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

Gerald Mohatt and Joseph Eagle Elk. The Price of a Gift: A Lakota Healer's Story. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. xvi + 226 pp. Ill. $29.95; £19.95.

The medical practices of American Indians are often misunderstood and even sometimes unjustifiably referred to as witchcraft; however, the healer in their culture dates back centuries before Western medicine and is central in a highly effective health-care system that has a rich and strongly conservative tradition. The American Indian culture deals with rites of passage, diseases, traumatic injuries, and mental illnesses by using herbs, physical manipulations, and psychotherapy. Many individuals in the tribe are part of this system, but the medicine men, also known as shamans, are the most important, and they deal with patients who experience "significant spiritual, psychological, physical, and social suffering" (p. 25).

The effectiveness of the medicine man's treatment was attested to by nineteenth-century physicians, who were trained at American medical schools. For example, in the 1870s Dr. George Martin Kober, who later served as dean of Georgetown's medical school, witnessed a medicine man's success in treating psychoses at Fort McDermit in Nevada (Reminiscences of George Martin Kober, M.D., LL.D., 1930). One hundred years later, Joseph Eagle Elk was a successful Lakota medicine man who for thirty years treated various psychoses on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota.

Joseph Eagle Elk is the focus of The Price of a Gift, which combines his oral history with interviews with individuals who knew him. In his early life, Eagle Elk went down the road of alcohol abuse and served time in jail. His life was turned around in the early 1960s when, after a series of revelatory dreams, he found his position within his community as a healer; he served in this capacity until his death in 1991. Like many other medicine men, he came from a family of healers. Traditionally, an individual became a shaman by one of several methods: inheritance, through a dream, or by visiting sacred sites. The fledgling healer usually became an apprentice to a senior shaman in the tribe.

Gerald Mohatt provides insight into the psychoanalytic healing powers of the medicine man. Unlike Western medicine with its rigid and definite boundaries of treatment, American Indian medicine relies on unique powers that vary with the individual healer. On the other hand, the treatment modes are traditional. They include the use of sacred objects, such as the sacred pipe and tobacco; the sweat lodge; sucking power, whereby the offending object is removed; singing and dancing; the sacred sage; and the healing ceremony. Eagle Elk was available twenty-four hours a day to help his patients. He relied on the use of the sacred pipe, singing, and the sweat lodge--ceremonies that are detailed in The Price of a Gift. This account of his life follows him from his native South Dakota to Europe and Alaska, where he conducted healing ceremonies and talked openly about them. During some of these trips Mohatt, who is a psychologist and was considered an insider by the tribe, observed and questioned him about his practice, his ability to heal, and his teachings.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter is the epilogue, which is also the longest chapter in the book. Co-author Mohatt brought together various psychologists and psychotherapists from Germany, France, and the United States with members of the Rosebud tribe who were involved in healing ceremonies. They discussed their contacts with Eagle Elk and related cross-cultural experiences in therapy and healing. Historians and practitioners of medicine would do well to examine the positive aspects of healing related to the medicine man's psychotherapy. Unfortunately, he is quietly disappearing from American Indian society. In short, those who are interested in traditional American Indian health-care practices will find this a useful volume to consult.

Anton P. Sohn
University...