Thoughts About Dreamwork with Central Alberta Cree
B. Writing About Central Alberta Cree
Through interviews I am doing for a book about the death of a Native woman. I have further become informed about how dreams function in this culture. At this point I have done about 50 hours of interviews with the principles in this story. Here are two stories from these interviews which illustrate the seriousness of dreams and the confusion about them contemporary Cree can suffer.
Jose Youngchief, a Cree woman from a nearby reserve, was diagnosed with a form of lymph cancer. She was told that she needed radiation therapy. Just before the diagnosis Jose had a dream of five heavyset Indian women with long hair. She was trying to get someplace but each stopped her and told her that they could help her. She turned away from all five of them and finally came to Chase. In the dream Chase took her to an elder and said that this elder would help her. Jose was strongly impacted yet surprised by the dream when she woke. She told her mother about it but at that point, the diagnosis had not been made.
That summer she found out she had cancer. Jose was a young woman in her mid-twenties with two children and although she had a drinking problem she certainly was not ready to die. She went to the western doctors and they told her she needed radiation therapy. Believing in the western way she let them do the first round of radiation therapy. They told her things that she could expect and things that would not happen. Apparently, she was one in ten thousand who had a horrible negative response to the therapy. Her body bloated up and she became extremely ill. Feeling stuck in her pursuit of Western medicine, she started seeing a healer from her own community. This healer and his wife did sweats and prepared herbal preparations for her. They tried to work with her as best they could, but finally the healer said, "I don't think that I can help you."
She was panicked because she didn't want to go back to the western doctors due to the bad response she'd had to the radiation. She didn't know what to do. Ms. Youngchief remembered the dream about Chase, who was an old boyfriend of hers and lived on a different reserve. She called him at work. Due to her past involvement with Chase he was suspicious. She said, "I need to talk to you," but didn't say anything about the illness as she had been told to not tell people about it except her mother and the healers. When she arrived Chase was about to leave, "here, this is the name of the man that you need to see." Somehow he knew who she needed to see. The name was on the table already written out with his phone number.
She called the name on the sheet. It was Harold, a Cree medicine man from Chase's reserve. He said, "Yes, I can help you, but you must wait." Six weeks went by, she heard nothing from Harold. Jose did nothing else during this period. She didn't go to her old healer. She didn't go back to western medicine. She waited on Harold's call. She knew that he would take care of her. She just knew. When finally his call came and she went to see Harold, he took her to the The Old Man. Although in his sixties, Harold is a student of The Old Man who is in his eighties and speaks six Native languages. She was taken to meet the The Old Man because he has to approve the healing relationship. She recognized him, The Old Man was the the old man in her dream who she had never seen before. The Old Man approved of the healing relationship between Harold and Jose.
Harold and Jose became quite close over the next year of her recovery. Harold has no children because of the Native belief that he could pass on the cancer when working with sick people. Harold worked with The Old Man preparing medicines. They came in gallon jugs. Jose was to drink two gallons a week. She went through about 14 gallons over a 3-month period.
Harold told her to go to the doctor to check in both before his treatment and afterwards. At the last checkup the doctor said there were no traces of the cancer whatsoever. All of her blood counts were within the normal range. He laid out the charts printed on yellow paper on the examining table and said, "See, this is where you were before, all your blood counts were way off the chart. Now look, they're all in the normal range." He continued, "I don't know what you're doing but keep doing it." It was a scientific confirmation of the success of Jose's therapy.
Throughout Harold's treatment, Jose never wavered. She didn't try anything else. She didn't do western psychotherapy. She didn't get involved in the recovery movement but she did stop drinking as part of the therapy was to cleanse herself. The young Aboriginal woman did whatever Harold told her to do. She was totally devoted.
Jose is adamant that it was the dream she had about Chase and the Old Man which led to her discovering the right path for her recovery. When retracing her actions prior to calling Chase she recounts five incidences of old long hared, heavy set Indian women or men who offered her help with her cancer. Only after turning away from each did she think Chase and he led her to the healer who could help her. When she recognized The Old Man as from her dream this constituted the proof she needed to go on. Yet the same sort of "proof" was rejected by another Indian cancer patient.
Consider, this story from the period after the diagnosis of Ravenwoman's sisters cancer. Crowwoman was involved with intuitive counseling, cranial psychotherapy, energy work, individual psychotherapy, nutrition and food counseling with others and dream work with me. However, her primary healer was the same 82-year old man Jose had dreamt of. Crowwoman went to the Old Man on the advice of her brother-in-law, who was also a student of the Old Man's. From the beginning of her illness she generally turned her life over to the Old Man.
She refused the radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery the western doctors had suggested saying that she didn't want to poison, burn or cut her body. She wanted to heal or die the traditional way. Although she tried many different techniques of healing and therapy throughout the entire experience with varying degrees of consistency, the Old Man was her primary caregiver.
Her healing regime with the The Old Man consisted of a variety of traditional Native techniques including sweats, fasting, pipe ceremonies, sweet grass, poultice, and various root and herbal preparations which she like Jose had to drink in copious quantities. Every time I saw her she'd have a gallon jug filled with some medicine the Old Man and his helpers had prepared.
A flour, pepper and mustard poultice was another technique that the Old Man used. It was put over the cancer area, left on overnight, and taken off in the morning. There would be sweat underneath which was thought to be a cleaning force, pulling the illness out. The experience that the Old Man and Crowwoman had with the poultice, seems to signify her ambivalence about dying. She was staying with The Old Man and his family for about six weeks, through January and early February of 1992. He'd given her this simple poultice to put just above her groin area on her right leg over the cancer. She had been using the poultice fairly regularly. One night she had a dream that the poultice was pulling out a yellow bile from her. A few days later The Old Man stopped by her room in the morning and commented to her that he had had a dream about her poultice and that it was doing the same thing, pulling out yellow bile. (When I asked the Old Man about these dreams he had not heard of hers and told me not to tell him her dream. Furthermore, Crowwoman told me when she told me her dream that she had not told it to the Old Man.) Immediately after these concurrent dreams, Crowwoman stopped using the poultice. She told her sister, Ravenwoman, that it was uncomfortable as it was always tugging.
When she told me the dream and the following week came back and told me The Old Man's dream and that she'd stopped the poultice, my obvious question was, "Crowwoman, are you sabotaging your treatment? Do you need to die? Do you want to die? Is that maybe what's going on here?" She was not offended by my questions rather she clearly responded, "Yeah, I've thought of that and I don't know." She wasn't sure, but it was something that she had thought of. I told her that I felt that the concurrence of both dreams so close in time was a clear indication that it might work. At the least it would be helpful. She agreed but did not continue with the poultice.
When I asked The Old Man about the poultice dreams after her death, I explained the mutuality of them but not the dreams themselves as he said they should not be told. They both spoke to the fact that Crowwoman could be healed if she did something, but she didn't do it. The Old Man chuckled when I told him this and commented good naturedly, "Well, I should quit smoking but I don't quit smoking. I guess there's a need yet for me to continue to smoke." I was humbled by his gentle response and recognized yet again my own humanity, we don't always do what it is we need to do.
It seems to me that one of the differences between the stories of Jose and Crowwoman is the narrow focus of Jose on her healer who had come to her in a dream. The "proof" in the figure of the Old Man worked for Jose while the "proof" offered Crowwoman of parallel dreams did not seem to have the same effect. Crowwoman turned away from the dreams potential. Crowwoman's strength, as well as her weakness, was her acceptance of a multitude of perspectives. I wonder if her breadth didn't undercut her depth, that is her own cultures attitude of the priority of the dream.
Go to: Dreamworker: (C). Research on Central Alberta Cree
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