Interview with Charles Scribe
Mr. Charles Scribe is a Medicine Man who lives in Winnipeg, MB, Canada. One of the community programs that he works with is the All Nations Traditional Healing Center Inc. The All Nations Traditional Healing Center provides both Native American traditional healing and contemporary mental health interventions to assist Residential School Survivors and their families who have been traumatized by physical and sexual abuse in the residential school system. This interview was conducted on 10/1/04 by Yvette Rivera-Colmant, MSW.
Yvette: Can you tell me how you use traditional healing to help people?
Charles: In what context are you referring?
Yvette: As far as healing emotional problems.
Charles: We use several methods actually to work with people. Most of them are methods that are passed down through the generations. A lot of them are related to the ceremonial ways of the ancestors. We deal with many types of ailments, physical ailments. When I started off working with a medicine man, I worked mainly with physical ailments. Things like diabetes, cancer, and high blood pressure. Things that affected people physically. But I soon learned that many of the ailments that affect people physically are related to their emotions. So we started getting into working with people’s emotions as well as their spirituality. Generally what we utilize is our ancestral ceremonies to deal with the various sicknesses that people experience. Just as an example, with cancer we began having women that were suffering with breast cancer and cancer in their reproductive systems. After awhile, we began to realize that about nine out of every ten of these women suffered some kind of problem when they were young, in their early or late teens. A lot of times there was trauma related to sexual abuse or some sort of rape. They didn’t seem to develop the cancer right away, not until they were older- in their late twenties or mid-thirties. Some of them even older than that and some didn’t develop the cancer until their late 50’s or 60’s. Usually there had to be a trigger somewhere along the line. There had to be something that triggered the cancer because it just didn’t start there when they experienced that trauma. Later on, as they grew older they experienced a second traumatic situation. It was usually the loss of a loved one, often their grandparents whom they were close too, or their parents. They usually developed cancer after a few years of loosing the loved one. In dealing with the cancer, we not only provided herbs but also dealt with their emotions and their spirituality. We had to educate them and help them regress by remembering the time that they experienced these situations. Once they dealt with the emotional issues that they held within themselves, the cancer began to clear up. In some cases it cleared up in several months. But, not all of them recovered. The success rate is about 60% depending how they themselves wanted to deal with these issues. A lot of these elderly people had these things so ingrained in them they couldn’t release, they had difficulty releasing.
Yvette: Was it that it had become a part of them that made it difficult for them to let it go?
Charles: Yeah, it was harder for them to let it go because it became a part of their life. It became a normal way of living for them. It shouldn’t have been. So they had difficulty releasing or letting go and they had difficulty finding forgiveness. That was one of the main ingredients in the cure that they had to be able to forgive the individual or person that did them wrong. As well as forgiving themselves, because a lot of times they held blame within themselves that really wasn’t necessary. Nonetheless, they felt the situation had occurred and that it was partially their fault. So it was like that, we dealt with all of these issues, some of them were easy to deal with while others we had to take deeper into the ceremony and help them understand that they had to release and they had to find closure with issues that have affected their lives. So that is one of the things that we did in terms of cancer. In working with people with diabetes it almost seemed like it was a similar situation. When people became emotional, they tended to overeat and they would indulge in sugars and different types of high fat foods that caused blockages in their pancreas.’ When these blockages occurred, their pancreas could no longer produce the insulin that they needed to digest the intake of sugar so they began to suffer from different types of sicknesses. It began affecting their internal organs and they started suffering from high blood pressure and as a result started having heart problems. A lot of them started having problems with their livers or their kidneys. In the advance stages of the diabetes, many of them started loosing limbs, starting from their digits, their fingers. We found several herbs that we use that flush the pancreas. Medical science is unable to do that. They have no cure for it. Basically what they do is just replace the insulin that the pancreas is unable to produce or a derivative of the insulin. One of the more difficult areas that we continue to work with is the depressions and the anxieties that people suffer. Usually there are many after effects of these anxieties and these depressions. The sad thing about it is that people, particularly from the reserves that haven’t been able to come out suffer from acute depression and anxieties. They suffer these sicknesses daily and it has become a normal way of life. They think that it is normal and when they come and begin talking to us in a depressed state. We have to educate them and try to get them out of their depressed state. It’s very difficult because of the economic situation on the reserve. The poverty is unbelievable. There is very little employment. Most people live on welfare. So they don’t have freedom, there’s no freedom. They can’t be free within there own land. So it makes it really difficult for them. It seems like in this society freedom costs money. You have to have money to be able to get into your car and travel anywhere in this land now-a-days. Most people that reside on the reserves don’t have that freedom. So they are caught in that, that, that . . . I guess you can call it a prison or a concentration camp. They are caught in there and they have no hope, no foresight for anything in their future. So it is difficult and we educate them. We let them know that as Indian people we have a sacred way of life. We do have a way of life that many people throughout the world are looking at and are trying to understand. It’s the way of life that Indian people have, the ceremonial life. So we have to educate our own people as well because many of them have been in the residential school system. Many of them have been told that their way of life is negative, that their ceremonial ways were paganism and that they were heathens. They were totally discredited and it made them depressed within their own community. So now they are trying to come out of that. Many of them are successful and many are able to come out of it. The ones that seem to come out of it returned toward their traditional ways. They developed their self-esteem and their pride in who they are. Then they learn how to function in society, they learn how to balance their ancestral way of life and finally become successful. What we do here as Traditional Healers or Medicine Men- people call us all kinds of things.
Yvette: What do you prefer to be called?
Charles: Charles (laughs). We have been working with a group of university students in the Access Program at the University of Manitoba. Quite a number of these individuals graduate. They use these traditional ways to give them the boost they need. So they would come to the sweat. Some of them even wrote their essays on the ceremonial way of life and they received really good marks. They graduated and achieved degrees. One of the things that we stress in our ceremonies, in our teaching and in our healing is that, in this day and age, an individual has to have letters behind their name. It’s necessary so that they can take those credentials and their ancestral way of life and balance the two. They start developing positive lifestyles and things work out really good for them. They abstain from any form of alcohol and drug which could lead to abuse. So those are some of the things we do using the ancestral ways. We have sweat lodges two or three times a week. We have a fair number of people coming, a comfortable number, 15 or 20. People come and go. Some come for a couple of weeks or a couple of months untill they find what they need and then they go. They may go and work with other tribes and it is good to do that because they get to learn from the many tribes that exist on Turtle Island. That is what we did too when we were seeking an understanding of our way of life. We met with many tribes, we sat in ceremonies with many tribes and we found out where we fit in. One of the things that we realized was that the tribes across Turtle Island all seem to have the same problems. They are very similar. It’s all related to lack of employment, lack of education, poverty. It’s all in the struggle.
Yvette: Lack of Freedom?
Charles: No freedom. No freedom at all. In order to have this freedom they need money.
Yvette: How did you become a traditional healer?
Charles: Well. I don’t really know. It just seemed to happen. My father was a war veteran. He was in the World War II. When he was young he was a trapper. He wanted to do something with his life so he joined the Army during the war. He ended up over seas. He was a Christian man. He was a trapper but he didn’t understand the ceremonial ways, the spirituality of the ancestors. Where he came from he had lost it earlier than the Plains tribes, simply because they stayed in one area longer, they settled in an area around the trading post and it was more fixed and missionaries came in with a church. The Plains tribes from my mother side, they weren’t as easy to Christianize. The reason why is because they were more nomadic, they would pick up and move. So if the missionaries would build a church there, it would be abandoned because they moved on and they traveled with the seasons, according to the animals and the harvesting of herbs and berries. They were more nomadic and they couldn’t be Christianized. So my mother is the one that kept me informed about the traditional ways. She took me back to her reservation when I was six-years-old and I witnessed a Sundance. It was the very first time that I witnessed the Sundance when I was six-years-old. I didn’t know what it was at that time. But, eventually I learn what it was about. My grandfather would talk to me quite a bit, her father. He would talk to me about the ceremonial ways but I wouldn’t pay much attention to him when I was younger. It wasn’t until I became older that I began understanding what he was talking about. One of the things that I learned in the 70’s when I was listening to elders and spiritual leaders was that everyone has a vision and that everyone has a dream and that they should try to realize that dream, whatever it is. My dream was to become a pilot. Going by what the elders said, I pursued that. I became a pilot and spent a little over 10 years in the aviation business, flying for people, flying for myself, bush flying. In 1983 my father became ill with cancer and I spent the last month of his life with him. I watched him, I watched his suffering. I saw how his suffering went, some days it seemed like he was going to recover and then the next day he would be really sick. It seemed to be going like that up and down, up and down. Then finally he couldn’t stand the pain anymore, just all of a sudden it seemed like he was fine one day and the next day he was really sick and then he passed away. That really made me angry, because at that time I had some faith in modern medical science. I had hope that the doctors that were working on him could cure him, but they were never able to. They never had a cure for cancer. They didn’t know how to deal with it. Basically all they did was three things with cancer. The first thing they seem to do is give people a high dose of chemicals, chemotherapy. If that didn’t work they radiated them and if that didn’t work they took their knife and tried to cut the cancer out, but there was really never a cure. So when I watched my father die, the anger that I had, I was able to turn it around and seek an alternative way. I knew that there must be an alternative way somewhere to deal with cancer, so I began seeking. I began seeking through our traditional ways; I began seeking an alternative cure. It took quite a number of years, he died in 1983 and it wasn’t until 1986 I ran into my first medicine man. I was really impressed with what he was doing and he did a lot of strange things to me, emotionally when I watched him work. My dad was a Christian and we understood that there was a healer that was able to make the blind see, the cripple walk and he was even able to raise the dead, he was even able to walk on water they said. We had that way of thinking and we didn’t realize that we had people among us that were capable of doing things like that, so it did strange things to me. I wanted to help him; I asked him if I could help him. I wanted to help him and I wanted to learn. So he was agreeable, I didn’t tell him what my reasons were, but during my time as a helper he seemed to zero in on cancer.
Yvette: He just knew?
Charles: Yeah. So I began to learn the four different types of cancer that can affect human beings and I began to see it. People would show up with cancer, from tumors to skin cancer. He had his own name for them too. But there were four groups of cancer.
Yvette: What are they?
Charles: There’s leukemia, the tumor, skin cancer, and the other that forms in the reproductive systems. He had a name for all of those and his own way. And he had cures for them and some of the cures were almost instant, particularly the skin cancer, and it was herbal medicines. And it started to give me insight into what our ancestors did. From there I began thinking about what my grandfather used to talk about and the elders that I used to listen to. I began understanding what they were talking about and I began to understand the connection that we have to the great mystery. Most human beings cannot see that connection that we have with this great mystery. Through the ceremonial ways and the fasting ceremonies, Sundance ceremony, an individual is able to set up a unique communication with the spirit and that is something that has to be learned. Not everybody can learn it. But a person has to make a tremendous sacrifice in order to take a few of the first steps, one of them as an example would be fasting- that is abstaining from food and water for four days. It doesn’t seem like a very long time to go without water or without food for four days, but it is very long, four days is a long time. The medicine people recommend that and it is four days in a row. The reason why they recommend that is because it takes three days for anything that you ate or drank to pass through your body and by that time you have thought about everything that you have done and you have had a chance to repent. So what happens is that you become purified- mind, body and spirit become pure and once you maintain that state, then the spirit makes contact. The spirit has to contact you and you can’t contact the spirit. So that’s the way it is, some people say, “Oh, I fast all the time but the spirit doesn’t come.” But there are some people that are able to go out there and be contacted. And that is very unique and my grandfather talked about it, but I couldn’t understand it until I did it myself. So if a person wants to understand it, they have to do these things themselves. They have to physically experience these things and if they don’t, they will never have the true understanding. They will only have the theory of it all, but they will never have the true understanding of the unique communication system that the elders talk about. It gives great meaning to Turtle Island, this spiritual island, the original inhabitants of this Turtle Island are a very spiritual people. One of their spiritual abilities included clairvoyance. So they are able to develop all of these things. They were able to live that way and they were able to live in harmony with nature. One of the things that the old people used to tells us was, look around you at nature, at the way nature is. If you begin to understand the way nature is, you will begin to understand about spirituality. What happens to the society is that it separates itself from the true meaning of nature. We take nature for granted. The most important thing about it is that life goes on, understanding the generations. How that Great Spirit allows life to go on. The Great Spirit allows life to go on one way and that is through the holy union of grandma and grandpa. This holy union applies to all living things- because all animals have a grandma and a grandpa, so that is the doorway, that is the only way that life can come out of this Earth. That is why Indian people look at everything that grows as having a spirit, because it does. All living things have a spirit. In this way of life, people are able to develop this unique way of communication system with it’s spirit. A medicine man for example can pick herbs and then use herbs, but they don’t have any meaning until they communicate with the spirit of that particular herb. So he has to ask the spirit of that herb through his song or his prayer or through his offering to do this work. Then it will work. You can take a lot of aspirin, but it really doesn’t do very much but it can do the same thing in a diamond willow bluff, you can do the ceremony in there and scrape the bark and get the same thing, with no effort. So that is the way it is and it is all respecting nature. Respecting the way the Great Spirit created it, so this way is all about respecting nature, it’s not a religion. The Great Spirit is everywhere; it is within all of us. Our ceremonies, when we get together and do our ceremonies we get together and pray and we are of one mind and one spirit and it’s strong. That’s because we have the Great Spirit in all of us. The way the Great Spirit created this earth is very wonderful, it’s very powerful. But society tends to separate itself from it and that is where the problem exists. They separate themselves and they take everything for granted. Water for example is very important. We begin our life in water. The water that is in our mother’s womb- that is how we begin our life. When that water flows we come onto this earth and we come into this earth with nothing. Then we leave this earth with nothing, we can’t take anything with us. So while we are on this earth we are all equal, (laughs), we think we are not but we are (laughs), because we are all equal. Nobody is more equal than anybody else. We are all created the same way and that is what people need to understand, it’s how the Great Spirit created us, the importance of water. Our ancestors didn’t let their child relieve themselves closer than 20 paces from any body of water, now-a-days we relieve ourselves right into it, that is why there is a change in the weather. That is why there are so many things happening in nature. People call it the greenhouse effect and sure everything is getting polluted and everything is being affected by all this pollution. That is because we disregard nature, we don’t respect nature at all and we live apart from it. The ancestors said back in the 70’s that Mother Earth was going to cleanse herself and that time is beginning. It is evident because we are seeing more hurricanes - there has never been a time when four hurricanes in a row has hit Florida. There were never so many eruptions of volcanoes. There were never so many earthquakes; it’s all starting to happen, what the ancestors foresaw. Everyone has to pay heed to what is going on for the sake of those future generations. We may not experience that great a catastrophe in our life, but what about our children and our grandchildren. What are they going to think? Changing the ecology, like putting in dams. When I was a pilot, I spoke to meteorologists. When Manitoba Hydro put dams in the North they changed the whole river systems. Not only did they change the whole river system, they changed the weather pattern and we noticed it, but we couldn’t prove anything until there was 20 years of statistics; it didn’t become fact until there was 20 years of statistics. Now, it is becoming evident, because the low pressure systems are swinging away to the South. Look at Southern Manitoba, look at our summer [This year Manitoba experienced the coldest summer on record]. That is why, changing ecology, changing the lay of the land, changing the rivers systems. That water is life giving, it gives us life. We begin our life in it and it also gives us life. Christian people say that God created us in his image, but actually God created us in the image of Mother Earth. Mother Earth is 80% water and so are we. So it is important that people begin to understand the traditional way of life. The residential school system told us it was Paganism and Hedonism: devil worship. I have been practicing as a medicine man since 1986. That is about 21 years and I have never seen a devil in it yet. I have never seen the devil. We are closer to God, we are closer to this Great Mystery, and we understand this Great Mystery more than most of the society.
Yvette: It seems like there is also responsibility with it. You are just not taking from the Earth, you are making sure that you are taking care of the Earth. When you do take from it you give back. So it is not hedonistic, it’s responsible.
Charles: Yeah, it is because our people never took anything from the Earth without putting something back in return. As an example, when the medicine people harvested their herbs, they left an offering. They never just took it, they always offered their prayer, and they always offered their song and they offered their cloth or their materials or whatever they felt they needed to offer, they offered it. Then they took that medicine and they didn’t synthesize it, they just used it in their natural state- and it is very effective, it’s a very effective healing medicine. One of the things that I learned as a medicine man is that there is medicine out there that we don’t see. When you talk about spirituality and that every living thing that God created has a spirit there are some medicine out there that people have not seen yet. We had a chance to see it. I have seen people walk over medicine that they didn’t even know it was there, and I never said anything. The medicine is very effective; we have friends that are doctors that want to find out more about these medicines. But, there are some medicines that are secret because they are sacred, you can see the spirit in them, we just don’t want them abused, but they are very effective for the health of our people or anyone that wants to use them. I don’t know what else you want to know.
Yvette: Something that pops into my mind is when you spoke about theory versus really knowing. I guess theory is talk about the mechanics versus having a true understanding.
Charles: Other doctors learn from books most of the stuff they know they learned from books. Most of everything they know is theory. They never actually went and experienced these things. They don’t pray before they work with a patient. If they feel that there is any type of spirituality required, they send for another person. If they think that it is an emotional problem, they send for a psychiatrist, so its all different people none of them know each other. So they interrupt things using this theory not really understanding what they are interrupting. A lot of decisions are made based on this theory and a lot of people are effected by it and there are some cases when people die because of misdiagnosing, a lot of malpractice. That is because a lot of the doctors are taking guesses, they look at you and they take a guess- there is another force out there that they are going by and it has to do with the amount of medicine they prescribe. We have had patients come here that have had so many pills that it is unbelievable; they had a pill for everything and more. Half of the time, that was what was making them sick; they were developing ulcers from Tylenol. They were admitting that they were getting addicted because their tolerance to these drugs were increasing and so in order to make it take effect, they had to add more drugs to it, like codeine as an example- Tylenol 3 with codeine. We have had patients come here that were addicted to codeine prescriptions. They go to the doctor with a particular problem and they look at them and prescribe them Tylenol. I know a lady that had a bottle of 300 Tylenol, I couldn’t believe it. In one day she would take 15 of them and she was wondering why she was sick, (laughs), she was wondering what was going on. I told her to throw her Tylenol away, you don’t need it. One of my doctor friends took sick and he became a very good friend of mine, we work together with natural herbs. He was telling me that when he took sick that his colleagues couldn’t help him. He had to find his own cure and he did and it was natural medicines and we were able to work together, so we shared our information, but not all of it. There are certain things that a person has to earn and it takes time. You have another question?
Yvette: You were talking about working with a doctor. I am going to ask you a related
question. Do you work with Psychologists, Psychiatrists, and Social Workers?
Charles: Yeah, we do. We have clients with Child and Family Services that are under the care of Psychologists, so we did have some contact with Psychologists. General these types of people are reluctant to be with us. Our natural medicines are unorthodox. So, they don’t really bother with us, even though they know our medicine is effective. We get referrals from some doctors- about 5% -10% of our clients is from doctors. You can say that the doctors can’t understand what the ailments are, probably because it is emotionally based. We do work with religious people, people that are ministers, psychiatrist- we do work with some indirectly. We can work together. Where we Sundance, we have a medical doctor, we call him Doc (laughs), he lives in Denver and he is a Sundancer too. I have known him for 18 years. He not only practices modern medicine, he also works with Native and Chinese medicine- acupuncture. He is an interesting character and he Sundances, we watched his son grow up in the Sundance since he was a little boy, now he is a doctor- 18 years later. So we do run across many professional people- Priests, lawyers, monks. All kinds of people Sundance. They come from everywhere, they don’t have to necessarily have to be Indian to Sundance. We have had people come from Japan. We get people from Germany and South America- people come from all over the world to Sundance. It is interesting we get to learn the different cultures all over the world. We even have Druids come- indigenous people from England before the Roman Empire, so we have all walks of life. It is really nice to have that kind of experience where you can meet people from everywhere. We also practice traditional medicines and it is very similar- the procedures might be a little different, but most the herbal medicines are the same. The Chinese people use Sage, but they use it in a different way but the effects- the cure is the same. We do work with many professional people, professors from the colleges. Does that answer your question?
Yvette: Western sciences uses the DSM to conceptualize problems, do you conceptualize problems differently? DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual- Categorizing
Charles: So basically what they are doing is treating people on the commonality of the sicknesses? We do that to some degree. Because we learned as I stated earlier- for an example- a family in New Mexico and a family in Northern Manitoba are sometimes very similar. There really is no difference in the types of problems they experience; they just experience it in a different part of Turtle Island. Generally it’s the same type of sickness or ailment or issues that occurs in the family. So we do- it took awhile to learn how to diagnose people. When we first started, it took 2-3 hours per person. That was back in 1993. Now it takes us about 2 minutes to diagnose people and to determine what type of herbal medicine they need. So we can go through quite a number of people very quickly. We also have ways of verifying too- by their bodies, marks on their bodies. So we have our ways of helping people and this way you can determine ways of helping people by knowing what they are suffering from- cirrhosis of the liver, kidney failure, heart problems. We do have our own instruments. So we are able to do that, but it comes with training, quite a number of years of training, I would say it is even longer than the medical professions training. We do have our methods of operating; we have a way of leaving no scars. For us it is something that needs to be learned over a long period of time.
Yvette: I have kept you for a while now. Is there anything you would like to close with, something that you think needs to be said?
Charles: People need to begin understanding that nature needs to be respected. It’s very important that anything that is taken from nature needs to be put back. Otherwise it’s not going to last and our ancestors prophesized that. We can see what they were talking about in the 70’s, we can see that today. The society needs to begin to respect nature, how to use the resources more effectively, there is a lot of wastage, too much wastage. I have friends that are from Germany. The German people are living in their own land so they have more respect for their land. So they utilize their resources more effectively. When they came over, one of the things they told me was that everything over here seemed artificial, everything around here seems temporary. You look at the building and they look like they are temporary. So the society comes here thinking that way, they know this isn’t their land, they know that they are trespassing, they know that they owe a lot to Turtle Island. They have taken advantage of the resources that exist, to the point where they have become a superpower, the resources within Turtle Island have made this society the superpower it is. Their atomic bombs, their war armaments, to be able to control the world, those resources are from Turtle Island. Also they owe a lot to Turtle Island. To the people that will continue to live on Turtle Island, 500, 600, 700 years, they owe a lot because the destruction that has taken place so far is immense, its immeasurable, you can’t measure the destruction. You can’t measure the effects it has had on the inhabitants, the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, you can’t measure it, it’s very destructive. That is basically in the way that society has to think. We deal with things like racism for example, and all the time society doesn’t understand why they are racist themselves, there is no need for them to be racist. It is something that is intergenerational from there forefathers. Their forefathers came here with a point of view they were looking for the American dream, they were looking for wealth, they were looking for prosperity, and it didn’t matter how they got it. They pillaged and raped to get it, and it caused a lot of destruction. As a result the society today has this guilt and they don’t realize that they have it, so they discriminate against dark skinned people. The society has to be educated too. They have to stop being in denial and that is what seems to happen, you can see the subtle racism vividly, but when you tell them that they are racist, they deny it. So there has to be a lot of education going on. So, we are prepared to sit down and talk with people, we always have been, our people are always willing to share this land, that’s the way they are naturally, they have been taken advantage of. The damaged that has been cause can never be measured. There is no reason for Indians to continue to live on reservations in poverty, in despair, suffering from depression and anxiety. There is no need for them to be there at all. Some of us make it out of there- the prison, the concentration camp. We find our freedom by being able to balance the values of ancestors with modern day society. That is what it is, an everyday walk of life. That is what it is, so we can function any place. I don’t know what else I can say.
Yvette: Thank You.
