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Native Americans Healers
Do you know how many tribes are there in the United States? For your information, I don’t know either, but I’m very sure there are more than a hundred tribes in the United States. In the history nowadays, they said Europeans was the first colony to settle down in the United States. But I believe Native Americans were the first group of people to have settled down in the United States before the 15th century. Why I made this statement? The reason is “they have long been known as Indian because of the belief prevalent at the time of Columbus” (Native) that the Americans were the outer reaches of the Indies. Native Americans have been using natural sources and beliefs to heal in centuries. Traditional medicine has been used widely in the past and in the modern medicine nowadays. Native Americans belief ceremonies can heal sicknesses and the herbs they have been using for centuries are now widely used in the modern medical field.
“Native American medicine is based on widely held beliefs about healthy living, the repercussion of disease-producing behavior, and the spiritual principle that restore balance” (qtd. in Chrisman). In Cohen’s journal, his beliefs are shared by all North and South Native American tribes, but the methods of diagnosis as well as the treatments are very different. This is mainly because of the fact that Native Americans medicine is based on a spiritual view of life. A healthy person is one who has a sense of purpose and follows the guidance of the Great Spirit who represented the central religious figure for most tribe (Chrisman).
Here is an example of an Native American, Dr. t Low Dog, she never graduated from high school but she work her way up to earn her degree in medicine now. She is the medical director on the Treehouse Center in Albuquerque in New Mexico. Since she is a teenager, she studied herbs from traditional healer and the power of health-giving plants (Kluger). In the article, she...