This might be confusing, but due to the corruption of the term shaman and the one’s calling themselves shamans who lack proper training, including ascetic training, and any apprenticeships with an authentic Indigenous healer/shaman, we needed a valid term to refer to a properly trained individual’s body and mind. And to honor the late Salish (Canadian First Nation) medicine couple, Mom and Vince Stogan, we chose Earth Doctor: a medicine man – medicine woman.
Within the context of Canadian First Nations, a medicine man or woman is a person imbued with the power to heal or cure disease. A medicine man or woman fosters harmony within communities bridging natural and spirit realms and humankind. Medicine men and women learn their skills and garner powers in diagnosing, divination, and healing from medicine teachers. Medicine men and women garner power and visions of the supernatural, the Otherworld, from animals, plants, or natural forces that are utilized in healing.
The origins of Indigenous healing are primordial and vary by region, nation, band, and even family. Medicine men and women of the Pacific Northwest trace their calling to prehistoric shamans of Northeastern Siberia, who considered disease to be caused by evil spirits. These healers employed mystical practices including visions, fasting, singing, and the use of grizzly bear claws to drive evil spirits from their patients.
Medicine men and women navigate the supernatural world in practical and empirical ways by creating relationships with deities and ancestors they believe created the earth and its plant, animal, and human inhabitants. The sacred beliefs of Indigenous people are diverse and include a variety of deities that shape all parts of the spirit world. Within the divine consciousness, the Great Spirit appears across Native American cultures in different ways. The Great Spirit (Great Mystery) is the omnipotent, omnipresent creator of the universe. Indigenous understandings of an omnipresent spirit world are rich with deities in various stages of creation with spirits, ghosts, animals, and cultural heroes that move through an Upper World and daily life in this world.
Among Native Americans, the term “medicine” supplanted the term “mystery” during the nineteenth century. In many Indigenous cultures, the concepts that Europeans later referred to as “medicine” were originally linked to spiritual power, the sacred, or the unknown. For instance, in Siouxan cultures, the omnipresent divine spirit is referred to as Wakȟáŋ Tháŋka, which is often translated as “Great Spirit” but is arguably more accurately translated as the “Great Mystery.”
Medicine men and women act as religious leaders that cultivate an ability to tap “holy” sources of internal power as keepers of bundles, historians, and preservers of creation stories. Healers used song to imbue their voices with power, not as a form of self-expression, but to call upon the spiritual world to encourage desired magic to be manifested. The imagery that emerges from vision quest rituals, such as bathing, are summoned internally; the reason after leaving the stream, we sit under a blanket, being open to knowledge and vision.
Medicine men and women demonstrate a profound religious sense. Spirit and co-essence guides offer Indigenous healers instructions for bringing visions into reality, and if followed, the desired outcomes are brought about. In daily life everything is attributed to spirit; events are significant not because they happen, but rather, they happen because they are vectors for significance and meaning. Religion and medicine are the expression of belief and reverence of a higher power demonstrated with conscientious devotion. Supernatural power is thought to be everywhere that might reside in or endow any individual, object, or thing.