Traditional Indian Medicine: American Indian Wellness

Traditional Indian Medicine: American Indian Wellness by Dr. Patrisia Gonzales is the first textbook of its kind to provide a curriculum about traditional healing and wellness practices among American Indians in the United States. Authored by Dr. Patrisia Gonzales, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, the e-book offers guided questions, prompts and key words to about 20 articles and book chapters, mostly authored by Native peoples. Traditional Indian Medicine is considered the first textbook on Traditional Indian Medicine and traditional wellness centered on content created by American Indians and Indigenous peoples. With its emphasis on content created by American Indian medicine keepers and scholars, the text book offers an intimate perspective on TIM from the viewpoint of Indigenous peoples.

The textbook addresses the complexities of American Indian worldviews along with shared values that allow for a conversation across various Native traditions based on correspondences in certain values, such as a relationship to place, and how key attributes of respect, reciprocity, responsibility and regeneration become expressed in TIM. The articles include writings by American Indian medical doctors and nursing scholars, Indigenous activists in the food sovereignty movement, leading Native thinkers and scholars such as Gregory Cajete and Anna Lee Walters, and artists such as Joanne Shenandoah. It also includes videos links and website links to sites such as the National Library of Medicine (Native Voices: Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness). The textbook is presented in a way that it can be used at various levels of instruction, ranging from a general education course to part of a supporting curriculum for an upper division course.

Traditional Indian Medicine: American Indian Wellness addresses the relationship between Indigenous ways of knowing and American Indian healing systems and key values that are important to understanding the context of American Indian Wellness.  The readings provide culturally specific contexts that help a student of the topic to better understand the profound philosophies that are contained within various healing systems that express TIM. The book contains content from array of Native Nations, including the Navajo, Ojibwe, Tohono O’odham and Yaqui nations and the Six Nations peoples, whose original territories are now bounded by the United States and Canada. The book addresses topics such as the relationships between self-determination and wellness, relationships with the natural world as relatives that participate in healing, intergenerational trauma and Native resiliency and various American Indian wellness models. Discussion questions ask the reader to consider foundational ideas central to TIM systems, such as what are Native concepts of “medicine”; who/what is involved in healing; how do relationships with the four elements of life (water, air, fire and earth) create medicine ways, and protocols and ethics in Indigenous healing systems. Plant knowledge is addressed through topics such as the use of Indigenous tobacco for prayers as well as the introduction of commercial, adulterated tobacco into Native societies. Cultural appropriation and stereotypes, as well as environmental justice and sacred sites, provide for a critical examination of topics related to TIM.  In effect, students and readers are exposed to the complex systems of knowing and historical contexts of various American Indian nations through their healing systems.

The book contains artwork from the Native collection of the Arizona State Museum and artwork by Navajo artist Ronald Chee, making it a graphically inviting learning tool for the student.