, the meaning that lives within them, and the balance they must maintain throughout the circles of time. In turn, this spirit is a part of the land the people occupy and care for. The traumas of forcible displacement and the requisitioning of lands, the disruption of traditional ways and forms of governance, the importation of alcohol and drugs, the loss of language, and the education of children in an alien world have all contributed to a breaking apart of society and a fragmentation of its meaning. Spirit departs and the relationships with the powers, energies, and Keepers of the land are weakened. Without them the people will die.
It is here that healing must begin, a healing that brings back the spirit and renews the people. Miraculously this healing still works, despite all that has occurred over the last five hundred years. It takes us beyond specific sicknesses in the body and into the healing of spirit, society, and the planet itself. Healing also comes when Natives and non-Natives sit in a circle to listen to each other. Healing begins when we reach down into ourselves and understand the narrowness of our own perspectives and lives, show respect for another way of life, and are willing to learn from it.
* Life's journey. Also known as taking the Earth walk.
* See E David Peat, “Towards a process theory of healing: energy, activity and global form,” Subtle Energies, vol. 3 (1992): 1-40.
* The word relevate (re-levate) was coined by the physicist David Bohm to sugest the act of bringing something into explicit manifestation or into conscious awareness from a deeper underlying flux. It seems descriptive of the way our minds and perceptions work.
* Some months before David Bohm died it was possible for him to meet with me and my Native friends Leroy Little Bear and Sa'ke'j Henderson. All of us were struck by the deep underlying similarities in their visions of the nature of reality.
* For the past few hundred years (until the advent of Schoenberg and atonality) Western music was composed of key signatures, related to scales. Such music has a tonal center and makes use of the tension and resolution that is created in moving away from and toward this tonal center. Earlier music, from the time of the Greeks until the Middle Ages, employed modes that, while they are also sequences of notes arranged in ascending or descending order, do not hve this same sense of a tonal center. Such music often has a timeless, eternal quality.
* As I understand it, these lawyers are paid by the state or province at a fixed daily or hourly rate that would be less than they could obtain from private clients. Thus, while they cannot make too much out of a prolonged case, they will do better by having a very fast turnover of clients and cases. Simply spending a few minutes with each client and then entering a plea of guilty to a lesser charge, the lawyer will take his fee, discharge the case, and not even have to bother to study the papers involved. Lawyers I have spoken to point out the very high rate of guilty pleas among Native people and have suggested to me that in many cases if they had chosen to fight the case they would probably have been found not guilty or would have received a noncustodial sentence. In most cases, Native people are cynical about the justice system, for they become pawns in an alien legal process and may not even be fluent in the English used in the courts.