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APA NewslettersSpring 2001
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Gerald
Mohatt & Joseph Eagle Elk. The Price of a Gift: A Lakota
Healer's Story.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. 236 + xiv pp. Illustrations, photographs, notes, index. Reviewed by Anne Waters, J.D., Ph.D. |
This
outstanding new book is about Joe Eagle Elk (1931-1991) and Lakota
ways of healing, about tiospaye (extended family of birth and nurture),
and its foundation, mitakuye oyas'in (all my relatives). This is
the spiritual place from which Joseph Eagle Elk struggles to be
a good relative and fulfill his family duties as a healer to all
generations.
In this book, Gerald Mohatt has put into transcript the tape recordings
of Joe talking about his life; also included are transcripts from
recordings of people Joe has healed. The current of this book flows
through interstices of time and space, as we learn about personal
healing, the life of a healer, and a traditional Ndn relationship
between healer and healed.
Joe enables people to understand the deep meaning of our abilities
to call forth our animal and plant helpers in the process of becoming
grounded in our places of being. This is accomplished via four traditional
powers: heyoka; wanagi, yuwipi, and tahca. Joe was born with a tawacin
(purpose) of being a healer. Until he accepts this role, he wanders
in life, having a recurring dream. This dream is a gift to help
Joe find his way of sincerity and respect among the Lakota, to find
his home, that place to which he (we) keep returning. The life Joe
lives is a life of prayer, sacrifice, healing, and thanking. His
stregth is continually renewed in vision quests and sun dances,
where he remembers himself equal with the two leggeds, four leggeds,
winged ones, and all of plant life. Joe lives the life of Lakota
Oyate (the people), a life of patience, acceptance, understanding,
and spirituality. From the songs of the heart, he knows who he is,
where he comes from, and that he is never alone.
The strength of humor, the medicine of talking (p. 79) in the right
way, with care and respect, the art of listening, and the talent
of vision are the inner tools of Joe's gift of healing. In the book
we follow the imagery of Joe's world as he tells it to Mohatt. From
his difficulties with the law, the years away from home working,
his symbolic encounter with his eventual friend, the eagle, and
finally, meeting his spiritual thunder power helpers, heyoka zik'ala
and heyoka isnala (97).
Intrinsic to understanding Joe's stories of healing is the belief
that medicines (plants, herbs, etc.) are people, are relatives.
Allowing our hurt and pain to leave our bodies means the medicine
has become our friend and that we can work together getting to know
one another, in order to heal our body. In this way we need to create
a good relationship with everything that goes inside our body. To
be healed human persons take on the responsibility of working together
with the medicine people by thinking deeply about medicines, body,
and healing. There is an especially helpful section in this book
when an anonymous person talks about Joe's thunder power and its
use. The person tells us that "Joe compared the creation and
use of electricity with his own power that he received from the
thunder beings (133, 134)."
Once Joe has accepted his place, his gift of human healing, he never
questions his purpose. He learns to incorporate healing powers:
of serious laughter in recognizing that we pick our home, our communities
(171); of family story, bringing the community together through
the ordinariness of being, in past, present, and future as one in
community; of the ceremonial and community time web found in the
symbolic synergy that merges place, meal, prayer, and spirituality;
of reciprocity when empowering people, knowing that his work takes
in the community and goes beyond himself; and of the intellectual
truth of contraries, the ritual clowns that present to us our authenticity
of Being.
It is very difficult to step outside the infrastructure of one metaphysical
system to experience another. Yet Joe Eagle Elk comfortably renders
a way of thinking about an indigenous metaphysical infrastructure,
that the reader can grasp in theory (eg. the syntactical meaning
of "all my relations"); he paints a picture of the praxis
of living the infrastructure. In this way an indeterminate semantics
of language opens up for the reader, and this opening up allows
for an intellectual "closeness" to the infrastucture.
The mediative process of Joe, as healer, bonds patients with a new
metaphysics; and in the communicative process, moves toward the
purpose of self healing. In this way the healer is a teacher, a
guide, and an enabler in the path from dependency upon healer, through
autonomy of self healing, to finally discovering an authenticity
of being (in harmony) among "all my relations."
Joe Eagle Elk live a life of moral dimensions, a life of giving
and receiving, a life of transcending the dominant linear and material
culture of our time. I recommend this book to anyone interested
in a native worldview, and to anyone wanting to explore the meaning
of "indigenous healing."