Shamanic Healing and Ritual Drama

Health and Medicine in Native North American Religious Traditions
ÅKE HULTKRANTZ
In this pioneering work one of the world's leading experts on Native American traditions offers a detailed survey of Native American practices and beliefs regarding health, medicine, and religion. In contrast to the sharp Euro-American division between medicine and religion, Native American medical beliefs and practices can only be assessed, says the author, in their relation to their religious ideas.

Spanning the full length and breadth of Native North American cultural areas, from the Northeast to the Southwest, the Southeast to the Northwest, the book offers "thick" descriptions of traditional Native American medical and religious beliefs and practices, demonstrating that for Native Americans medicine and religion are two sides of the same coin: a coherent and holistic system in which supernaturalism acts as a motor in healing.

ÅKE HULTKRANTZ is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at the University of Stockholm and the author of close to twenty books. For forty years Professor Hultkrantz has studied Native American Indian cultures, particularly their religions. His field research in the 1940s and 50s concentrated on the Plains and Great Basin Indians, but he has also written about such widely separated tribes as the Hare of the Mackenzie Delta, the Ojibway of the Great Lakes, the Stoneys of the Alberta Rockies, the Chumash of southern California, and the Zuni of New Mexico. Professor Hultkrantz describes his life's work as an attempt to put Native Americans on the "religio-historical map" and to present their religious beliefs as expressions of genuine religious needs.



Shamanic Healing and Ritual Drama
Health and Medicine in Native North American Religious Traditions

"Åke Hultkrantz's pioneering work on health, medicine, and religion in Native North American traditions appears against the context of controversies that began half a millennium ago.

"Five hundred years after Christopher Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic, the heirs of the Europeans ... who came from one hemisphere were still debating how to think about the descendants of the people who were already living on the two continents … For most of the five hundred years of contact between the peoples, those of European descent paid little positive regard to the 'health, medicine, and religion' of the natives …

"What was most consistently overlooked is precisely the point of Hultkrantz's book:   that health, medicine, and religion taken together made up a coherent and credible system. It enabled Native Americans to live in a relationship to the environment in a way that did not lead to exploitation or exhaustion of that natural setting. This system demanded that Native American healers draw resources from the natural elements of that ecology--herbs and the like--while they offered solace and aid also in the context of the seasons, the beauty of the landscape, the contact with the 'spirits' that inhabited that natural order …

"The reader, then, does well to be prepared for visits to Ojibway and Tlingit people, to Shoshoni and Navajo; to the ways of the shaman and the keepers of shaking tents, sweat lodges, and holyways… No one in the world could guide so effectively as Åke Hultkrantz. The rest of the book is his, and that of the Native Americans he knows and describes so well."

--From the Foreword by Martin E. Marty

Contents
Foreword by Martin E. Marty   ix
 
Preface   xv
 
Introduction     1
 
Map of Indian Tribes of North America     6
 
1. THE CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS SETTNG     9
 
2. TRADITIONAL MEDICINE IN THE NORTHEAST    23
  The Care of the Sick: A Seventeenth-Century Document    25
  Health, Well-being, and the Causes of Disease    28
  Doctors and Diviners    33
  The Shaking Tent Performance    37
  Midewiwin as a Doctors' Organization    39
 
3. TRADITIONAL MEDICINE ON THE NORTHWEST COAST    43
  Health, Good Living, and Passages of Life among the Tlingit    47
  The Nature of Disease    52
  The Tlingit Shaman and His Healing Practices    54
  The Healed Healer among the Coast Salish    61
  The Spirit Canoe Curing Ceremony    65
 
4. TRADITIONAL MEDICINE ON THE PLAINS    71
  The Eastern Shoshoni    72
  Shoshoni Passages of Life    74
  Shoshoni Ideas of Health and Well-being    78
  Causes of Disease    80
  The Shoshoni Medicine Man    83
  Individual and Collective Aspects of Curing    87
  Methods of Professional Curing    89
  Shoshoni Nonprofessional Folk Medicine    94
  Curing among the Arapaho    95
  The Arapaho Spirit Lodge    96
  The Pawnee: The Blessing of the Animal Lodges   101
 
5. TRADITIONAL MEDICINE IN THE SOUTHEAST   105
  The Mythical Introduction of Diseases   107
  The Immediate Causes of Disease   108
  The Cherokee Doctor   109
  The Treatment of Diseases   111
 
6. TRADITIONAL MEDICINE IN THE SOUTHWEST   113
  The Zuni Religious System   115
  Collectivistic Healing among the Zuni: The Medicine Societies   117
  Zuni Ways of Curing   121
  Zuni Symbolism of Ritual Curing   123
  The Navajo World   125
  Navajo Themes of Morality, Philosophy, and Health   128
  Cosmological Healing among the Navajo   130
  The Blessingway Ceremony   131
  The Holyway Ceremonies   133
  The Evilway Ceremonies   135
  The Pima and Papago of the Southwestern Deserts   136
  Different Diseases for Native Americans and Whites   138
 
7. MEDICINE IN NEW RELIGIONS   141
  Peyote Curing   142
  The Sweat Lodge Movement   146
 
8. TRANSCULTURAL MEDICAL RELATIONS:
THE INTERACTION BETWEEN NATIVE AND
EUROAMERICAN CURING METHODS		   149
  Indian Criticism and Tolerance of Euroamerican Medicine   151
  The Expansion of Native American Medicine into White Society   155
 
CONCLUSIONS   157
  A Field of Difficulties   157
  The Concepts and Practices of Native Medicine   158
  The General Setting of Medical Beliefs and Practices   164
 
Notes   169
 
Bibliographical Notes   175
 
Bibliography   179
 
Index   187


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