A native boy hurried through a thorn bush.
With his mouth stained a deep purple and his purse full of blackberries, he glances at the fading colors on the horizon - the sun will soon set, and he won't have to endure any more bedtime stories about the importance of respecting the elderly and the young.
His mom was already waiting for him to come back, and the blackberry (Biberl/CC BY-SA 4.
0) is right over there, he thought, and then I'll be home in no time, when suddenly a stabbing stabbing stabbing stabbed through his leg.
He looks down in shock and realizes the end of a rattlesnake, slithering away.
His eyes darted back to his leg, now bleeding profusely, two perfect puncture wounds dripping in his bright youthful blood.
He hobbled back to his mother in horror, who watched him from afar, coming through the trees, her warning intent quickly turning to urgency.
She flew through the forest, looking for the only help her son would need from the doctor, unaware of the boy's predicament, the doctor began his 'magic'.
Powder, liquid, ointment, words.
He seeks guidance from the Great Spirit and invites the plant to work with him as an ally who intuitively administers the medicines he acquires, both spiritual and tangible.
Long ago, he accepted the call to be a healer in good faith, and by dawn, the boy's heart once again found its natural rhythm, and he drifted off to dreamland, traumatized but grateful to the tribes and peoples who once occupied the land we now call America, who imagined and developed surprisingly effective ways of healing to offer their healing community.
While Native American medicine and healing traditions are diverse, many of their foundational aspects are very similar.
All of these emphasize the importance of a multidimensional understanding of life and nature, and the interconnectedness of all aspects of what it means to be "alive.
Many Native American medicines center on animal symbols, combining the animals that are most important to them, such as the tortoise, rabbit, bear, deer, eagle, and wolf, and for the First Nations people of the Americas, every plant, animal, and stone, no matter how invisible or small, possesses a spirit.
Each spirit is unique, and each form of life is given the respect and appreciation it deserves.
The spiritual dimension overlaps with the material dimension and *** enjoys time and space.
They see their spirit (soul) and body as a unique expression and extension of the natural world.
In fact, natural law itself is seen as a force working with, rather than against, the Native American proverb (source), which states explicitly that human blood "flows back" into the sea, despite the fact that the general healing and restorative properties of seawater have been recognized for thousands of years.
It demonstrates their belief in the relevance and similarity of blood to the sea.
While some may see this proverb as a whimsical, poetic statement as a warning to white people, perhaps there is also an underlying scientific truth.
In 1897, a French doctor named Rene Quinton made the remarkable discovery that human blood is 98% identical to seawater.
Seawater is completely saturated with so many life-nourishing minerals that it bears a striking resemblance to human plasma, or to be precise, the "water" portion of human blood, and the French biologist, Rene Quinton (1866-1925), at the peak of his career, developed a method of utilizing the very same water as human blood. Dr. Quinton developed a method of healing and curing many health conditions using very specific injections of seawater.
Unfortunately, the legacy of his healing method was eventually shut down by those friends within the French *** who feared losing sales in their burgeoning pharmaceutical industry to modern Western thinkers, irreversibly trained in a linear way of thinking based entirely on logic, and these facts beg the question: how did the First Peoples know about the complex and astonishing chemical composition of their blood? The oceans themselves? With no microscopes or laboratory equipment, and no (apparent) knowledge of minerals or molecules, how could they possibly have causally understood what it took centuries for modern science to "discover"? Is this a lucky guess, or did the Western world make a mistake in assuming the depth of knowledge possessed by Native Americans? In order to better understand their methods of gathering knowledge and information, an examination of the medicine wheel may yield a greater understanding of the traditional healing of indigenous communities: the medicine wheel (source: Prezi), The medicine wheel is a basic concept used as a symbolic reference in the healing traditions of many different indigenous tribes.
It consists of four quadrants, representing north, east, south and west.
Other categories of the wheel include stages of life, seasons of the year, elements (fire, air, water, earth), sacred plants and animals, and general aspects of life (mental, physical, spiritual, emotional), the medicine wheel, Native American sacred sites and National Historic Landmarks in Wyoming (the public ****domain), and sometimes the manifestation of the medicine wheel was (and is still) the physical earthwork structure .
At an elevation of 9,642 feet (2,938 m) above sea level in Wyoming, the Big Horn Medicine Wheel is a circular structure formed by carefully placed stones .
The wheel itself is 80 feet (24 meters) in diameter, with 28 spokes protruding from the center, and a cairn in the middle, which is 12 feet (3.
6 meters) in diameter and 2 feet (60 centimeters) high.
There were six other Cairns incorporated into the wheel design, purposefully placed at intervals around the edge of the wheel where the spokes terminated.
It has been speculated that the central Cairn was also used to support a large column for the Wyoming Bighorn Medical Wagon.