The Price of a Gift: a Lakota Healer's Story (review)

This outstanding book is about Joe Eagle Elk (1931-91) and Lakota ways of healing; it is about tiospaye (extended family of birth and nurture), and its foundation, mitakuye oyas'in (all my relatives). Joe struggles to find a grounding in spiritual place in order to become a good relative and fulfill his family duties as a healer to all generations.

Gerald Mohatt has put into transcript the tape recordings of Joe talking about his life; also included are transcripts from recordings of people Joe has healed. The current of this book flows through interstices of time and space as we learn about personal healing, the life of a healer, and a traditional Ndn relationship between healer and healed.

Joe enables people to understand the deep meaning of our abilities to call forth our animal and plant helpers in the process of becoming grounded in our places of being. This is accomplished via four traditional powers: heyoka; wanagi, yuwipi, and tahca. Joe was born with a tawacin (purpose) of being a healer. Until he accepts this role, he wanders in life, having a recurring dream. This dream is a gift to help Joe find his way of sincerity and respect among the Lakota, to find his home, that place to which he (we) keep returning. The life Joe lives is a life of prayer, sacrifice, healing, and thanking. His strength is continually renewed in vision quests and sun dances where he remembers himself equal with the two legged, four legged, winged ones, and all of plant life. Joe lives the life of Lakota Oyate (the people), a life of patience, acceptance, understanding, and spirituality. From the songs of the heart he knows who he is, where he comes from, and that he is never alone.

The strength of humor, the medicine of talking (79) in the right way with care and respect, the art of listening, and the talent of vision are the inner tools of Joe's gift of healing. In the book we follow the imagery of Joe's world as he tells it to Mohatt. From his difficulties with the law, the years away from home working, his symbolic encounter with his eventual friend, the eagle, to finally meeting his spiritual thunder power helpers, heyoka zik'ala and heyoka isnala (97).

Intrinsic to understanding Joe's stories of healing is the belief that medicines (plants, herbs, etc.) are people and relatives. Allowing our hurt and pain to leave our bodies means the medicine has become our friend and that we can work together, getting to know one another, in order to heal our body. In this way we need to create a good relationship with everything that goes inside our body. To be healed, humans take on the responsibility of working together with the medicine people by thinking deeply about medicines, body, and healing. There is an especially helpful section in this book when an anonymous person talks about Joe's thunder power and its use. The person tells us that "Joe compared the creation and use of electricity with his own power that he received from the thunder beings" (133, 134).

Once Joe accepts his place, his gift of human healing, he never questions his purpose. He learns to incorporate healing powers: of serious laughter in recognizing that we pick our home, our communities (171); of family story, bringing the community together through the ordinariness of being, in past, present, and future as one in community; of the ceremonial and community time web found in the symbolic synergy that merges place, meal, prayer, and spirituality; of reciprocity when empowering people, knowing that his work takes in the community and goes beyond himself; and of the intellectual truth of contraries, the ritual clowns that present to us our authenticity of...