Sat 30 May, 2009
Here’s a pretty nifty review in the Boulder Daily Camera
http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2009/may/30/broken-arapaho/
AND
if you want to hear a streaming interview with me on KCFR’s Colorado Matters, click here.
AND
if you want to hear me read in person, come to the Boulder Bookstore at 7:30 p.m. on Monday (tomorrow) evening.
THERE IS ONE CORRECTION I WANT TO MAKE, SINCE IT HAS BEEN REPORTED TWICE NOW THAT I DON’T BELIEVE THAT STAN CAN CURE CANCER. THAT’S NOT THE WHOLE STORY. I KNOW SOME NORTHERN ARAPAHO PEOPLE ON THE RESERVATION WHO CREDIT HIM WITH HAVING CURED THEIR CANCER. I BELIEVE THEM. AND I HAVE A WHITE FRIEND WHO WENT TO THE RESERVATION FOR HEALING, AND SHE’S STILL GOT HER CANCER. THE DETAILS ARE HERE IN A Q&A I DID WITH CAROLINE LEAVITTVILLE FOR HER BLOG EARLY IN MAY:
I have to ask: while in a sweat lodge, you witnessed a cancer coming out of a woman’s body. How is that woman now?
This woman, a good friend of mine who happens to be white, was suffering from a particularly virulent strain of breast cancer that had spread to her bones. She was near the end of the year the white medical doctors had predicted she had left to live and arrived on the reservation gulping Oxycodone (a powerful narcotic pain reliever). After the sweat lodge I refer to in the book, Stanford said we’d gotten the cancer out, but if she continued with chemotherapy, she would die. She felt better than ever after the sweat (sweats, actually — she, me, and about a dozen friends made two trips to Stanford’s in which she did four sweat lodges each and a third trip where we did one sweat before we were stopped by torrential rains), and then went home to Kansas. Cultural conditioning being the unstoppable thing it is, she went back on chemo. Awhile later tumors were found in her brain. She is still on chemotherapy. Her sight is starting to go. But she has lived two years past her predicted survival date and is still dancing at parties and being generally delightful. And she’s not on Oxycodone — she makes do with a couple of Aleves a week. And her doctors think she’s a marvel.
What happens in Stanford’s sweat lodge is unknowable to me, but I do think the attitude of the person there for healing is very important. It’s not a magic wand he can wave over just anyone and BAM, heal them. But it’s a healing method friends of mine on the reservation take very seriously, and it works for them. I know that for me the sweat lodge is a hugely mentally healing process.
For my whole interview with Caroline, click here.
THANKS TO SARAH KARIKO (www.sarahkariko.com) for letting me use the above gorgeous photo of Stanford in the corral, with Pinta