Indian Healing Beliefs

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experience that leads one into
the study of medicine, or being born into a family that includes
generations of medicine people. Many tribes have both men and women
medicine people, but some tribes have only medicine women. Many medicine
people have a specialty, such as herbalist, bone setter, midwife, or
counselor. The Hopi tribe has Effie, a medicine women who learned the art
of using herbs. Each person is effective and useful at what he or she does,
and they each have distinct ways of doing their work. They are ‘medicine'
in their cultures; learned, capable individuals who hold places of respect
in their communities.
One must be very careful when using the term's medicine man or
women, healer, or shaman, because these are terms for concepts for which
there are no direct translation from tribal languages. Each tribe has a
particular title for its healers, a title not easily gained, for knowledge
of these professions is closely guarded and many long years of
apprenticeship ...

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