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

The Price of a Gift: A Lakota Healer's Story. By Gerald Mohatt and Joseph Eagle Elk. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. xviii + 218 pp., photographs, figure, map, glossary, index, bibliography. $29.95 cloth.)

This work by Gerald Mohatt, professor of psychology and education at the University of Alaska and founding president of Sinte Gleska University, builds upon the "as told to" genre of Lakota autobiography in a unique effort to provide a multivocal portrait of a spiritual leader of the Lakota, Joseph Eagle Elk. The book chronicles Joseph's life, his visions and work as a healer, and his personal and familial relationships with other people on and off the Rosebud reservation. Mohatt supplements this with case studies of individuals Joseph helped and commentary by Lakotas and members of the psychological healing community on the significance of Joseph's life to them personally as well as to their own healing practices.

The work's introduction summarizes Joseph's life in the larger context of traditional and contemporary Lakota culture with its unbroken central focus on kinship and its sometimes problematic relationship with Christianity. Mohatt also describes his own close adoptive relationships and friendships on the reservation. While stressing the importance of his social relationships, Mohatt in no way attempts to usurp the voice of these people but stresses the importance of establishing boundaries and limits, denouncing overidentification with others and the romanticism inherent in New Ageism. Joseph's narratives, for the author avoids as far as possible an interview structure in favor of a free-flowing life history, were produced in 1990, a year before Joseph's death.

The main part of this work consists of four sections. The first chapter of each section consists of Joe's engaging and frank autobiographical story. His narratives reveal a life of struggle quite unlike the mystically perfect life of a medicine man that outsiders might imagine. Born in 1931, Joseph experiences an important dream in 1938. Though his relatives advise him to ignore it, Joseph accepts the call of his dream in 1965 and embarks on the life of a healer. Joseph's life, like the life of his coauthor and others in the work who seek to be of help to others and to find kinship relations on the reservation, revolves around both accepting one's gift and finding a home. Joe is quite frank in his descriptions of self-doubt, struggles with alcohol, violence, and broken relationships, and of positive struggles, friendships, humor, and healed and healthy relationships. Most of his narrative is filled with the ordinary, a key theme in the life of a Lakota healer, for power only comes through these individuals and does not belong to them. The remainder of the chapters provides further context to Joe's life, his work as a healer, and his healing influence on the lives of others—Lakota, Indian, and white.

Other chapters in each section provide case studies of people whom Joseph sought to help, stories by friends and relatives remembering Joseph and how he helped them, and explanations by Joseph and others of Lakota culture and spirituality. In general Mohatt refrains from interpreting either the cultural or personal context of Joe's life and lets the narrative stand as it is, using testimony by others to further contextualize Joseph's story. While the author engages but little in ethnohistorical analysis, providing a short analysis of taxonomies of Lakota healing and healers, the work itself is of significant ethnohistorical value, for it provides a carefully contextualized portrait of a contemporary Lakota healer.

Unfortunately the author usually cites whole books rather than relevant pages when relying on other works, and his bibliography is cursory, omitting even references to the writings mentioned by the scholars in the work's appendix. The author also presents a rather one-sided view of the Jesuits' relationship with medicine men in 1969 as simply adversarial. For example, Mohatt mentions an Iroquois (Mohawk...