Ritual Retellings (original) (raw)
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Indigenous Traditional Healing Annotated Bibliography 6 2024
Ward, J. T. (2024). "Indigenous resilience and healing through dreams and spirituality." Dreaming. Through Indigenous dream knowledge, Indigenous youth are beginning to find or achieve a new resilience. Their new set of guidance is coming from the dream narrative's contribution to healing their trauma as more and more people take back their stolen culture, especially, regarding dreams and spirituality that may aid in the building of resilience and healing of trauma. This article looks at the concept of Indigenous dream narrative from the intersections of resilience, spirituality, healing, and trauma by looking at traditional knowledge shared through lived experiences to understand this essential part of Indigenous culture. There are many ways of interpreting of dreams, however, this article will focus on the wisdom and knowledge of Elders and others, who are familiar with Indigenous social-cultural and spiritual perspectives. Analyzing dreams or 'dream weaving' is a conduit with a message that can bring about healing and well-being (Lorenz, 2013; Riley-Mukavetz, 2021). An evaluation of dreams, lucid dreaming, and dream knowledge will be included along with spirituality and two-eyed seeing. This enables a duality for assessing how dreams are interpreted within a healing context. Interpreting dreams through the areas of spirituality and healing puts this method in conjunction with the Elders' roles. This knowledge presented, reflects my own lived experience as an educator of settler-Indigenous background, as I acknowledge how dreams are used to interpret one's spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental stability.
Traditional indigenous healing: Part I
Complementary therapies in nursing & midwifery, 2004
Traditional indigenous healing is widely used today, as it has been since time immemorial. This article describes the following areas in regards to traditional healing: (a) an explanation of indigenous peoples, (b) a definition of traditional indigenous healing, (c) a portrayal of traditional healers, (d) health within indigenous culture, (e) traditional healing techniques, (f) utilization of traditional healing, (g) how to find a traditional healer, and (h) comparing traditional healing principles with mainstream ways. It is important to have knowledge about this method of holistic healing so health care providers and nurses can integrate it into the health care for individuals and/or families that choose traditional indigenous healing.
The indigenous healers adopt a holistic approach in considering the factors that led up to the disease. The treatment is tailored in such a way that addresses the needs of the physical bodies, their psyches, their families and the community. This approach is based on the conviction that all beings and elements of nature are interconnected and affect each other in profound and subtle ways. Disease provides a valuable clue to what needs to change in our lives. It needs to be approached with love instead of fear, the body engages in that language in order to make us aware of the disharmony that exists in our whole being. It brings about transformation and growth. Rudolph Ballentine puts it beautifully, “Sickness and Health become a major way you learn from life. Although dysfunction and disease point to what you need to work on; they also hold the seeds of your enfoldment…, illness is an opportunity for growth and transformation”. Spiritual healing is fundamental to all kinds of healing. When the spirit is nurtured, the physical being flourishes and a serene state is achieved. The spirit is immortal and contains all the files of our lives, forms the template of our core being. Ignoring its presence is detrimental to our health. The understanding of the relationship of the body, mind and spirit is crucial to all healers for it is the doorway to holistic healing. When the spirit incarnates, it receives a body. The purpose of the body is to serve as a vehicle so that the spirit can experience and explore itself further so that it remembers its true nature, which is the nature of the Divine. The body, once it tastes the pleasures of this world, chooses to suffer amnesia, and immediately a disharmonious relationship is created. The dis-ease drains our life energy; we lose the rhythm of nature; thus, the signs and symptoms of the dis-ease manifest in the physical while the roots are strongly anchored at an emotional level.
2008
The persistence of traditional healers in contemporary Aboriginal society is based on the persistence of a worldview that includes non-physical causality and non-physical conscious agents. Anthropology, based as it is in Western culture, does not engage with the experiential foundation for this worldview but limits itself to descriptive accounts or seeks to interpret it thr ough psychological or sociological prisms. This article makes a case for an experiential anthropology and for the analytic use of the out-of-body experience and related research as a useful model by which to interpret Aboriginal accounts of dreams. It suggests that this could lead to a reevaluation of the practice of traditional healers and open new avenues for cross-cultural engagement in a contemporary environment where traditional Aboriginal culture is increasingly sidelined from public policy discourse.
Traditional healing: A review of literature
2011
The major focus of this paper is Aboriginal healing. The literature review was originally presented as a preface to en evaluation of a healing centre in Alice Springs, Australia. The healing centre, Akeyulerre, was established by Arrernte Elders and community members as a place for Arrernte and other Aboriginal people to enjoy their cultural life and practice. It was designed to give people the right to access their own knowledge systems their way. It was also established to work in partnership with mainstream western systems to ensure a strong understanding of cultural knowledge systems. The purpose of the paper is not to comment on the findings of the Akeyulerre evaluation, though the evaluation project will be referred to in the context of the literature. The authors recognise that there are broader implications arising from an understanding of this topic which are of importance to policy makers, researchers and Indigenous people with an interest in traditional healing. The paper attempts to answer three questions: 1. What do indigenous peoples of the world understand the nature of traditional healing to be? 2. How does mainstream health service delivery and policy respond to traditional healing approaches? 3. What do mainstream service providers understand the outcomes of traditional healing to be?
CULTURE AND MEDICINE: HEALERS AND HEALING PRACTICES
Course Description: Every culture and society has had to deal with illness and thus has well-developed concepts about the healing process, healers, diagnosis, medical treatment, medical knowledge and healing practices. This course offers a cross cultural exploration of medical systems, healers and healing approaches. In Healers and Healing Practices we examine differences and similarities in the ways that people approach illness and healing by relying heavily on an abundance of examples from various cultures, including that of the United States. We examine illness causation and classification theories, diagnostic practices, therapeutic procedures, preventive care, the assumptions that underlie medical concepts and practices, and medicine's relationship to the social, cultural, and technological environments in which it is constructed and practiced. The course focuses on the role of the healer in the context of culture and will examine physicians, shamans, witch doctors, curanderos/as, midwives, wise men and women, and other healers. The course also explores the use of medicinal herbs, music, healing aids, and pharmaceuticals in the healing process. Informed self-reflection and critical analysis of one's own worldview assumptions and medical beliefs system are fundamental to the course. Prerequisites: None Course Objectives: • Distinguish between different illness etiologies • Understand the role of the healer in distinct medical systems • Know the fundamentals of the Great Medical Traditions • Compare patient/provider relationships in varied medical systems • Learn that there are many ways of knowing and doing regarding health and illness • Engage in critical thinking regarding the relationship between health care and culture, environment, and economy • Appreciate the traditional relationship between medicine and religion • Employ the holistic perspective when attempting to understand human phenomena, including health care and medical treatment
Journal of Aboriginal Health (Accepted for publication but subsequently withdrawn by authors), 2008
This paper describes the lessons learned from efforts to develop greater understanding between traditional Aboriginal and western medical traditions and practitioners. Between 2003 and 2008, the Building Aboriginal Health Teaching and Learning Capacity project at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Medicine, sponsored a series of unique, land and community-based gatherings that brought together traditional Aboriginal healers and ceremonial leaders, clinicians and medical students. The gatherings provided an opportunity to develop and pilot curriculum materials, modules and culturally-appropriate teaching methods as well as providing a forum for a much deeper dialogue between medical specialists from both traditional Aboriginal and western clinical backgrounds. To work generatively between cultures has required us to learn how to navigate through complex ethical, social, cultural, political, spiritual and personal terrain, and in this paper, we share some of the process as well as the outcomes of that learning. Our conclusions stress the importance of building respectful and meaningful relationships as a foundation for learning and practice.
Indigenous Narratives of Health: (Re)Placing Folk-Medicine within Irish Health Histories
The Journal of medical humanities, 2015
With the increased acceptance of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) within society, new research reflects deeper folk health histories beyond formal medical spaces. The contested relationships between formal and informal medicine have deep provenance and as scientific medicine began to professionalise in the 19th century, lay health knowledges were simultaneously absorbed and disempowered (Porter 1997). In particular, the 'medical gaze' and the responses of informal medicine to this gaze were framed around themes of power, regulation, authenticity and narrative reputation. These responses were emplaced and mobile; enacted within multiple settings by multiple agents and structures over time. The work is drawn from secondary material from Ireland, which identify more indigenous narratives of health and act as potential sources for medical humanities. While assumptions have been made as to the place of folk-medicine being essentially rural, evidence will be presented ...