Medicine person

This entry describes an office and does not describe any ceremony. That is deliberate, and the reasoning is worth setting out so that it is not mistaken for an omission.

Detailed accounts of Dine chantways, of Lakota ceremony, of Pueblo ritual and of much else were recorded and published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by ethnographers who were told not to publish them, or who never asked. The nations concerned have objected, repeatedly, formally, and in writing. Those objections have not been withdrawn because the material has been in libraries for a century.

The argument that publication is now harmless because the material is already available gets the situation backwards. The availability is the injury. Repeating it does not neutralise an old wrong; it extends it, and it transfers the benefit to whoever is doing the repeating.

There is a second reason, narrower and equally sufficient. Ceremonial knowledge in these traditions is held by particular people who are responsible for it. A description assembled from published sources by someone outside that chain is not authorised by anyone, and is frequently wrong in ways the writer cannot detect.

So the entry says what can be said: that these specialists are trained over years, that the training is by apprenticeship, that the authority is recognised by a community and can be withdrawn by it, and that competence is specific rather than general. What the ceremonies consist of is not ours to publish.

The same reasoning is applied elsewhere in this atlas, to closed initiations in West African and Haitian traditions, and to five mantras that are recorded as restricted with their formulae deliberately absent.

For much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ceremonies medicine people conduct were criminalised outright by United States federal policy: the Religious Crimes Code of 1883 empowered reservation agents to prohibit and punish traditional dances and ceremonies, and enforcement under this and related policies suppressed public ceremonial practice on many reservations for decades, driving much of it into concealment rather than ending it. Canada's Indian Act carried comparable prohibitions, including a ban on the potlatch and related ceremonies that remained in force into the twentieth century.

Legal protection came only much later and remains incomplete. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 was the first explicit federal statement that Native peoples in the United States have a right to practice their traditional religions, and subsequent litigation has tested how far that right extends against competing claims, including cases over access to sacred sites on federal land and over the use of otherwise controlled substances such as peyote in ceremony, an exemption now recognised in United States federal law for members of the Native American Church. The medicine person, and the community that recognises and depends on that person, practises today under legal protections that are recent, were won rather than given, and continue to be actively defined and defended in court.