Canyon Dreams by Michael Powell

Author:Michael Powell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

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Days later I got to talking with Josie Tsosie, the sophomore team manager, and she was the full and complex spin of a Navajo. She embraced Traditional belief and country music and danced a cowboy two-step. When she felt surges of anxiety, she found peace by listening to Beethoven. She told me her grandfather was a medicine man and well read. She asked if I would like to talk with him. I nodded, yes, please.

The call from Josie came a few days later. I was to meet her grandfather the medicine man at the Burger King in Chinle on Sunday afternoon. I walked into the fast-food joint and found a cowboy gentleman with blue jeans and a handsome suede vest over a flower-print shirt, a new bandanna knotted just so around his neck. He had a Stetson cowboy hat and finely wrought boots with silver spurs.

Her grandfather had dark strong eyebrows that defined a handsome face, and he introduced himself as of the Red House People Clan, his mother’s people. “My name,” he added with a trace of a smile, “is Valentino Domingo, and, yes, that speaks to something beyond Navajo clans.” We retreated to a corner table at a distant remove from Whoppers to talk realms of mystery.

Domingo insisted on calling himself an apprentice medicine man. There was no fixed endpoint to his studies, which stretched into valleys of culture and history and botany. Ceremonies like the Blessing Way, Fire Way, Protection Way, Enemy Way, could extend to five, nine, fifteen days, and consisted of words that must be understood and intuited and recited from memory with emotion and precision. Forget a line or a step and the patient would not heal, would not recover joy.

“I am freer to talk of our Holy People and their stories than I would be in summer, when all are awake and walking the earth. In the Anglo world, stories run linear. We Navajo locate ourselves in timelessness.”

His teachers insisted that Domingo learned the precepts of Western medicine. A wise medicine man acknowledged that cancer treatment often relied on radiation or surgery or chemotherapy. In which case you sought the correct song and incantation to shore up the immune system and bolster the spirit.

To question old practices, to turn your head to the side and think why and where it came from, was to learn. Nothing should be sung, no herb offered, without knowledge. “I notice that the Christian ways don’t always question what they are taught and preach. I have to think about what I am told, and I have to ask questions about everything. I can’t just say, ‘I’m an Indian and I’ll do the ceremony.’”

Domingo was raised in Greasewood, a town at the foot of a low-slung mesa. He came of age in a dense netting of family, riding bulls, and roping horses. Domingo wondered what had become of his biological father and, at the age of twelve, found him working at a barbershop in Window Rock. Domingo walked in and sat in a chair.

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