Native North America

Hundreds of nations

There is no single Native American medicine

North America holds hundreds of sovereign nations. The Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes, the Haudenosaunee of the longhouse, the Lakota of the northern plains, the Cherokee of the southern mountains, and the Diné of the Southwest each keep a separate medicine.

Their languages come from four unrelated families. Diné is Athabaskan, Anishinaabemowin is Algonquian, the Haudenosaunee and Cherokee languages are Iroquoian, and Lakota is Siouan. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy states the rule on its own site: each community has its own medicines and traditions.

The National Native Network, a program of the Inter-Tribal Council of Michigan, notes that traditional tobacco use varies by tribe, and that Alaska Natives generally do not use traditional tobacco at all. Every claim here names the nation that holds it, because the generic composite belongs to none of them.

The Midewiwin

Anishinaabe healing knowledge is graded, taught, and written

The Midewiwin, the Grand Medicine Society, is a society of spiritual advisors and healers called the Mide. It has four to eight grades of membership depending on the community, and each grade carries its own initiation and its own instruction in medicine and healing.

Initiation ceremonies were recorded in line drawings on bark scrolls. Rank was marked by facial painting and by the animal skin from which a member's medicine bundle was made, with weasel, bear paw, rattlesnake, owl, and hawk each denoting a grade.

Bob Goulais, a second degree member of the Three Fires Midewiwin Lodge, describes the lodge as the source of Ojibwa governance. It was the place of prayer and education, where people were named, married, healed, and buried. Lodges operate today in Ontario, Manitoba, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and initiates are expected to learn Ojibwa.

Anishinaabe medicine carried ranks, a curriculum, and a written mnemonic record long before anyone outside it took an interest.

The medicine societies

What the Haudenosaunee have asked not be described

Haudenosaunee medicine societies hold the sacred duty to maintain the use and strength of special medicines, for individual and community welfare together. Among them are the societies that use the wooden and corn husk masks, which represent the shared power of the original medicine beings.

In 1995 the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee ruled on those masks. They are not to be made for sale, publicly exhibited, photographed, or illustrated. The policy adds that information about the medicine societies is not meant for general distribution, and that non-Haudenosaunee have no right to examine, interpret, or present the beliefs and duties of those societies.

So the record stops at three statements. The societies exist. Their work is medicine. The rest belongs to the Haudenosaunee. A boundary set by the people who hold the knowledge is part of an accurate description of the tradition.

The seven rites

Lakota ceremony is closed by Lakota decision

The University of Oklahoma Press published The Sacred Pipe in 1953, Black Elk's account of the seven rites of the Oglala Lakota, recorded by Joseph Epes Brown during eight months at Pine Ridge. Among the seven is the Inipi, the rite of purification. It is a religious ceremony.

The Lakota Summit V declaration of June 1993 set the terms for outsiders, and those terms have held. In October 2009 three people died at a commercial imitation lodge near Sedona, Arizona, run by a promoter with no training in the tradition. He was convicted on three counts of negligent homicide.

Naming a rite and reporting that it is closed is accurate. Describing its conduct is not. What an outsider may take from the Inipi is the fact of its existence and the length of the training behind it.

The plants

A continental pharmacopeia, recorded one preparation at a time

The Cherokee entries for willow specify what to take and how to prepare it. Bark infused and drunk for fever. Inner bark decocted for hoarseness. Bark applied as a poultice. Root chewed by ball players for wind. Paul Hamel and Mary Chiltoskey published the compilation in 1975.

In Anishinaabe teaching, tobacco, sage, cedar, and sweetgrass are the four sacred medicines, used in daily life and in ceremony. Anishnawbe Mushkiki, an Aboriginal Health Access Centre in Thunder Bay, publishes the teaching. Tobacco comes first. It is offered before anything is asked, and it opens the way for the other plants.

That tobacco is not the cigarette. The National Native Network states that commercial tobacco is manufactured for habitual use, contains chemical additives, and produces over 7,000 chemical compounds when burned. Native public health programs work to keep the two apart.

Domagaya's instruction to Cartier in 1536 has the same shape. Name the tree, the parts, the method, the interval. The plant alone was never the medicine.

Hózhó

The Diné name a condition that illness disrupts and ceremony restores

Hózhó is the wellness philosophy of the Diné, a set of principles that guide thought, speech, behavior, and action. Michelle Kahn-John, a Diné nursing scholar, and Mary Koithan published the account in 2015. The word carries beauty, harmony, goodness, normality, wellbeing, order, and the ideal in one condition.

Hózhó is disrupted by irresponsible thought, speech, or behavior. The resulting state is hóchxó, which the paper describes as chaos, sadness, grief, disharmony, and imbalance. The restorative ceremony is the Hózhóóji, the Blessing Way, performed when a person needs support from a healer, the extended family, nature, and the Diné Holy People to re-establish hózhó.

Diné College takes Sa'ah Naagháíí Bik'eh Hózhóón as its educational philosophy, the Diné traditional living system that places life in harmony with the natural world. It supplies principles for protection against the imperfections of life and for the development of wellbeing.

In Diné terms health is a condition held, lost, and returned to. That is a claim about a value the system defends, stated by Diné authors, in the present tense.

The ceremonial year

The Onondaga keep the ceremonies on a lunar calendar

Faith keepers of the Onondaga Nation refer to the seasons and the lunar calendar to decide when each ceremony begins. Midwinter opens the new lunar year and runs 21 days. Maple sap, planting, bean, strawberry, green corn, and harvest follow.

The thirteen moons carry Onondaga names that describe what the year is doing. Ohiaihah is the little ripening of the berries. Disgo:nah is longer nights and shorter days. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy counts 13 ceremonies for the 13 moons, most of them fixed to seasonal change.

The ceremonies give thanks to the people, the natural world, the spirit world, and the creator. The Confederacy states that doing so is expected to maintain the health and prosperity of the nations. Timing is the content of the practice rather than the container it comes in.

1883 to 1978

Traditional healing was a federal offense for ninety five years

Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller wrote to the Office of Indian Affairs in 1883 about dances and about medicine men. The Rules Governing the Court of Indian Offenses followed on March 30, enforced on the reservations by the Courts of Indian Offenses.

The penalties were material. A first offense under the dance rule cost up to ten days of withheld rations. Repeat offenses drew fifteen to thirty days of withheld rations, or up to thirty days in prison. A person who practiced as a medicine man faced at least ten days in the agency prison, and a person who consulted one faced ten days as well.

Congress ended it on August 11, 1978. Brett Lee Shelton of the Native American Rights Fund says that less than 50 years have passed since America withdrew this sinister legal mechanism attacking Native religion and culture. Protection then had to be extended item by item. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of October 6, 1994 made the ceremonial use of peyote by Indians lawful and unpunishable in every state.

Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, a Hunkpapa and Oglala Lakota social worker, and her colleagues described the accumulated result in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs in 2011. They named it historical trauma: collective, intergenerational group injury compounded by discrimination and oppression, and carried forward in the health of the living.

The return

Traditional practice is now a covered health service

On October 16, 2024 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services approved section 1115 demonstration amendments. They allow Medicaid and CHIP coverage of traditional health care practices for the first time. The coverage reaches Indian Health Service facilities, Tribal facilities, and urban Indian organizations in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Oregon.

Forty six years separate that approval from the repeal of the ban. In the same period the Midewiwin lodges have kept initiating and the Onondaga longhouse has kept its thirteen ceremonies. Cherokee Nation citizens have gone on gathering and teaching medicinal plants, which the Cherokee Phoenix reported in 2009 as knowledge passing to younger generations.

What these nations hand forward is a standard rather than a technique. A human being is a whole inside larger wholes. Health is that whole in right order. The healer's work is restoration, and it is judged by whether the person returns to the condition their own nation names.

Common questions

Frequently asked