Honoring the Medicine: Native American & Indigenous Healing Traditions

09/11/2026

Remembering 9/11/2001. My heart goes out to the, at minimum, 2,977 people killed in the 9-11 terrorist attack, the many thousands who were injured, the brave police, firefighters, military, and others who risked their lives helping others, and the many descendants and family members whose lives were affected.

“The attack on the World Trade Center is an attack on Turtle Island,” my indigenous friends and relatives declared. Hundreds of U.S. and Canadian Mohawk Nation steel workers helped to build the towers, and indigenous people were among the casualties. My mentor, N’Tukw (Innu, Quebec) lost a cousin in the attack. Native American and First Nations communities in the U.S. and Canada created emergency crisis teams and hubs (including radio and media networking), contributed rescue equipment and huge sums of money, and volunteered in rescue efforts.

My Personal Experience: A premonition. A few days before 9/11 I had a very clear and strikingly real dream in which I was standing on a New York City subway platform under a tall building. The building was on fire; the staircase to the street level had partially collapsed, and thick black smoke, like a volcano, was pouring into the station. I knew I was witnessing a terrible tragedy. When the report of the attack appeared on T.V. I recognized the images from my dream.

A few weeks later, in early October of 2001, I took my sacred pipe into the mountains to pray for guidance. I heard the voice of the Earth: “The wars will not cease until human beings let go of greed and learn the lessons of simplicity. Two-leggeds are breaking the bones (coal), draining the water (oil), and siphoning the breath (natural gas) of their ancestors, the plant people whose ancient bodies created these ‘fossil fuels.’ These bones are sacred. When you mine coal, oil, or gas, you rob the graves of your ancestors.

“When you stand on the ground, you stand on your plant elders. They support you, and their spirit and energy is the source of feeling ‘grounded’, rooted, and in touch with nature. As humans pillage their own roots and history, they become incapable of making wise decisions. If they hoard resources and continue to disrespectfully excavate, burn, and consume my body, conflict will get worse and continue for a very long time.”

09/01/2026

The great poet and essayist Wendell Berry has, through his writings, been my lifelong poetic and literary mentor. His devotion to the land and its teachings, his passion for justice, his deep knowledge of the ethical implications of farming, make him completely congruent with the Original Teachings. His peaceful passing yesterday (at age 92) in his home in Kentucky is a loss to humanity. A life well lived. An influence through the generations.

I love all of his writings, but especially influential on me was his 1977 book The Unsettling of America, and his many poems, such as the one below.

When despair for the world grows in me / and I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what...

08/14/2026

Noted during my morning walk. First time I have ever seen the high mountains without snow. I live at 9,000 ft elevation; these peaks are much higher. Water, the essence of life, is being depleted; if it is happening on the earth, it is happening in our own bodies. Nipiy pimatisiwin. Water is life.

A grove of aspens is a linked community; they remind us that humanity also shares one common root. The world's social and environmental problems cannot be solved only by policy change but only by recognition and willingness to act on this basic truth. If only two-legged people were as wise as aspens!

07/28/2026

Traditional indigenous diet and heart disease risk. A newly publishd study funded by the American Heart Association demonstrated the positive effects of “medically tailored meals, incorporating traditional Navajo foods” on 206 Navajo adults living with heart disease. Specifically, the study was designed to include “8 weeks of culturally and medically tailored traditional Navajo meals (14 meals/week 100% of meals included Native-sourced ingredients)” compared to those receiving usual care and dietary advice without indigenous/culturally designed meals. In the traditional food group, hospitalizations were cut by more than half, weight was lost and blood pressure dropped to healthier levels.

Research Highlights: Among 206 adults living with heart failure in the Navajo Nation, those who received eight weeks of medically tailored meals, incorporating traditional Navajo foods, were less likely to visit the emergency room or require ...

06/27/2026

A world of wildflowers and medicine as spring begins here in the mountains (9,000 ft elevation). What courage and resilience to show such beauty even in the midst of climate change and the lack of a winter season this year. A reminder, a plea from Mother Earth to protect her!

06/21/2026

Listen and learn. A message perfect for World Peace and Prayer Day from the great Tibetan Buddhist educator and spiritual leader, Robert Thurman, who sadly passed into spirit several days ago. It reminds me of a teaching I received from Wolf Clan Seneca elder, Twylah Nitsch: when you counsel with the earth, don't ask or petition for what is needed, rather acknowledge with gratitude, as though what you are wishing for has already occurred. In other words, instead of praying "I hope my grandmother heals." pray "I am so grateful that she has healed." As Thurman advises in his heartfelt words, "Imagine everything working out. Don’t take no for an answer in your imagination..."

In this clip from his keynote address at our 2024 Dalai Lama Global Vision Summit in partnership with Tibet House US, Robert A.F. Thurman guides us to visualize a better world.

06/19/2026

This Sunday, June 21 is Summer Solstice and World Peace & Prayer Day. Go to a place that is beautiful and sacred, whether to you personally or to your community. Honor the place with prayer and perhaps ceremony, song, dance, or any other spiritual practice appropriate to your culture. Pray for peace and the protection of Mother Earth and all of our beloved relatives, not only all people, but also the stone, plant, animal, fish and winged ones, the water, air, and other elements.

According to the Dakota/Lakota/Nakota people during the Summer Solstice, the sun is in the constellation Mato Tipila (Bear Lodge), which in European culture corresponds to Gemini. At that time, many indigenous nations gathered and gather today at what might be called the earth equivalent of this constellation: the mountain called Mato Tipila (on Euro-American maps, “Devil’s Tower”). Mato Tipila is not a place for “close encounters of the third kind” but for close encounters of the original, first kind, encounters with the sacred. Here, since ancient times, people have gathered to pray and seek Creator’s guidance.

The practice was renewed by respected Lakota Chief Arvol Looking Horse in 1996. On May 3, 1996 about 300 indigenous people rode on horseback from Wahpeton Dakota Nation near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada, passing through Chief Sitting Bull’s campsite at Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan and the Wyoming Bighorn Medicine Wheel, eventually arriving at Mato Tipila (also known as Grey Buffalo Horn Butte) on June 21st. A distance of 1,087 km (677 miles). The next year there was a similar “Unity Ride” starting from Saskatchewan’s Joseph Bighead Reserve. My adoptive dad, Cree Medicine Man Andrew Naytowhow, was on those early rides and always spoke about it with joy and pride.

Photo by Mick Haupt

05/30/2026

A unique scientific perspective on distant healing effects (healee not in immediate proximity of the healer). There is increasing evidence that when a healer sets an intention to heal a particular client/patient, the healing energies continue to be transmitted even if the healer is not directly focused on the client. I spoke to a medical researcher/physicist recently who suggested that there seems to be another dimension at work, a realm that is more complex than our everyday world and which has agency—an ability to act and cause measurable effects beyond time and space.

That is, when a healer who is well trained and spiritually connected to this transcendent yet immanent reality (a “divine realm” as it were) focuses his/her mind, the energy keeps working. In my way of thinking, the manitou, spirits, are activated and shower blessings. Reminds me of the implications of the superb scifi film “Interstellar”, which was based on recent theories in physics.

Photo art by Alesia Kozik

05/07/2026

A dream fulfilled. I have wanted to visit Manâtakâw, the Cypress Hills in Saskatchewan and Alberta for many years. I am standing on cobblestones that have been here for more than 50 million years and viewing a landscape sculpted by one of the last great ice sheets that stretched all the way to the Rockies, covering an area of more than 5 million square miles.

For more than 8,500 years Cree, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, and other peoples have hunted, prayed, and gathered medicine and lodgepole pines here. It is also where the Cree welcomed and gave refuge to the Lakota leader Sitting Bull and his followers.

Here are photos of the lookout (about 4100 feet above sea level) and the magnificent lodgepole pine forests. In Colorado I live near lodgepole pine forests that were also used for tipi poles. But I have never seen ones so tall and grand before.

04/17/2026

I often feel that the Native American/First Nations view of death and reincarnation is, in many ways, parallel to that of Buddhism. On the one hand, there is clear evidence that the person or at least an aspect of their soul continues after death, perhaps reincarnating. And some people remember past lives or have experiences that cannot be explained any other way.

On the other hand, each of us is so linked with all beings ("All My Relations" or the Network of Jewels in Buddhism-- each jewel reflecting every other), that there may be only one being who reincarnates in many forms. Or perhaps we are all waves, different vibrational states, on the same sea. The same, yet different.

I remember, in particular, the strange events that happened after my friend and elder, War Eagle (Cherokee) passed. Here is one, adapted from my book "Honoring the Medicine"

Shortly after War Eagle died in the winter of 1990, some friends, unaware of his passing, visited his winter home-- actually, a trailer War Eagle and his wife, Helen (Commanche) maintained in Quartzsite, Arizona. The rest of the year, they lived in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

The friends knocked on the door. War Eagle answered and invited them in for a cup of coffee. Strangely, they did not see Helen anywhere. Perhaps she was gone for the day.

Not long after, the friends were driving through Arkansas and heard that War Eagle’s wife, but not War Eagle, had temporarily returned to their other home in Eureka Springs. Helen was sitting in a lawn chair outside when they drove up. After exchanging greetings, the friends excitedly told Helen about their recent visit with War Eagle, noting how healthy War Eagle appeared.

Laughing, Helen exclaimed, "That must have been his spirit. He's been dead for weeks!" Incredulous, the friends protested that it was clearly War Eagle. War Eagle had looked great, was walking normally, and told them that all his diabetic pain was gone.

A great mystic once told me, "We never die because we were never born. We've just forgotten who we are."

Photo by Ken Cohen, Helen & War Eagle, 1990