Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850–1990

5. Doctors

There is no single word in Yurok that can reasonably be translated as “power,” in the sense of a person’s acquired, spiritually based potential to accomplish a desired end. What is today called “power” was formerly an unspecified, generalized presence (cf. Kroeber, in Elmendorf 1960: 522.2). My own understanding, gained through various elders, is that what we now call “power” was once perceived as no more or less than the integral energy of “creation,” ki ?wes?onah, a movement at the heart of “the spiritual.” As part of its essential nature or functioning, “power” was once inseparable as a unique thing from the rest of reality. Simply, there could be no world without it. A person could acquire the capacity to control this energy, to “do something” with it, good or bad, but the energy itself was essentially neutral. When one had that kind of control he or she had what people call “power” today. 127 5 Doctors Kill or cure! The two functions of man. Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End Control, the ability to do something “on purpose, every time,” as Harry Roberts used to say, is task-specific: a person spiritually acquires the ability to do this or to do that. This kind of control has been called “power” in English for a long time. Even the cultural conservative Robert Spott used the English term as early as the 1930s, perhaps picking it up from the Indian Shakers (who came to the Klamath in 1926; see chapter 10) or in the Baptist church that he occasionally attended but never joined (see Beyer 1933–34; Count 1934; Barnett 1957). Use of the term “power” probably long predates Spott’s acceptance of it, although his adoptive nephew, Harry Roberts, seldom used the English word in his conversations with me and spoke it circumspectly when he did—as did other elders that I worked with in the 1970s. Still, “power” is a word one hears more frequently among younger people in northwestern California today, and it has been a word invoked with some regularity by other anthropologists. It seems difficult to avoid it in discussing spirituality in the region, where having control of power, often and paradoxically while relinquishing oneself to its control, is a central aspect of being “in the spirit.” In the received ethnographic literature, the Yurok kegey, “doctor” (pl., kegeyowor), usually identified as a “shaman,” seems the exemplar of those commanding power. Kroeber was clearly fascinated by these figures in part because they seemed once to have been almost exclusively women in what he construed as an overwhelmingly male-dominated world (cf. Buckley 1988) and in part because of the sheer exoticism of their training and practice. He wrote a considerable amount about them himself. He also directed Erik Erikson to the Yurok Indian doctor Fanny Flounder, widely regarded as the last of the very powerful “old-time” Yurok doctors , as a source of privileged insight into Yurok worldview (chapter 9), and had several of his graduate students at Berkeley salvage further information about them.1 Given all this attention, the kegeyowor came to be central to scholarly debates , primarily among psychologists, who mined and re-mined Kroeber’s publications, usually with no firsthand contact with Yurok people.2 However , Dale Keith Valory, the first anthropologist to do new sustained fieldwork on the Klamath after the last of Kroeber’s immediate students had departed , twenty years earlier, reassessed somewhat the psychologists’ 128 t e s t i m o n y pathologization of these over- and often misrepresented figures in his dissertation , subtitled “a study in identity, anxiety, and deviance” (Valory 1970). Nonetheless, what is missing in all this attention is any real sense of the original contextualization of the kegeyowor within a broad associational field of men and women with curative and other powers to whom the kegey stood, in Jean Perry’s accurate formulation, as a prototypical figure (personal communication, 1991). In addition, the historical fluidity of this semantic field itself—its reconfigurations and transformations through relatively recent historical experience—was vastly underplayed in Kroeber ’s ethnographic reconstructions and entirely ignored by the removed theorists who made psychoanalytic hay with them. As men’s training proceeds along a continuum and perhaps must be misunderstood if aspects of it are taken outside of this context, so sucking doctors arise along a continuum of people with increasing powers to “do” things, “on purpose...