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^ The Poetry and Drama of Healing: The Iroquoian Condolence Ritual and the Navajo Night Chant Jarold Ramsey One of the central impulses of Native American traditional literature is the impulse to summon and direct the powers of healing. This employment of verbal art for therapeutic purposes ranges in the tribal repertories from short lyrical incantations, like this Modoc shaman's song, What do I suck out? The disease I suck out,1 to elaborate rituals of healing taking hours or even days to perform, and involving the participation of whole teams of ritualists and the concentrated attention of onlookers. Of the latter undertakings, two of the most powerful and impressive in literary terms to have been transcribed for reading are the Condolence Ritual of the Iroquois Nations and the Night Chant of the Navajos. Before I go any further, it is worth pausing briefly to acknowledge the premises on which I will be examining these two great ceremonial works. My interpretive premises are simply the ones that underlie the new field of American Indian literary study—namely, that under the right conditions of textual validity and ethnological competence, works that are in conception oral (originally existing in performance and memory, not print) and traditional (anonymous and indeed authorless) can answer profitably to interpretive scrutiny. Although it has come to us at a triple remove—originating in other languages, representing cultures largely foreign to us, and bearing the unfamiliar lineaments of oral transmission— Literature and Medicine 8 (1989) 78-99 © 1989 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Jarold Ramsey 79 American Indian traditional literature can speak to us, and powerfully. Indeed, after centuries of neglect and misunderstanding, it now promises to assume its rightful place in the canon as America's first and oldest continuing literature, as its traditional forms and energies find new life in the writings of gifted contemporary poets and writers such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, and Louise Erdrich. Our claiming this exciting prospect, of course, does not mean that elucidating the traditional native texts without distortion and ethnocentric bias has suddenly become an easy task—but at least the literary and cultural rewards are becoming visible, and to those who work in this field, their pursuit seems well worth the effort. John Bierhorst has aptly identified the Condolence Ritual and the Night Chant as "masterworks" of Native American literature.2 They are both poetic and dramatic liturgies; as will be seen, they are in form and content very different from one another, but they have in common the purpose of restoring the well-being and vitality of a patient or subject, and beyond this, the reaffirmation of the fundamental unity and balance of life, according to the Iroquois or Navajo scheme of things. Underlying the conceptual and verbal design of each is a profoundly holistic idea of hearing— an idea largely unfamiliar to modern Anglo medical practice, but characteristic of Native American medicine. Everything is seen as interconnected and interdependent, part of the great hoop of life (to use a widespread traditional Indian figure).3 What in Anglo terms are discrete human, natural, and supernatural realms are in native terms interpenetrating and mutual, for better and for worse; indeed, the hard-and-fast Anglo distinction between natural and supernatural does not apply in most native conceptions of reality. In Indian healing, physical afflictions invariably have spiritual implications , and vice versa: treatment of the body or of the spirit alone, then, would not suffice. Likewise, in terms of the "politics" of healing, Indian praxis recognizes that the illness and debilitation of one person diminishes, and perhaps threatens, the whole community, human and otherwise, and conversely his or her restoration to physical and mental health enhances the health and good order of the community. "One for all, and all for one," as we say: with a literal and unblinking confidence, native healers assume that the sun, the moon, the stars, the rain, the corn, and all the rest of the living order are profoundly implicated in the cure of one human individual's afflictions, and must be, as it were, brought into consultation for the curing to be successful. And its success adds something to...

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