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GT1 | GT2 | GT3 | GT4 | GT5 | GT6 | GT7 Grupo de Trabalho 1Gender and Healing in Navajo Society Thomas J. Csordas [1] Case
Western Reserve University
The
Navajo are among the three largest indigenous tribes in North America
(the Cherokee and Lakota or Sioux are the others), and as a people possess
a land and natural resource base larger than that of any other tribe.
When one poses the question of the relation among gender, race, and class
in contemporary Navajo society, a complicated picture appears from the
outset.
With respect to class, it can be asserted without controversy that
the Navajo are poor. Their class position is not that of a proletariat
or an excess labor force; seen from one standpoint they are part of a
rural underclass in the form of an ethnic enclave, and from another they
are an impoverished fourth world nation dependent on the largesse of the
dominant United States federal government. Tourism, although important
to the Navajo economy, is hardly adequate to affect the class position
of the people as a whole. Gambling in tribal casinos of the kind popular
with some tribes has not yet been legalized but is a lively topic of political
debate at the present moment, with perceived cultural and spiritual as
well as economic consequences. Natural resources such as coal and uranium
have provided income, though as made evident in a recent lawsuit by the
tribe again the U.S. government and coal companies the royalties from
such extractive industries have been for years woefully smaller than is
appropriate, and certainly not enough to make the Navajo a wealthy nation.
Nevertheless, it is also the case that within Navajo society there are
those who are clearly more wealthy than others; there is a small but highly
influential professional and bureaucratic sector particularly in the domains
of government and health care. Middle
class values as promulgated in mainstream North American society have
penetrated Navajo society, evidenced by the recent emergence as a role
model of a young man who has become the first Navajo to be on, and successful
in, the PGA tour for professional golfers.
Race is a powerful symbol among Navajos, and it is likely that
virtually any Navajo would acknowledged having experienced racism in a
direct way. Being an “Indian”
is almost certainly experienced as a matter of race rather than of ethnicity.
The sites of racism are occasionally encounters with “white” health care
professionals in government operated health care facilities on the reservation
or with non-Navajo teachers, government officials, or businesspeople.
Navajos report being unduly singled out and stopped by police for traffic
violations when driving off the reservation. Racism irrupts most vividly,
though, in encounters in the “border towns” that surround the reservation,
where Navajos feel demeaned and exploited by whites, Mexicans, and recently
Arabs who have stepped into ownership of businesses to the great resentment
of Navajos who feel that their turn at success has been preempted by yet
another group, this time of foreigners.
The lingering devastation of health by years of exposure of Navajo
miners to dangerous levels of uranium in mines, exposure of their wives
to the same uranium introduced into their laundries on the miners’ clothes,
and exposure of their children to exposed piles of uranium tailings which
appeared at first as inviting places to play without benefit of precaution
or explanation of danger is experienced as an extreme example of racist
disregard. Likewise, the introduction of alcohol from white culture is
regarded as unnatural, destructive, and ultimately racist, virtually a
form of collective poisoning. Thus
poisoned by uranium and by alcohol, Navajos recently experienced additional
humiliation when, during the hanta virus outbreak of 1993, they were descended
upon by national and international media with little respect for their
privacy, and written about is such a way that they felt virtually blamed,
as “dirty Indians,” for bringing the illness upon themselves (see Csordas
1999). At the same time, however, racism by Navajos against others is
not entirely alien. This
does not simply take the form of a reverse hated of whites, but Navajos
also occasionally express disregard for blacks, as was evident in the
tension surrounding the reign of a recent winner of the Miss Navajo Nation
pageant one of whose parents was Navajo and the other African-American.
The situation is no less complex with respect to gender. Navajo
society was traditionally both matrilineal and matrilocal, with women
able to own property and exercise significant authority within the family.
Navajos express a strong spiritual connection to “Mother Earth.” In myth
the Navajo are said to have originated from Asdzaan Nadleehi, or
Changing Woman, who remains highly venerated today. In contemporary society
women are often the stable centers of extended families. The Navajo word
shim1, or mother, has powerful associations of warmth and nurturance
that encompass the senses of one’s birth mother, Changing Woman, and Mother
Earth. Men may also be strong presences in families, and there is a clear
articulation of the importance of Father Sky as a complement to Mother
Earth, but men are relatively more likely to be absent from the home for
extended periods to engage in wage work, or indisposed because of alcohol
abuse. With relatively little stigma attached to divorce, serial monogamy
is not uncommon. Domestic violence, especially associated with alcohol
abuse, is widely reported, and father/daughter incest (especially by step-fathers)
is a longstanding concern. Overall, gender relations are underpinned by
a mythic charter for the “battle of the sexes:” the story is of a time
when men and women tried to prove they could live without one another
by segregating themselves on opposite sides of a river, with abominable
consequences including the begetting of monstrous offspring as a result
of some of the practices resorted to during the ultimately unsuccessful
experiment. Ceremonial knowledge and practice are largely male prerogatives. Though women are not expressly excluded, they are often considered
a bit out of their place when inquiring about such matters, and medicine
women often begin their careers as apprentices to an immediate male relative,
particularly when there is no male apprentice on the horizon.
Every statement I have made thus far could be elaborated and qualified
at considerable length, and the scenarios of interaction among race, class,
and gender could be spun out indefinitely - to say nothing of the risks
of accepting these three categories without either careful definition
of conceptual critique. What I propose in this paper is far more modest,
a mapping of only a corner of the terrain indicated in the preceding paragraphs.
In question is the role, and the experience, of women as ceremonial
practitioners in contemporary Navajo society. I base the discussion on
seven years of research conducted by myself and a team of Navajo and non-Navajo
researchers working under my supervision. Our purpose has been to understand
the experience of therapeutic process in Navajo religious healing, and
it is a sine qua non of navajo culture that healing is the goal of virtually
all Navajo ceremonial practice other than that concerned with life cycle
transitions (birth, puberty, marriage, and death).
To examine gender in this domain carries its own complexities,
for the broad designation of “ceremonial practitioner” includes adepts
of three intimately coexisting religious traditions. These include not
only traditional Navajo religion with its chants and sandpaintings, but
also the Native American Church with its sacramental use of hallucinogenic
peyote as adopted by Navajos from Plains Indian tribes, and Navajo Christian
faith healing as practiced in several denominational variants. It is also
an undertaking that offers a highly specific view of gender among Navajos:
women are unique among healers because they are women; and they are unique
among other women because they are healers. In this respect our principle
is that a general cultural situation can well be understood by a close
look at exceptional cases within that situation.
It is well known that women are in the minority among Navajo ceremonial
practitioners, and that they tend to concentrate in the roles of herbalist
and diagnostician. The impressive
but inconsistent[2]
Navajo Ceremonial Practitioners’ Directory dating from 1981 (which includes
herbalists, Traditional chanters, and Native American Church ceremonialists,
but not Navajo Christian healers) allows us to add a degree of specificity.
Based on the summary of the directory presented by Frisbie and
Tso (1993) it can be shown that, overall, 21.5% of Navajo ceremonialists
were women. Among those whose
primary specialization was divination, 68% were women, and among those
whose primary specialization was herbalism 66% were women. On the other
hand, among Blessingway chanters, only 6% were women, and among Native
American Church specialists only 8.5% were women.
The data presented by Frisbie and Tso also allow for a regional
breakdown within Navajoland of the proportion of women with different
types of ceremonial knowledge that carry varying amounts of prestige (Table
1). Uniformly across the
geographical regions of the reservation, the representation of women declines
as the level of ritual specialization and prestige increases.
Handtrembling (nidilniihi) is perhaps the most frequently
sought form of Navajo diagnosis or divination, but while diagnosticians
are gatekeeper who direct patients toward major healing ceremonies, they
generally carry less prestige than chanters. Blessingway is the central
and most frequently performed of Navajo ceremonies, but it is also the
one that chanters often begin with before moving on to more specialized
and advanced rituals. Regionally, it is worthy of note that among chanters
women are represented in the highest proportion in the eastern area of
the reservation (Crownpoint) which is regarded as relatively more acculturated,
or at least much more thoroughly exposed to, influences from the dominant
Anglo-American culture; by the same token, the lowest proportion of women
chanters is reported in the western region (Tuba City) which is typically
regarded as most “traditional” in orientation.
(The assumption underlying this observation is that Anglo-American
culture is relatively more open to women in positions of public power
and influence than is traditional Navajo culture.)
Table
1. Proportions of Women Navajo Ceremonialists Source:
Frisbie amd Tso 1993
Frisbie reports being told by one of its administrators that the
Rough Rock Demonstration School’s Mental Health Training Program for Medicine
Men and Women, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health from
1969 to 1983, had “14 or 15" women among its 104 graduates during
this period (1992: 496). Our own work beginning a decade later in 1993
was conducted among Christians and Native American Church practitioners
as well as among adherents to Navajo traditional religion. Although healers
were recruited primarily from the personal networks of Navajo members
of our project staff, the reservation wide character of the work, and
the use of four separate ethnographic teams that tended to cancel one
another’s recruitment biases, lend credence to the suggestion that this
group of healers is to at least some degree representative.
Indeed, the overall proportions of women healers across all three
religious categories corresponds closely to those cited by Frisbie as
having completed the Traditional training at Rough Rock: during the period
since 1993 we worked with a total of 112 healers (thirty-eight from the
Native American Church, thirty-nine Traditionalists, and thirty-six from
various forms of Christianity), 15 of whom were women. Women accounted
for 5% of Native American Church healers, 12% of Traditional Navajo healers
(including both Blessingway chanters and chanters of other ceremonies,
but excluding diagnosticians numbering five of the total, with three of
these five being women), and 16% of Navajo Christian healers.
In this preliminary paper I will go no further than to present
brief sketches of three women, one representing each religious healing
tradition, from among the fifteen with whom we worked. I make no claim
that their experience is typical, but rather that their experience is
likely to be distinct from their male counterparts in a variety of ways,
and I will attempt to highlight precisely these distinctions.
To begin, we can note a prominent difference in marital status
(Table 2). Whereas 83.3%
of the males were married or living with a partner, only 53.3% of female
healers were married; 20% were single, 13.3% widowed, and another 13.3%
divorced.
Chi-Square
Tests
Table
2. Marital status of Male and Female Navajo Healers Source:
Navajo Healing Project This
is significant even given the small number of people involved.
It is a social fact that appears to be in accord with the observation
that, for women, marriage and its responsibilities are perceived to be
in conflict with the demands of being a healer; stated otherwise, the
cultural expectation is that women should be married instead of becoming
healers, and to a certain extent the choice of being a healer is a choice
to remain unmarried. For men, in contrast, being married is a sign of
the stability and maturity expected of a healer, and the role of healer’s
wife is often one not only of active support but also of considerable
influence both ceremonially and socially.
What
a Women’s Libber He Made Out of Me The
Traditional Navajo chanter, to whom I will refer as Desbah, is unique
even among women healers in her relative youthfulness: while eleven of
the fifteen women we encountered were over the age of fifty, she was in
her early forties. Despite her age, she was, she averred, one of only
two women on the Navajo reservation capable of performing a ceremony in
its full nine night version (many Navajo healing rituals are performed
in one, two, or five night versions which lack the elaboration of many
ceremonial details). She is among five of the seven Traditional
women healers we interviewed who is unmarried (in her case never married)
because she “didn’t like to be controlled” and “wanted more independence,”
though she has had boyfriends. Yet in an interesting affirmation
of the traditional pattern she not only inherited her practice from a
great uncle, but that uncle’s wife remains as her principle assistant.
In other words, the elder woman continues in her accustomed role of “medicine
man’s wife,” though her husband’s place in the practice has been taken
by her younger kinswoman. Desbah is relatively well educated, having
completed slightly more than two years of college and having experience
as a mental health consultant at the University of New Mexico. Moreover,
her interviews were more extensive, articulate, and reflective than any
other healer, male or female, with whom we worked. She clearly understood
the experiential focus of our work, commenting that our interest in healing
was not so much in the details of how she performed her ceremonies, but
in “things like states of mind.” Finally, more than most Traditional chanters,
she was quite comfortable both with participating in peyote meetings of
the Native American Church, and with integrating use of the hallucinogenic
peyote into her own practice. Such an integration of religious forms is
a matter of some debate and controversy, with those giving primary allegiance
to the NAC often being more willing to embrace Traditional ceremonies
than Traditionalists are to embrace NAC prayer meetings.
Desbah was born the middle child of eleven siblings, at least two of whom
attended college before her. She is comfortably bilingual in Navajo and
English. She attended a Catholic highschool till her junior year, when
her parents were divorced and she transferred to a public school on the
reservation where there was no tuition. Following graduation she earned
an associate’s degree in college, then worked in several tribal government
jobs. At one point, consistent with her comfort with challenging gender
roles, she enrolled in a course in auto mechanics, but eventually chose
instead to begin learning the ceremony she now practices. Desbah was raised
in the Traditional Navajo religion, saying of the elders that “I always
thought that they had some kind of power. They had a way to, even by just
speaking a word of advice or something, to heal or correct something.”
She remembered her mother relying on a medicine man, and being healed
of a bad headache by a medicine man when she was quite young. She began
experimenting with peyote in junior high school, but after becoming ill
as a result of using it with friends she was taught that it is a ceremony,
and has used it since then in a religiously appropriate manner. She began
attending Traditional ceremonies regularly in her early twenties because
...it appealed to
me... made sense to me, so I would follow different medicine men. They
would be doing it and I would be there. And then slowly I got drawn into
it. Then as it grew, about twenty years ago, that’s when I actually started
following it as an apprentice. And it never dawned on me that I was going
to sing [or]do actual ceremonies. It just happened. At
one point during this time she was part of a group of ceremonial dancers
when a significant even occurred: ...we did our part
of the ceremony, and somewhere along the way, I felt overwhelmed with
what was going on. And it affected me in a way where I felt like I was
depressed. And there was a longing in my thinking, a certain longing in
my life that I wasn’t quite able to grasp. I had my mother and my brothers
and sisters there, but thee was something that wasn’t in my life. I wasn’t
sure what the feeling was. All I knew is a felt a little depressed. And
pretty soon it started bothering me to a ppoint where I was not really
able to sleep and not really able to eat. So there’s a certain breakdown,
emotionally. A
Traditional diagnostician told her via the method of handtrembling that
a spirit had entered her at the ceremony that needed to be expelled. She
was intimadated at approaching a prominent chanter about this for fear
of being reprimanded, but she was told that it’s “something that happens.”
Apparently she had been affected by the spirit of the ceremony itself
in a way that indicated a potential calling to the healer, for after expelling
the spirit he said, “You might think about learning it in a little more
depth, maybe. There’s really no harm in knowing some of these things,
because it will eventually make you a little wiser, and eventually make
you think a little deeper and make you think a little more about a lot
of the things that are going to be taking place in this world, in your
life. So, it will add more meaning to your life.” In fact, she discovered
that this healer, whom she had barely known, was her uncle. It still took
her about a year before she decided she would begin attending ceremonies
more seriously, and during this period her uncle told her “four or five
times” that “This ceremony itself has all the luxuries that you are probably
wanting throughout your lifetime - what you are going to accomplish, and
what you’re going to have to live comfortably. It has all the luxuries,
plus knowledge and some little bit of wisdom. And you get to travel all
over the reservation, too.” In this way he attempted to persuade her that
the ceremony was a self-sufficient way of life - a philosophy, a spirituality,
and a way of making a comfortable living.
Again she suffered an emotional breakdown, in which she became so depressed
that “My foreseeable future, my capacity to think of my life span was
only two weeks more, that’s how mentally ill I got.” She was again diagnosed
by a handtrembler who told her that “Lightningway was bothering me.” She
searched for a chanter to perform that ceremony, and eventually ended
up again with her uncle. She then asked him to administer some peyote
to her during the ceremony - unusual since most Navajos say the two forms
of religion should not be directly mixed, but her uncle was among those
who accepted peyote when it first came to Navajoland in the 1930s. She
says: [Peyote] knew everything
that was going on. Somehow it just said, the ceremony itself was [saying]
“I’m your mother, I’m your father, I’m your sister, I’m your brother,
I’m your best friend. You’re in good hands, don’t worry about it”... this
ceremony comes in a clan form, and I’m of the Red House clan, and this
ceremony takes care of itself... my uncle was singing the song, and the
song just kind of came and “Here it is, get on!” It was like one of the
sandpaintings that I do, the one that resembles the lightning with the
arrowhead on it. I just got on that, and zoom, all over the place, way
out there, beyond comprehension, all the way over the whole universe.
Soon as the song was over I was back,, and then I already knew there was
no place in this world that I was going to find anything to be able to
do just being a normal person. Then my uncle knew it, too, he just saw
it, too. He said “Quit your job, get rid of your vehicles, this ceremony
has everything, there is not anything that you would want that’s not in
there, all you have to do is ask.” The
visionary experience included a moment in which the Navajo holy Beings
appeared and identified themselves to her. They also acknowledged that
they knew her by descent, and told her they were placing her on a particular
path. She felt that this was a critical crossroad in her life, and that
“my being alive, my existing today, depended on that very decision I made
that day.” From that point she had a strong thirst for knowledge, for
stability, and for a clear state of mind. Although she had wanted to go
back to school for further education, she realized she had no need for
it. She gradually learned more and more, till finally she was the one
doing most of the singing in ceremonies while her elderly uncle slept.
When he became ill, he was her first patient as a presiding chanter, and
from that point she continued taking up his practice.
Initially her relatives were skeptical, wondering why with a good education
and a good job she would want to start all over with a new career as healer.
Eventually, she reports, her siblings came to treat her with respect and
seek her advice, recognizing her status as a “medicine lady”; none of
these siblings is a ceremonialist, though one of her brothers-in-law is
a Native American Church healer, or “road man.” When we asked if she felt
if people act differently toward her than toward others, she responded
affirmatively, attributing the difference to her role as a medicine person
who was younger than most - not to her gender. Her sense of calling is
strong, and she reports being able to see and hear things others can’t,
to have revelatory dreams about her patients, and to be able to tell if
someone is ill or distressed. “It’s a gift,” she says, “Not something
that was handed down through teaching. I think I was selected for the
gift.”
Desbah made the following response to the question of why there are so
few female chanters: Maybe because they’re
not as determined as I am. It’s harder for a female person to get the
corporate jobs, or a real high range job, maybe their colleagues are male,
and maybe [the idea that] it’s a man’s world kind of rubbed off on them.
And while they were growing up, maybe they were taught , the only way
a female should make a good life is to find a good man, and find a good
home and maybe stay home. And have kids, you know... So far, I haven’t
seen a place where a male medicine man would come up to me and say “What
you’re doing is wrong, you shouldn’t be doing it because you’re a woman.”
I haven’t seen that. Because most of the people that do come and help
me [i.e., assist in her ceremonies] are medicine men anyway, and I guess
they are in position where they say, “It’s real easy for her to learn,
and now we’re wondering why our kids can’t learn.” These
men, well respected themselves, ask her to perform ceremonies on their
children so as to instill in them a sense “somewhere in the back of their
mind, that this ceremony is a way of life that’s for real and for keeps.”
In addition to being regarded as a good example for young people, she
acknowledges that not only do many man not have the knowledge that she
does, but that her mentor is himself regarded as a kind of “chief”’- and
hence an influential senior male sponsor for her. Nevertheless, this mentor
himself is not exactly an enlightened feminist, as evident in the following
extract from our interviews: Desbah: H has a theory
that since time began, back in the old days, he said the woman’s role
is just like from here on, he said the woman only meets the man’s equal
from the hip on down. That means you’re always the underdog. Interviewer: Humm.
What do you think about that? Desbah: The hell with
it (laughs). I think that’s one of the main reasons why I became a medicine
lady - to kick around his theory. See what a Womens’ Libber he made out
of me (laughs). See, it’s not a theory that he has, it’s just something
that has been told to him - from his ancestors. And he said that, he’s
always saying that the males are always supposed to be the dominant figure
in the household. But then the way I see it is that he’s saying it’s okay
to be abusive. Physically and mentally. And that’s why I say, the hell
with it.
In her practice Desbah recognizes men and women to be fundamentally the
same in that they are human, but fundamentally different with respect
to gender. In our interviews, this observation leads not to the discussion
of psychological differences between men and women, but to that of sexual
appropriateness: “Now if I was doing a ceremony and a man was physically
handicapped and he couldn’t pull down his pants, and say he lost his pants,
I wouldn’t be the one standing there laughing. Because I would be the
one that would have to understand and say, ‘Cover it up.’ Maybe the peer
group would be laughing. And the same with a lady.” She mentions instances
she has heard of in which a male medicine person has “decided to carry
on, maybe makes passes at the patient, and then, you know, touches her
in a way that wasn’t called for.” Such an action is a serious violation
that requires correction through performance of a major ceremony for the
patient - and Desbah reports having had to deal with three such cases
herself. The healer must also atone ceremonially for such a mistake,
whether it was made through negligence, ignorance or intent to harm the
patient. Otherwise the consequences of divine retribution may be severe:
“If you’ve done something wrong like that, then you better pretty well
answer to the Beings for it. If you don’t - we’ve lost a lot of medicine
men before they reached old age.”
Occasionally an impropriety takes the form of a sexual dare that doesn’t
quite cross the line between sexual teasing and actual violation. For
example, the man will say “I dare you to touch my leg up this far.”
In one recent case a medicine man reportedly approached a male patient
and said “Since I’m the one doctoring on you, is your wife available?”
This request does not assert but tentatively proposes a privilege to sexual
favors that can be declined if the patient is secure enough to do so.
In this case resulted in a certain amount of social approbation and potential
for embarrassment for the chanter, as the story of what he tried to do
is repeated through the community and even to “outsider” ethnographic
interviewers. For Desbah, appropriate relations between the genders is
based on recognition that “You’re the doctor, and otherwise you’re a human
being, too. You have to use your own discretion right there. If you feel
that you’re going to be intimidated somehow, then you have your paraphernalia
right there. You use your paraphernalia, not your physical being.” In
this sense the ritual objects or paraphernalia used by the medicine person
form a buffer of direct bodily contact between patient and healer, both
formalizing and sacralizing their interaction.
An additional insight into the relation of gender and status (if not class)
can be gained by comparing two cases in which Desbah performed full scale
nine-night ceremonies for female patients. In the first case the patients
were two sisters (having two patients is typical in lengthy ceremonies
that require substantial resources) whose late father had been a well
known Traditional chanter of the same ceremony Desbah performs. Both women
were in turn married to medicine men, one of whom had been their father’s
apprentice. During the ceremony they were treated for a variety
of potentially dangerous exposures: to a sheep bitten by a snake, to lightning,
to the power of their father’s ceremony (numerous time since they were
conceived), and to a rainbow. However, neither was explicitly ill, and
the primary purpose of the ceremony was a gendered and subtly psychological
one. I quote Desbah’s explanation at length: They found out that
during the course of the ceremony, while they are helping their husbands
out, doing sandpaintings or else doing certain other things, they said
they lacked the ability to comprehend what their husbands were doing.
Or else it [felt like] something real tedious that they couldn’t be doing.
I guess it’s an honor to be married to a medicine person, but then at
the same time, it has its problems, too. So they said, “We want to be
able to fully comprehend and fully be able, physically, to do what our
husbands are doing and also be able to stand right next to them, and be
able to help them out fully... we’d like to understand how this ceremony
gets to be a place where it is a commitment, and it’s not just a have-to
thing.” You get initiated into it. And the only way you can get initiated
into it is to find somebody like myself. I guess being a female medicine
woman pays off there. Whereas I guess the men would always say that the
ceremony is for the men, and it’s a man’s job to do this. But it helps
them in a place where it says, “Look, even though you’re a female, it’s
okay for you to do something like this. So there’s nothing to be afraid
of, because the Gods and the Beings, the Spiritual Beings, they call for
a man and a woman, a male and a female, both...” And [at the end]
they were thankful, you know, they were crying, they were thankful and
they said, “We never knew that there was something to [this], something
that we had all our lives, anyway. This certain ceremony. We never knew
it was that powerful until you did it for us.” Well, I’m glad they used
my ceremony. I’m glad that they used my better judgment. I mean, they’re
people of a certain status, you know? Their husbands are medicine people.
And they could easily seek the services of somebody else, like maybe an
older gentleman that does the same type of ceremony, but the decided to
go with me. They decided to use my style of ceremony, because they came
right up to me and said, “We know where you ceremony is coming from. And
we know where your ceremony is going. It’s going to go a long ways. And
then because at the same time, you don’t do the type of things the other
medicine men do, like drink and maybe be promiscuous, and stuff like that.” This
ceremony was highly successful and dignified in nature, with both patients
and healer expressing both clear motives and acknowledging explicit and
deeply meaningful effects, and mutually validating their roles as women
in relation to ceremonial practice.
In the second case, the success of the ceremony was in question from the
beginning, when one of the two patients dropped out due to a death in
the family. The other patient insisted the ceremony go on because she
had been counting on it, but Desbah warned her that once these things
are set in motion they must continue, and she had better be prepared with
sufficient material resources and social support from kin. However, Desbah
eventually realized that the patient did not have the correct attitude,
and did not truly understand either the seriousness or the magnitude of
the event. She said that the patient and her boyfriend appeared to be
treating it like the “Song and Dance” social events they frequented where
provisions are made somewhat casually, and not like a religious ceremony
where everything must be planned in advance and well in order. Nevertheless,
Desbah decided to go ahead with the ceremony “because she said she was
sick... I couldn’t back out of it, so we went in there. And we ended up
buying our own firewood... [and] we were underfed.” When it became
clear during the ceremony that there were not in fact sufficient resources,
the boyfriend made a public announcement over the local radio station
asking for support, a gauche and inappropriate move that infuriated Desbah:
And then I said, “Look,
you two, this is horrible. Right during the ceremony, this is not done...”
I was slowly boiling over. And... the people that we knew that [were there],
they were laughing right at us, like, “How are you dealing with it? What’s
going on, what are you doing these days,” and they come right at me, “You
mean, you actually so ceremonies like this? I mean, you’re playing around,
girl!” I said, “I know this is not your regular type of - these are people
that go to flea markets [note - flea markets are a ubiquitous feature
of reservation life] and sell stuff to people. And that’s their way of
life. And for all we know, what the people have brought and stuff like
that, maybe next week after the ceremony is all done, they’ll be at the
flea market selling that coffee.” And that’s exactly what they did. They
sold those sheep. I was mad then. Moreover,
after the ceremony she and her assistant found someone loading their bedding
and the remainder of the wood into a truck and had to stop them.
These events prompted Desbah to comment that “This is a ceremony where,
it seems like, it wasn’t for the purpose of trying to get well. It was
for the purpose of somebody gaining some other things on the side.” An
additional problem was that the patient made it clear that she wanted
the prayers to “go in the direction” of moving her boyfriend, with whom
she had been living for at least five years, toward committing to a married
relationship and having his relatives accept her as a wife. Desbah felt
pressured and embarrassed by this demand, since the couple was considerably
older than she, and It seems like we were
fooling around with their lives... because it seems like I was in a position
where I said it was okay to cohabitate, for a person that old to indulge
in something only teenagers could do (laughs)... Everybody already has
grandkids and everything, but here’s a situation where he doesn’t want
his family involved with her because they’re not accepting her as their
in-law or something like that, and she doesn’t want her family involved
with him because he’s a cheapskate... I have never run into a problem
where I am to correct an old man and an old lady, and tell them to make
the things right so that they can be effective. Thus
the patient and her boyfriend had neither the material resources nor social
competence to bring off the event; but what is more, they did not have
a serious or sincere ritual attitude, asking something less than appropriate
of the ceremony and not being in accord about their motives. To sum it
up in Desbah’s words, they were “playing around with my ceremony,” and
making her feel that she was “fooling around with their lives.” To put
the best face on a bad situation, however, the patient did claim afterwards
that she felt better, and Desbah took pride in the fact that despite being
“backed into a corner,” she had made sure that from a social standpoint
the patient had received “her money’s worth,” and from a ceremonial standpoint
she had done her best “to make it complete for her.” The contrast in these cases is not merely that between status groups - distinguished ceremonialists as opposed to uncouth lay people - the male partner in the second situation is himself a diagnostician and an aspiring chanter. More precisely, there is a double contrast in what appears as a kind of class habitus. The first contrast appears at the level of social standing, between the dignity that characterizes “people of a certain status” and the lack of self-respect that characterizes “people that go to flea markets and sell stuff to people.” The second contrast appears in modes of male-female relationship, between on the one hand women who seek a professional intimacy with their husbands in the context of a generations-old ceremonial commitment now perpetuated, in a way that powerfully reflects the matrilocal principle of Navajo tradition, in the adoption by the men of their father-in-law’s practices, and on the other hand a woman who struggles in vain to win the commitment of a man whose relatives have never accepted her and who cannot quite make it as a medicine man, the two together exhibiting not only the specific inability to successfully carry off a ceremony, but in general a crazy incompetence in living. These contrasts are played out in the first instance as a mutual validation of women - healer and healers’ wives - and in the second instance as a disaster that threatens to undermine the female healer’s reputation but which she must carry through despite numerous affronts.
God
Does Favor Men Nora,
our Christian healer, is in her mid-fifties, with five grown children.
Two grandchildren live with her and her husband, to whom she has been
married for over thirty years. She is a full time teacher studying part
time for a Ph.D. degree, and is fluently bilingual in Navajo and English.
Nora and her husband are also skilled and highly successful silversmiths,
making jewelry in the distinctive Navajo style. She was raised in the
Traditional religion; indeed her grandfather was a distinguished chanter
and her father a Blessingway singer. Her mother died when she was
two years old, and by tradition she and her baby brother went to live
with her grandmother, where she was physically and psychologically abused.
This included being called such insulting names as “devil’s daughter,”
“cruelty’s daughter,” and “coyote’s daughter,” and being told she “killed
her mother” by constant crying which in Navajo thought can bring witchcraft
on the family. By age six she was able to return to live with her father,
but by the time she was seventeen he, too, died. Then she felt truly
abandoned: “And then from there, I’m DANG! I just went crazy. [Loud banging
on table; interviewer laughs] I said, ‘Okay, guys.’ I said to my mother,
‘You left me when I was a baby.’ My dad, ‘You left me just when I needed
you the most. So what? I’ll do anything I want to.’ But fortunately, I
never did anything so bad that... [laughter] I never smoked, I never drank...”
Though her early education was (not atypically) marked by several episodes
of running away from school, by her early teens she settled in and completed
an education that led her ultimately to a teaching job that she had held
for twenty-six years at the time of her participation in our study. She
was deeply respected and sought out for advice, and addressed as “shim1”
(mother) by students and colleagues alike. Nora is thus a mature
person with a long and stable marriage, a long and stable job, highly
skilled in the respected craft of silver smithing, not only a successful
teacher but an innovator in Navajo language curriculum development - and
a prominent member of her Pentecostal church.
Nora was converted to Christianity through the process of healing. Her
beloved husband contracted cancer. He underwent two major surgeries and
was in the hospital for chemotherapy four days of every week. She says We were just living
like that, and we began to sink. When you’re sick, you’ll do anything,
you’ll go anywhere to get healed, and that’s how we happened to go into
church. But we didn’t stay in church the first time we went in. We ran
out three times. The fourth time, we stayed [note that the number four
is often sacred in American Indian myth and ritual]... and I think it
was the word of God that got to me. [But] I said, “Wait a minute. Before
I really take hold of it, I want to settle it with you.” I said [to God],
“I want my husband back. I want my husband healed. Make yourself real
to me. I will walk, I will talk, I will live the very essence of what
you’re telling me. That God is God.” I guess I let my faith loose. And
I gave my mind, my whole being to God, and I came out a different person.
And my husband was healed instantly... They named the cancer by name,
and they commanded the cancer to leave his victim now because he is the
property of God.. I didn’t see the cancer leave, but I felt it. Because
my husband and I, we have been so close... They were praying for my husband
and I knew. I knew that I knew - the call it the touch of God. And I thought,
Understood it, that touch of God, because I felt it myself. And I said,
“God, is this what it is to be one in a husband and a wife?” I said, “You
touch him, and you touch me, too. Let it be that way, when you touch him
in any way. Anything that touches him, it touches me.” And that’s why
I believe in prayer so much... I pray for people that have marriage problems.
I pray for people that have other ailments, illness, name it. And I do
believe it very much. This
event had occurred twenty-two years earlier, and Nora and her husband
had remained loyal members and leaders in the church ever since, attending
services typically three times per week. Prominent in this narrative are
Nora’s assertiveness in making deals with God, the personal basis for
her willingness to embrace healing prayer, and her conception of a gender
ideal embodied in the relation between man and wife.
Nora noted that much of her healing prayer has to do with troubled marriages,
and that “most of the time, the problem is there because we really believe
as Christians that husbands are anointed by God to take care of his family.
He has to make a choice, and this is really biblical. If I get ahead of
my husband, and start making a big decision on my own, I’m going to get
in trouble. I may not see it, but it’s going to manifest itself down the
road somewhere. I’m not going to be happy with my husband. He’s not going
to be happy with me until I come back and respect my husband as a man
of the family. He rules his house.... And the Bible calls the wife, a
worthy woman. You have to be worthy of your husband and your children.
In other words, your husband is going to call you a blessed woman. A blessed
mother of my children. And the children are going to call you a blessed
mother. That is happening in most every, even in Christian homes.” When
we asked Nora about the meaning for her of the important Navajo word shim1
(mother), she said, “I think a [real] mother is a mother that makes a
stand by her family... a mother is somebody that stays home for her kids.”
Although this has the overall tone of conservative Christianity, as is
the case with many Navajo Christian ideas the traditional notion remains
subtly in the background. This is the case in a story Nora told of exhorting
the mother of a sick child to pray for healing with the words “You are
the mother, you are the key.” Man also has greater spiritual power than woman. Nora attested to this in referring to a male healer in her congregation who is “more powerful. Because, it could be that he’s a man. And God does favor men. Well, not only does he favor, but he’s just anointed them as the head of the family.” The same male healer affirmed this notion in accounting that Nora requested prayers for a health problem of her own based on her knowledge of “the power and prayer of a man, of a male - the male is very powerful, and God has planned it this way, also. So she recognized her position that way, and my position as a male... [his prayer had effect] by recognizing my authority, as a man, and then the faith that I have, with her faith, what we believe we share, and putting all that together...” In recognizing a hierarchy of spiritual power in the congregation, Nora interestingly invoked the analogy of the pastor as like a medicine man in “holding more power than anybody else that we know of within the church structures.” She then immediately shifted to a more conveniently gendered analogy to conventional medicine, saying that there were the equivalent of nurse’s aide, nurse, doctors, and beyond that a head doctor equivalent to the pastor. In elaborating this analogy she variously referred to herself as a nurse’s aide, a registered nurse, and surgical nurse assistant to the head doctor, but though she was willing to promote herself with the female side of the hierarchy, she deferred to the males as invariably more powerful spiritual equivalent of doctors.
She
Told me That I Should Take Over the Fireplace
The person who runs peyote prayer meetings and heals or “doctors”
others is called a road man. Effie is a rare example of a road woman.
Sixty-seven years old when she began participation in our project, she
had been married for forty-four years. Unlike Desbah and Nora, she
has had only a few years of formal schooling, and speaks Navajo almost
exclusively. She has par time employment providing home day care for senior
citizens, but much of her time is spent in her healing practice.
Effie’s family became involved with the Native American Church when she
was fifteen years old, in the early years of peyote’s presence in Navajoland.
Her mother became seriously ill, as she recounts: My mother participated
in Navajo Traditional ceremonies several times and had gotten worse. She
did not want to go to traditional ceremony and the hospital. So she decided
to take peyote because she heard about its healing power. She wanted to
overdose on peyote to really feel the effect. So she sent my father up
to Towaoc for peyote buttons. Whatever she got she took it all - about
a hundred or more pieces of peyote. She got well from that. Effie
said that at the time, her mother did not care whether she lived or died.
Some people had told her that the peyote could cure her and some that
it would kill her, and she was apparently aware that such an incredibly
large dose would be either suicidal or miraculous in its effect. Not knowing
how to prepare the medicine, she got a pot of water and cooked all of
it, including the bag it was in. When my mother was
passed out on peyote she had a dream. She saw in her vision the cause
of her illness. There was a blockage in her digestive system. An
angel being also came to visit with her and told her that it was not time
to pass on. The being went into all types of commotion afterwards. She
kinda got down and started crying. Afterwards she felt light and well.
I guess you know when you are going to die from your sickness. Your body
feels like dead weight and you are very tired out. This was what she felt.
She was at the verge of dying. She could not breathe. So overnight the
Lord had given her renewed strength and breathed a breath of life back
into her. That is how she got well. From
this time on, her family was devoted to peyote, rejecting Traditional
ceremonies. Unlike many adherents of the Native American Church,
she expresses a degree of hostility to Traditional practices. She teaches
that her method of healing can be successfully substituted for Traditional
ceremonies even when the cause of illness is one of those typically recognized
in Traditional religion, such as exposure to lightning or violation/injury
of an animal. In contrast, along with her NAC involvement, she claims
membership in the Christian Reformed Church, and expresses affinity with
many Christian ideas. Indeed, her ceremonial hogan is decorated with several
portraits of Jesus.
Following her mother’s cure, Effie’s father himself became a renowned
road man, developing a distinctive form of the peyote meeting based on
the use of water. When Effie was twenty-three, she had an experience of
sudden trembling in her body, beginning from her feet and moving through
her body and hands. Her father identified this as a calling to become
a Traditional diagnostician or handtrembler, though a peyote meeting is
not the most typical setting for the onset of this Traditional form of
giftedness. Effie did develop this capacity and uses it to diagnose and
treat patients to this day, but true to her unique attitude toward Traditional
practices she does not attribute her diagnostic insights to inspiration
by Gila Monster spirits, but to angels from God understood in a Christian
sense.
Prior to his death, Effie’s father indicated that she should prepare to
become his successor as leader of peyote meetings:
In Effie’s story we see a kind of female line of succession, in that her
mother’s self-medication was the beginning of the family’s involvement
with peyote, her mother was the caretaker of the family fireplace following
her father’s death, and Emily was the person who sanctioned Effie’s taking
over the fireplace after her mother. That devotion to the peyote
fireplace is a kind of family cult is not unusual; what is more worthy
of note is that Effie’s practice as a road woman whose following is largely
composed of an extended family is supplemented by a more traditionally
female practice as a handtrembler whose clientele appears to be drawn
from a broader base. Those who come for handtrembling may or may not pursue
treatment in a full scale peyote prayer meeting; meanwhile, within her
peyote meetings Effie often makes use of her handtrembling ability to
help individual participants.
I will conclude with one example, relevant to issues of race, gender and
sexuality, of how Effie dealt with a patient who complained of sinus trouble
and pain in the chest. Effie struggled to make the patient understand
that, according to her practice, sincere confession of a wrongdoing understood
to be the cause of an illness is necessary for healing. Her explanation
of what needed to be confessed is compelling, though strained by the sensitivity
of the matter and stilted by the difficulty of translation: “The white man sure
does everything the wrong way, whatever s/he does maybe it’s [fine] for
the white people, I don’t know. The Navajo people have gone in that direction
and the body fluid is starting to function the wrong way and it will make
them sick,” this is what I told her. Our body is a big valuable thing,
that’s how God/Creator looks at it. When that fluid stops somewhere in
our body, then the body will live and what they call cancer - just like
the red ant digging out their ant hole - will affect them in that way.
Whatever you did, whatever you created for yourself. If you broke any
of the rules, committed a major mistake then you won’t even realize it.
Maybe you can just keep on going like that and it will affect you physically,
it will affect your bodily fluid. A man and a woman, this is a law, forbidden
to be broken, I’m sure that everybody is breaking the law - that was brought
before her [the patient] and that’s where we got stuck [in the confession/healing
process]. Are you understanding it fully? That’s what it is, the human
bodily fluid - what you conceive with - semen. If you were to put that
in your mouth that is forbidden. There’s a place for it on the other end
and if you put the semen fluid into the mouth then if it flows into your
lungs then that will affect the lungs, that’s how that is. She was told
that was what was affecting her. So you finally understand it now?...
Her throat the semen fluid had gone down her throat and so it entered
her lungs and it was supposed to explode there and then it would be a
disease and would hurt right in there on the inside. Like
the Traditional Navajos whose ceremonies she eschews, Effie typically
discerns or recognizes multiple causes for her patients’ problems. In
this case she insisted there was only one - the patient’s having engaged
in oral sex - testifying to the profound violation of both nature and
Navajo culture she saw in it. More than this, however, her diagnosis also
served as a condemnation of a practice that she saw as imported from the
dominant Anglo-American society.
Conclusion
What can be concluded about the relation among gender, class, and
race among the Navajo from such a preliminary presentation of such unarguably
remarkable women? To the extent that the presentation is preliminary
their experience must for the most part speak for itself, with much of
its meaning implicit against the background of contemporary Navajo society.
To the extent that they are remarkable, their stories must in some ways
be read as exemplary rather than representative, with what counts as exemplary
or representative implicit due to lack of sufficient cultural context.
What can be said in the most general terms is that for contemporary Navajo
the issues of gender, class, and race all revolve around the pivotal issue
of identity; and furthermore that ritual healing in the inextricably intertwined
religious modes of Traditional Navajo, Native American Church, and Christian
is a critical arena in which identity politics are played out (see also
Csordas 1999). Nevertheless, there is one more specific domain in which race and class impinge on healing regardless of gender, and that is the relation between Navajo religious healers and medical professionals of the dominant society. Desbah touched on this issue in expressing her desire to be recognized for her knowledge as an indigenous doctor with an honorary degree from a mainstream institution of higher learning. Nora, despite her Christian commitment, touched on it in describing her Traditional grandfather as a “big time medicine man... If he lived today, he would have several titles, for sure M.D., as neurosurgeon because he had to deal with the brain, a psychologist or psychiatrist because he talked right along his ceremony, he had to counsel people.” Effie, in the context of noting that it was inappropriate for a Navajo healer to set a fee but that the more a patient chose to pay the more effective the prayer would be, remarked on the inequity between the pay that physicians receive and what religious healers receive: “Your surgery over there probably cost you thousands of dollars, that’s what it cost, the doctor’s bills, too. On this side, when you wanted help with the Handtrembling Way, you paid me forty dollars.” Closely related to the issue of identity, the equation is that therapeutic efficacy is in part based on respect, and that respect is in part expressed by money. In the domain of healing, as a woman, as a Navajo, as a person who by the standards of the dominant society is of an impoverished class, the relation among gender, race, and class boils down to one central idea: respect.
References Csordas, Thomas J., 1999, Ritual Healing and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Navajo Society. American Ethnologist 26: 3-23. Frisbie, Charlotte,
1992, Temporal Change in Navajo Religion: 1868-1990. Journal of the Southwest
34: 457-514. Frisbie, Charlotte,
and Eddie Tso, 1993, The Navajo Ceremonial Practitioners’ Registry. Journal
of the Southwest 35: 53-92. [1] Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University. His publications include The Sacred Self (U.of California Press, 1994); Language, Charisma, and Creativity (U. of California Press, 1997); and the edited volume Embodiment and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1994). [2] For example, spouses with ceremonial knowledge, most often the wives of male ceremonialists, may or may not have separate entries (Frisbie and Tso 1993: 57). |
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