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  • Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing by Patrisia Gonzales
  • Renae Watchman
Patrisia Gonzales. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012. 304 pp. Paper, $35.00.

Patrisia Gonzales (PhD) is a community health practitioner of Mexican traditional medicine, an assistant professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies, and affliate faculty in American Indian studies at the University of Arizona. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing weaves elder knowledge and teachings, applied Indigenous ceremonial experience, symbolism, and established Indigenous scholarship to reveal the perseverance of “Indigenous medicine and various rites of renewal” (xvii), or red medicine.

Gonzales recognized that North American Indigenous birthing has largely lost its ceremonial, communal, and cultural significance along with the Native Americans’ loss of soul (susto), loss of land, and loss of cultural and spiritual indigeneity. Birth is ceremony and healing, an idea introduced by Lucila Contreras (Apache and Nahua), one of many women who are actively reclaiming traditional birthing and healing rites.

Through Indigenous knowledge and teachings, which are rooted in Spiderwoman Knowledge, Gonzales presents a personal/communal and scholarly account that challenges Western ways of knowing and de-Indianization. As a study that privileges Indigenous knowledge, Gonzales’s writing reflects that of ceremony. Thus, the book is itself poetically written and reflects the cyclic order of life: “Each chapter knots ancestral knowledge of birth stories, medicine stories of howwith essential prefatory remarks Indigenous [End Page 256] people relate to place as part of their medicine, stories in which skin and dreams, body and land, space and time are conjoined concepts, or contiguous and concurrent” (xv). Gonzales’s book is an act of decolonization and begins with essential prefatory remarks of defining Spiderwoman and how Gonzales uses the imagery of the web to illuminate her argument. She recognizes that Spiderwoman Knowledge is known by many names throughout Indigenous North America and that it is essential to distinguish among beliefs and stories from those who recognize this matrifocal weaver. She grounds her study in the Mesoamerican Weaver/Spiderwoman (the Nahua Tlazolteotl) while also turning to Indigenous midwives, grandmothers, and learned women and scholars from the Pueblo, Ojibwe, Lakota, Otoe, Oneida, and Mohawk Nations.

Red Medicine honors oral and familial stories. Gonzales incorporates her interpretation of symbols, of pre-Columbian codices, of dreams, and of the color red as part of her scholarship. She further defines and introduces twelve essential ideas that are critical to understanding how Indigenous knowledge works. Together these teachings and tools are key to unpacking traditional healing systems and convey Native science (cajete). Gonzales astutely claims that her findings do not hold true for all; there will be many configurations of Indigenous knowledge and red medicine. Her story should be viewed as only one metastory of a larger system of knowledge and healing.

There are many glaring gaps in Indigenous knowledge due to colonization and Christianization, and Gonzales acknowledges these catastrophes. She posits that despite de-Indianization and the prominence of Western ways of knowing and doing, Indigenous knowledge can (and has) return(ed) through ceremony. The ceremonies that she highlights are not meant to be replicated, nor does she feel that she betrays Indigenous insight; rather, she shares her lived experiences as an answer to healing. Red Medicine unfolds through the ceremonies of Birth, Memory, Sweeping, Land, Time, Dreaming, Curing, and Return (the essence of each chapter of the book).

Ceremony and healing are aided by traditional medicine, which is shared across cultures. Gonzales’s first calendar as evidence of trans benefits of four Indigenous plants (medicine) through story and dream. These plants and their knowledge originated in Mexico but have found their way across international borders. Gonzales discusses the healing power of Indigenous medicine and its role in fertility, pregnancy, labor, and other imbalances that ail women. The vast amount of herbal and [End Page 257] traditional healing practices focuses around food and agriculture; both are literally rooted (buried) in the land.

Gonzales continues the analogy of planting and connectedness to land in the chapter “Ceremony of the Land: ¿Y dónde está tu ombligo?” The umbilical cord is transculturally significant, as is the placenta...

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