The last word

Should Aboriginal healing practices be integrated into conventional medical care?

By Clifford Cardinal

There is a longstanding debate within Aboriginal health circles about whether traditional healing and conventional medical approaches should be integrated to provide better care for Aboriginal clients. Some argue that integration would lead to the appropriation of traditional healing practices by the very society that has oppressed Aboriginal peoples for centuries. As a traditional Cree healer on the medical school faculty at the University of Alberta, I argue that conventional medicine has much to learn from traditional healing practices and that these practices should be shared. If traditional knowledge and wisdom are to remain intact and alive, our people must open their doors to dialogue about practices that historically have not been documented.

The argument that access to traditional knowledge, for example, around healing practices, should be restricted to Aboriginal people, overlooks the fact that people may know about healing knowledge but that they are not necessarily holders of healing knowledge. The keepers of traditional healing knowledge have more than knowledge. They are well known within our communities and exemplify an unusual capacity for humility.

Knowledge serves no one if it is not used. Healing ceremonies are meaningless if there is no need for healing. But we know that mortality and morbidity rates remain high among Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people need physicians who are trained as healers of their own kind to document what little is left of the sacred health knowledge and to carry that knowledge into the future.

We need this knowledge in order to practice medicine appropriately. But what are the conditions for sharing? Should an elder provide a CV to document his or her qualifications? Or do we engage with them on their own terms and in their own territory? Our knowledge keepers have not felt the urgency of documenting their knowledge because they have focused on living it, not on professing it.

Much academic writing has been done by our people, written with the hope that the purity of the ideas of traditional knowledge will be respected. It may be difficult to understand this writing as a unified body of thought, perhaps because it is difficult to express knowledge and wisdom that have been preserved and perpetuated through centuries of oral cultural tradition. A wealth of ideas comes from academic theories, disciplines and representations of aboriginal ways of thinking. The disciplines have their own protocols. Traditional medical knowledge also has its own exclusive protocols. How do we navigate through academic and traditional inquiry, respecting all the appropriate protocols?

When knowledge is documented or shared by a trusted teacher, it is believed to be entrusted to people with moral fibre who will use it to enrich their lives and those of people around them. Consider, for example, the pipe ceremony. Each ceremony is adapted to the needs of its participants, but the central message remains unchanged. Through the permission of the conductor of the ceremony, others in the circle can learn these ways provided they are willing to walk the road. Many of our youth are interested, but have no teachers in their communities. The scope of the knowledge specific to the pipe ceremony is their inherent right by way of their belonging in the circle. As circles create other circles the scope widens and the act reverberates, just as a pebble thrown into a pool of water causes ripples and waves outwards.

Knowledge must be used daily to survive. To restrict or inhibit the practice of traditional knowledge is like an old man who never shares his knowledge, dying with what was given to him.

Recently, several practising healers asked me about preserving the traditional medicine recipes they had collected over their lifetimes. I suggested that the recipes be documented through modern means, for example, by using pictures of plants and written instructions for making herbal medicine. The healers were unsettled by this suggestion. At a sweat ceremony one month later, the same healers declared, “It is about time this happened.” The spokesman of the group would never see this transpire because he died soon after, never having shared his “recipe book.” In fact, the morning of his passing one of his relatives asked me whether he had shared any of his medicine recipes with me.

Knowledge of traditional healing practices is best shared by someone with a history in healing, rather than by someone who has objectified it, compared it and analyzed it purely from an academic perspective. The past has shown us that force and coercion have stripped us of our identity; this is the opportunity to practise what we do in an appropriate context.

At the university, it is a pleasure to see a medical student ready to receive his first pipe, blessed by healers. I am proud to see a first-year medical student participating in a healing event with traditional teachers, and to hear her say, “This will affect the way I practise.”

The need for our young healers in medicine to know traditional medicine is great. How can we tell them to learn two systems of healing skills in separate “culturally appropriate” venues? The hope lies in developing collaborative relationships between traditional healers and conventional health providers. Learning healing knowledge in two viable traditions, blessed by elders in medical school, is the solid cultural practice of learning the appropriate things in the appropriate place. It may be a hard road to walk but our medical students have started on this journey.

Clifford Cardinal is a traditional Cree healer and an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Alberta.

Editorials do not necessarily reflect the views of CAMH.