When the Medicine Man Cares for the Doctor

Photo by Graham Ramsay Ellen Rothman

 “Probably he’ll say that somebody witched you,” my nanny, Urisha, told me. “Have you noticed anything of yours that’s missing?”

My nanny’s father is a hathale, a medicine man, and we were discussing a blessing that he was to do for me later that night.

“I’m always pretty careful to check everything in your house for you,” she said, “and I haven’t noticed anything either.” In the Navajo tradition, anyone, including a spirit, has the ability to witch, or wish evil, on someone else. However, the person plotting the evil requires a personal item that belonged to the person in question, such as a lock of hair or discarded nail clipping.

While I have spent time with many traditional healers during my years as a pediatrician on the Navajo Reservation, this would be the first time that I would be the recipient of any type of ceremony. Truly, it was to be a simple blessing and offering. This would not be any of the classic ceremonies, held over many nights with sand paintings, herbal remedies, and ash. After being painted in ash, the healing effect of the ceremony requires four days to take full effect. During that time, the patient cannot bathe so as not to disturb the sacred power.

Iverson, respected in the community for his healing abilities, participates in rituals of the Native American Church. While we met in his hogan, a traditional Navajo building, he also conducts all-night peyote meetings in a teepee, which is borrowed from the Plains Indians’ tradition.

Last month, when I was just entering the third trimester of a previously uneventful second pregnancy, I found myself in premature labor. My obstetrician was in the closest town with a hospital that accepts non-Natives, 150 miles from our home. Evaluation when I arrived showed that my labor had progressed substantially. After more than a week in the hospital, I was finally discharged home to bed rest.

In Navajo tradition, while anyone has the ability to inflict harm, only a select few possess the gift to heal. Even though my tradition of healing and my skills are different from Iverson’s, they carry a similar import. There are strong Navajo taboos about being close to death, sickness, snakebites, and spiders. A pregnant woman has to take special care because her experiences can affect her unborn child. During both of my pregnancies, when there was a code blue in the ER, the Navajo nurses would usher me quickly out of the room as soon as another doctor arrived. 

By virtue of being a doctor in this community, I became involved in the Navajo healing tradition. The Navajo believe in a sense of overall balance that is preserved by the Holy People. Wickedness and Beauty exist in equal parts, and any wickedness taken from one person by definition must surface again within the community. Iverson’s family believes that he suffers from diabetes because, in his work as a healer, he has taken on the disharmony of his patients. Even though I may not heal in the same way that he does, I also intervene in this balance when I treat a Navajo patient.

Iverson performed the blessing after nightfall. Urisha and her mother joined us, as well as my husband, Carlos. Iverson sat on a cushion on the western side of the hogan and carefully opened a worn leather box containing beaded turkey feathers, crystals, and obsidian arrowheads. A fire had burned low in the iron stove in the center of the hogan. At her father’s instruction, Urisha brought a shovelful of wood coals from the fire and placed them in a small pile on the dirt floor in front of her father. He then carefully laid out the four arrowheads on the dirt between the coals and us, pointing them toward the coals to protect us from the spirits. He then laid out four crystals, interspersed with the arrowheads. Sometimes the spirits speak through the crystals and at other times through the embers. Finally, he asked me to explain my problem to the embers.

He dimmed the lights and examined the coals. “I see many spirits standing in the fire,” he said. “I see the face of a coyote looking at you, and a wolf’s head.” He was quiet for a few minutes, examining the glowing coals. “In your work over at the clinic, you helped many people. Maybe you saved lives of people who were supposed to have died, or treated a person with a snakebite. Or maybe somebody witched somebody else, and you intervened. All that transferred to you,” he said. In the dark, he made a Navajo blessing, and then he sprinkled cedar wood shavings on the coals as an offering to the spirits. The coals glowed orange and wafted beautiful white smoke into the air. He used his feathers to direct the smoke at my husband and me to cleanse us.

“It’s scary what you see in the fire,” Iverson said. Finally, as the ash collected over the cooling coals, he saw the face of a smiling woman looking at me. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re going to be all right.” Then we walked quietly back to the house.

—Ellen Rothman, HMS ’98, practices in northern Arizona on the Navajo Reservation.

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