#Medicine Man

[federer7]

Hastobiga (Navajo Medicine Man), 1904

Photo: Edward Curtis

[weepingwidar]

Oscar Howe (Native American, Yanktonai Dakota, 1915-1983) - Dakota Medicine Man (1968)

[forever70s]

Lakota medicine man, John Fire Lame Deer during an interview about his book (at left): Lame Deer - Seeker of Visions (1972)

[kdmatheson]

"SHAMAN" kd matheson

[crush-or-gender-envy]

Dr. Robert Campbell (Sean Connery), Medicine Man:

[paaxindigenouswitchcraft]

[bubbelpop2]

I'm making a medicine stick. I'm a medicine man and a detatched reclaiming native. I'm a winkte (two-spirit)

If you could help me out by meditating on healing intent and then clicking the like button to put it in the blue plastic egg on my stick, I'd appreciate it.

[lisablack000]

"The primitive magician, the medicine man or shaman is not only a sick man, he is above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself."-Mircea Eliade

The wounded healer archetype is a term coined by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

The idea states that an analyst is compelled to treat patients because the analyst himself is "wounded." The idea may have Greek mythology origins.

Mythological origins

In Greek mythology, the centaur Chiron was a "Wounded Healer", after being poisoned with an incurable wound by one of Hercules's arrows. Jung mentioned the Chiron myth "wounding by one's own arrow means, first of all, the state of introversion".

For Jung, "a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor's examining himself... it is his own hurt that gives a measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician."

[busterkeatonsociety]

This Day in Buster…January 12, 1962

Buster Keaton finishes shooting a CBS TV Sitcom Pilot "Medicine Man" co-starring Ernie Kovacs; the project was dropped when Kovacs died in a car crash hours after filming ended.

[tellingittash]

Religious Studies Term Of The Day: Medicine Man/Woman

[cinemajunkie70]

A very happy birthday to the great John McTiernan!

[siamkram]

“Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and around and about me was the whole hoop of the world… I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit and the shapes of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the Sacred Hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight and in the centre grew one almighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one Mother and one Father, and I saw that it was holy.”

-From the vision of Nicholas Black Elk Lakota Holy Man: 1863 - 1950

[krimsonskingdom]

[blxckdragonfly]

And for those of you who are waiting for more Kat and Strange, it’s coming. I just need some extra materials. Right now, I’m just doing something fun to give my brain a break and relax, even though it has been fun to write what I have so far. I have other stuff to work on so... but we’ll be back with that. Promise. 

[bubbelpop2]

I am oglala lakota, cherokee, and white

I am winkte. (Lakota two-spirit)

Traditionally, two-spirit lakotas are born male, and have a feminine spirit of some sort. They would take care of their families by cooking and sewing. They would be known to be lucky in love, and known to help other people find love.

I was not determined male at birth.

Primarily, I'm a man. Sometimes I'm a feminine man. Very rarely, I feel like a girl.

I'm an intersex man. I have PCOS. I was labeled by doctors as a girl as a child. I am not a girl. I am a feminine man. I have always had muscular shoulders, a broad barrel chest, and a masculine attitude. I have never fully understood women, and women scare me.

I have been a witch for a long time. I have used my time and my energy to cook for my friends and family, and to speak to them and try to heal their pain. To make spell bottles and research natural medicines.

I feel connected to the great spirit after learning about him. I feel connected to the lakota legend of man first emerging from the earth and being taught by Buffalo to survive.

I have been appointed by no tribe, but

I consider myself a medicine man. For myself, my family, and anybody I stumble on who will let me help.

I make up my rituals. I made up my stick. Because I had no one to teach me. No community that I was born into in which I had any chance of being a participant of the "religion."

I am a medicine man to help my friends and family, who are the only tribe I've known, thanks to history and murder and rape and land theft.

People who attack me for bastardization never think about the struggles of mixed native kids who grieve for their culture and family and history and social structure and the millions of things that we'll never know unless we dig and dig and dig for it ourselves.

I'm not doing it for attention, I'm doing it for myself. And for the people I want to help.

I used the lakota medicine wheel, symbolism, intent, and my own experience working with magic to create my own medicine stick. I picked up a stick from outside, tied four plastic easter eggs and a painting of the lakota medicine wheel to the stick, and cleansed and prepared each little plastic egg to serve a purpose and have a place on the medicine wheel's symbolism.

I am trying to learn lakota, and there are no formats that are friendly to my disabilities that are available to me. I would prefer an actually native live teacher.

I have a plan to make money as a YouTuber, and to donate as much as possible to reservations in the U.S.

And then use the YouTube as a platform for healing activism. For environmental protection, for workers rights, and for minority protection.

It's not my fault my grandma never spoke about my culture.

It's not my fault that I look white.

I belong to no officially recognized tribe, yet. My dad was registered. I am not. I do not know the oglala lakota, or the cherokee. I have never been to pine ridge. The things I know about the oglala lakota are from the Internet, and I had to dig for accurate information from native sources.

Growing up, I was not taught my culture. And the amount of grief that that causes me is incommunicable. The idea that, by history's hand, through rape and murder and sickness, that a winkte child would have to teach themselves what they are is heartbreaking. Winkte are not socially celebrated and known as a valid part of normal communities. They're joked about or forgotten about.

I have naturally had habits and behaviors that have existed in me for years-- caring for my family members by cooking, comforting the people around me, making artwork, isolating myself, doing acid, talking to myself for hours and hours to find proper answers to things.

All of these things are replacements for traditions I was never invited to.

Smoking a cigarette under the moonlight and talking to myself is as close as I can get to the traditions of my culture.

I feel invalid sometimes, as a native man. As a winkte. As a two-spirit.

But not as a medicine man.

I have done magic for a long time. I have done tarot readings. And I care about people immensely. I have stopped many, many people from killing themselves. At least four or five, maybe even six people have been talked out of suicide and suicide ideation by me.

I have attempted suicide twice myself.

I have been through pains most people would consider unimaginable. My father was going to kill me when i was seven. My father would find excuses to beat me, and then he would comfort me afterwards to make sure I was still attached to him. I have always been sickly and disabled and I easily pass out. Most of my relationships in the past have ended with me being abused and taken advantage of. School was hell for me growing up autistically-- as people would ostracize me and then pretend they didn't do anything wrong.

I have been through so much. And i make it my life's work to understand the things that I HAVEN'T been through-- to understand the proper ways to go about healing other people from them. But some things you can't heal from.

Like being black and being treated like mud on someone's boot because of it. That sort of pain doesn't really go away, because it's systemic. It is situational.

It is reality.

And to the same degree of reality, I can't help being white.

And I can't help being a bastardized medicine man.

There is not a single person in this world who is truly, totally at peace.

And I intend to do everything in my power to change that. With everything I know about psychology, queer BLM anti-fascist activism, witchcraft, Buddhism

With the gall to be myself, who is someone who is both white and native.

You can't colonize your own religion. I don't deserve to be a sideshow spectacle to white people and an annoying bastardized White Man Copycat to native people.

So yeah, fuck it. I act like a medicine man. I act like a mental and physical healer. And I'm gonna get my doctorate one day, too. And I'm not claiming I'm even an authentic tribe-appointed medicine man who became one properly.

Because I'm not.

I'm some kid that lives in the middle of nowhere, feeling misunderstood by white people and judged by people who don't really understand why I'm so connected to these bastardized rituals and titles and this stick I found in my backyard that I tied colorful eggs to and a painting and dubbed it a medicine stick.

People can't tell I'm native or don't understand my made up pretend little rituals that provide comfort to myself and help my friends and just assume I'm some fucking racist colonizing copycat meditation crackpot guru or something instead of just some guy in the middle of nowhere that has a stick with plastic symbolic fucking colorful stupid little easter eggs tied to it

So I guess I'll just exist like that.

I guess I'll just be viewed as a white guy that steals native culture to people who don't care to understand my bastardized traditions that belong to me

or as a white guy that gets brownie points for being a cool white guy that other white people are impressed by

I guess I'll just continue to feel a lack of community at all with native people.

And I guess I'll still tear myself apart building a YouTube career to help them one day.