Three
A Visit with a Medicine Man
In his famous essay “What Makes a Life Significant,” the American philosopher and polymath William James wrote that life is “soaked and shot-through” with “values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view.” He cautions against a failure to realize that the “meanings are there for others, but they are not there for us.” Understanding this is the “basis of all our tolerance, social, religious, and political.” He continues:
No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.1
With this in mind I set off to talk with a traditional Navajo medicine man.
Tóhajiilee, New Mexico
Meeting John Sandoval
On a hot, dusty August day, I drove with my translators out through the mesas and arroyos of the eastern side of the Navajo Nation to the home of John Sandoval, a medicine man who has a history of performing ceremonies for railroad workers. John lives not far from the home of Jerry Sandoval. John, a tall, handsome, and very spry 84-year-old, lives alone in a spartan, two-room cinder block home nestled discreetly among the towering pastel-colored mesas of Tóhajiilee; the name is confirmed by the huge green exit sign on Interstate 40 west of Albuquerque near the neon of the Route 66 Casino.
Driving up to John Sandoval’s home. Like many Navajos, John lives in a small dwelling in a compound that has homes of his extended family nearby.
Unpainted and unadorned on the outside, his home has two neat rooms inside. The first contains his bed and a small area with a television and several sitting chairs. A large window ushers in the sharp New Mexico light. The other room is a well-stocked kitchen with a collection of older appliances that reminded me of the kitchen of my grandmother, whom I often visited in the rural boot heel of Missouri when I was young. John had agreed to see me after Julie had contacted him and explained my interests in Navajo work and religion. John had never worked for the railroad, though some in his family had. John had, however, performed many ceremonies for railroad workers.
John’s work as a medicine man
Most of the Navajo men I met in this research were elderly, like John. Their ability to speak and understand English varied greatly. Aware of our imperfect communication and the philosophical and existential issues at stake in our conversation at the intersection of English and Navajo, I wanted to talk with John about his work as a medicine man.
Navajo people have a remarkably vivid sense of humor, and John was no exception. After I sat down in his comfortable chair next to his bed in his living room/bedroom, he began by showing me a large “arrowhead” that he claims he uses as a macelike weapon to kill rabbits. Enjoying his humor yet suspecting that I was being played, I was reminded of a newspaper story that had described the Navajo sense of humor as “impish.” That seemed to be case with John.2
With Julie and her daughter Zina at my side, I took out my tape recorder, turned it on, and began to ask John about his work as a medicine man. In traditional Navajo religion, the clergy are divided into two categories, diviners and healers. John works mainly as a diviner, offering suggestions to those who seek his services so that healing medicine men can perform specific prayers, sings, and ceremonies directed toward the client’s problem. John was taught the craft of being a medicine man by his grandfather, who learned it when the Navajo people came back from Bosque Redondo in the 1860s, believing that by learning the craft of the medicine man he could help his family and other Navajos to survive.
People with emotional, psychological, or legal needs come to John to ask him to analyze their problems and suggest solutions. John’s specialty is to help people deal with the strain that they face in their interactions with the world outside the Navajo Nation. Railroad workers approach him when they are worried about their safety at work, a problem which was my specific interest. But many others come to him too, including young people who ask him to perform ceremonies to help them get better jobs or to deal with difficulties in their personal lives. Men and women who have been charged with DWI or other criminal matters also come to him.
John tells me that after he performs a ceremony for those with criminal legal problems, the police often fail to show up for the court hearing and the case is dismissed. He believes his prayers and ceremonies “stress the mind” of the prosecutor, causing the prosecutor to lose the paperwork and often resulting in the dismissal of the case.3 The white man cannot function without paperwork, John tells us.
When someone visits John looking for help, John first asks for an explanation of the problem. His treatment method involves “first things first,” he tells us. He investigates by engaging in “hand trembling,” a type of Navajo triage. According to the story of a Navajo medicine man, John Holiday, “hand trembling came about from the beginning of Creation. It has its own form of sacredness and set of rules. . . . The gift itself has to be bestowed from above on certain individuals, but one can become a hand trembler through ceremonies, if the Gila Monster accepts the person.”4
John finds that his diagnosis and treatment are more efficacious and mean more to the family when he goes to their house. There, he is able to experience the situation of his patient with greater depth and understanding. He can see a clearer picture of what is bothering them, he believes. The client, John tells us, “must really be seeking help for this to work.” Julie chuckles as she remarks that John sounds like an Anglo psychological counselor. Through the diagnostic hand trembling, John tells us, the Great Spirit guides him as to what to do. The treatments that he prescribes are a way to share his knowledge from the Great Spirit with his patient. On occasion, John performs these healing activities himself. He is proud of the fact that while many medicine men know just one “way,” he knows several and puts all of them together in his work. He says that many people are scared to learn what he has learned; it takes a lot of patience.
John Farella, a student of Navajo philosophy, classifies work such as John’s as “ritual knowledge.” “From this perspective,” Farella writes, “the world is not seen as given, but as subject to alteration or manipulation. More specifically, ritual can ‘correct’ mistakes, or anticipate and immunize against them. The ritual expert is a ‘fixer,’ both in the literal and colloquial sense of the term. Ritual offers fairly active control of one’s environment as contrasted with the fairly passive control that taboos offer.”5
John enjoys showing me the materials he uses in the ceremonies. Each ceremony requires a slightly different combination. Certain blends of white and yellow corn pollen are the basic ingredients of most ceremonies. Corn, in the concluding story of Navajo creation, was created by a figure known as Changing Woman. To fashion the Navajo people, Changing Woman uses a “ball of epidermal wastes which she rubs from her body, mingled with cornmeal.”6 John brings out his packets of white and yellow corn that he uses when he performs his Blessingway ceremony. He shows me his “horny toad rock,” and says, looking at me, “my grandfather.” As I look at the rock and wonder aloud which of my grandfathers he means, the bald one or the one with a full head of hair, we all break out in a belly laugh. John tells me that if one holds this rock while sleeping, evil spirits will leach out of the body and into the rock.
Medicine man John Sandoval and the author in John’s house.
If John is performing treatment along with his diagnosis, he works to complete the ceremonial mixture. In his concoctions John uses wild herbs that he gathers or that others gather for him.7 The fruit of these herbs looks like “toenails,” he tells us, and we all laugh again. John finds these sacred plants on Mount Taylor, he tells us, one of the four sacred mountains that frame the Navajo Nation. John’s understanding of the importance of the four sacred mountains emanates from the Navajo creation story. This story, along with the concept of hózhǫ́ and certain traditional ceremonies led by the Blessingway, are front and center for John. In Navajo cosmology, Mount Taylor is the sacred mountain of the south, Blanca Peak in Colorado the sacred mountain of the east, San Francisco Mountain in Arizona the sacred mountain of the west, and Hesperus Mountain in Colorado the sacred mountain of the north. The original Navajo world was a four-cornered area framed by these large mountains at each corner, which roughly define the Navajo Nation today.
John then administers the salve, and he prays, sings, and chants for the person. He counsels the client based on the specific type of problem she or he has. He always reminds the person of the proper way to live. This way is to walk in harmony with the earth, expressed in the Navajo concept of hózhǫ́.8 Importantly, as seen in John’s work, “The Navajo does not look for beauty; he generates it within himself and projects it onto the universe.”9 Like a good advisor, before he leaves, he instructs his client as to which herbal medicine to use.
The Long Walk
John traces the lineage of the understanding of medicine men to the time of the Long Walk. This knowledge is important for medicine men and it is important to Navajo railroad workers. Playing a role similar to slavery and the Middle Passage for African Americans, the Long Walk was the formative event in Navajo history. To begin to understand the dialectic between the group and the personal for Navajo railroad workers, we cannot forgo knowledge of history; it is a history that is very much alive today.
In 1860, having grown tired of constant incursions into their land by the military, white prospectors, and land speculators, Navajo warriors attacked Fort Defiance, Arizona. In retaliation, the US Army, led by Kit Carson, pursued a “scorched earth” policy, killing all Navajo livestock, burning all crops, and flattening all dwellings. Navajos fought and fled, and except for a few who found refuge in the most isolated parts of the four corners area, all succumbed to Carson’s campaign. Thousands of starving Navajos were forced by Carson and his troops to take the infamous Long Walk to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, through spring blizzards, which killed many. “Perhaps most lethal,” writes Maureen Trudelle Schwarz, “was the fact that the U.S. military armed Ute, Hopi, and Zuni warriors as well as other residents of New Mexico, then granted them full license to raid the Navajo and capture women and children, whom they were allowed to sell to anyone they wished.”10 A recent historian of this period described his view of their condition, as they were marched east from their land to the spot the US Army had chosen for their camp:
East was the direction of hope, after all—the direction that every Navajo hogan faced to greet the morning sun. But east was also the direction from which the bilagáana had come. There was a paradox to this, and also an admonition: Ever since they could remember, the Diné had been told never to leave the confines of their four sacred mountains. If they did, the ceremonials would cease to work. Ancient chants would become meaningless, and even the best medicine men would lose their touch. And so, as the refugees filed out of Navajo country, past Acoma and Laguna pueblos, and down into the Rio Grande rift, they began to fear the consequences of drawing so close to the land of the sunrise.11
One can only imagine the Navajos’ sheer existential terror at being forced from their land, physically assaulted, and, in addition, seeing their traditional ways of coping rendered useless and meaningless.
In 1868 a treaty was negotiated between General W. T. Sherman and Navajo leader Barboncito, and the Navajo Reservation was established in the four corners area of present-day New Mexico and Arizona. After the signing of the treaty, the Navajos walked back to the reservation, beginning the modern process of the formation of their nation. At that time, the Navajo people numbered between eight and sixteen thousand.
The Bosque Redondo experience is one of the historical periods of stress alluded to by Kluckhohn and Leighton. This tragedy is truly the Babylonian expulsion experience for the Navajo people. It lives in the minds of many Navajos today. With some hyperbole, Kluckhohn and Leighton described the experience this way:
Probably no folk has ever had a greater shock. Proud, they saw their properties destroyed and knew what it was to be dependent upon the largess of strangers. No[t] understanding group captivity and accustomed to mov[ing] freely over great spaces, they knew the misery of confinement within a limited area. Taken far from the rugged and vivid landscape which they prized so highly, they lived in a flat and colorless region, eating alien foods and drinking bitter water which made them ill.12
Having grown up in Arkansas, I know how the experience of slavery and the Middle Passage still casts a daily shadow over the American South, even though it ended nearly 150 years ago. Many in Little Rock, Arkansas, where I grew up, continue to view the world through a lens tinted by the effects of slavery. In a similar way, the Bosque Redondo experience is seldom forgotten by the Navajos, and its effects often silently color many views and relationships.13 This history is part of the competing narratives of the colonizers and the colonized.
John Wayne on the wall
On the wall facing his bed, John has a makeshift entertainment center including two television sets, a video home system, and a satellite television. On the wall at the side of the bed hangs a large picture of John Wayne. After a while I summon the courage to ask him why he has John Wayne on the wall. For many Anglos, I think, John Wayne is a symbol of all wrongdoing to Native Americans. Seeing Wayne’s iron-jawed mug on the wall was jarring and disconcerting to me. John says matter-of-factly, however, that John Wayne appears in many of the movies that he likes. These Westerns show a familiar landscape and at least feature Indian characters. John tells me they remind him of the land where he lives.
Later, I learn in talking with Maurice Tanner, a Navajo trading post owner, that he and other traders contracted with the movie industry in the mid-twentieth century to supply Navajo men and women to act in movies. Many of the actors in these Westerns, he told me, were Navajos who were bused from the reservation to the movie location in the desert outside of Hollywood. In an ironic twist, the trader told me that many of the Navajo actors did not have the braided hair that the movie directors wanted, so they were given wigs to wear in the movie.
John and I talk about religion in general and I ask John what he thinks about the other religions that people practice. He says that he does not go to “cowboy tent revivals,” alluding to the evangelical services that are a major event in many parts of the territory in summertime. Someone needs to save the old ways, he believes. John believes that his ways more quickly alleviate people’s problems than do the evangelical prayers and ceremonies. The tent revival way is slow, he says, and often does not do what is needed. His way is the fast way and people feel better immediately. So, people come to him.
As we start to leave, John tells Julie that he wants me to smoke some “mountain tobacco” with him. In a deliberate manner, he takes out his ceremonial materials and rolls a cornhusk cigarette with the materials that he has picked from the mountains. He slyly tells me that this tobacco is not “habit forming.” We smoke it together and he says this should “clear my mind.” He believes this tobacco is good when you are depressed or when you think that people are talking about you. How does he know me so well, I wonder? When I turn off the tape recorder and we get up to leave, John welcomes me to come back any time.
As we drive off, I marvel at the subtle pastels and earth tones of the magnificent land around us. Julie begins to tell me about the role of Navajo religion in her own life. When she was young, many children near her went to Christian boarding schools, and she attended a Mormon school.14 The Mormons had lots of activities for children at the school, Julie remembers, and she liked that. In spite of her early Mormon religious training, she felt that the Navajo religion had a beneficial effect, as it “brought balance back.” Her grandfather was a medicine man who performed the Evilway ceremony, one of the most popular Navajo traditional rituals. Her grandfather would have his grandchildren go out to forage for the herbs he needed, and he would use oil from animals to make his sacred mixtures. Bobcat oil was especially popular. In his ceremony he would rub a concoction made of these herbs and bobcat oil all over the patient so that she or he looked “black,” Julie tells me. The ceremonies used a feather fan, as well, to chase bad spirits away from the person. Often her grandfather’s ceremony was part of a traditional Navajo sing, which he would perform at his patients’ homes.
I think about how there is much in John’s narrative and Julie’s story of her grandfather that seems out of sync with the modern Anglo “rational” mind. But in my legal practice I had seen that frequently the Navajo way of looking at events and understanding their significance was more sensible to me than the analysis of the same events under the structures of the American legal system, which favored the railroad companies on most occasions. There is a lesson here.
1 William James, On Some of Life’s Ideals: On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings; What Makes a Life Significant (New York: Henry Holt, 1912), 49–50.
2 For an interesting study of Native American humor, see Kenneth Lincoln, Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
3 That this ceremony seems so successful may be aided by the level of competency in the actual practice of local criminal courts.
4 John Holiday and Robert S. McPherson, A Navajo Legacy: The Life and Teachings of John Holiday (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 3.
5 Farella, The Main Stalk, 11.
6 Gill, Songs of Life, 6.
7 The transformation of common substances into meaning-laden ritual objects is a feature of many religious practices. In Oliver La Farge’s Laughing Boy, Slim Girl wonders why her husband seemed to become so devout when in a traditional ceremony he “put on the painted rawhide bag trimmed with spruce and feathers, pretending to be Talking God.” Then she recalls the sacraments she saw at her time in the Indian school run by the Catholic Church where she had been sent. She had been shocked to see the priest cavalierly handle the bread and wine for the sacrament but realized there was something more there. La Farge wrote that when the priest “raised the chalice his face would be inspired. He knew it was just the Italian’s wine and himself, but he had not been pretending.” Laughing Boy, 105.
8 See Reichard, Navajo Religion.
9 Witherspoon, Language and Art, 151.
10 Schwarz, “I Choose Life,” 18.
11 Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (New York: Doubleday Press, 2006), 359.
12 Kluckhohn and Leighton, The Navajo, 41.
13 Anthony Webster finds this crucial motif in the work of Navajo poet Laura Tohe and others. Webster, Explorations in Navajo Poetry, 170. Tohe’s poem In Dinétah can be found in Heid E. Erdrich and Laura Tohe, eds., Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002), 100.
14 The issue of boarding schools is much contested in Navajo literature. A glimpse of why many Native Americans still harbor bad feelings toward these schools can be seen in George Hinman’s observation that missionaries would “hunt out the children and bring them to school under escort.” George Warren Hinman, The American Indian and Christian Missions (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1933), 147.