Healthy Body, Healthy Mind: Dull Knife Memorial College offers alcohol and mental health programs tribalcollegejournal.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tribalcollegejournal.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Relying upon traditional knowledge and native plants, indigenous people have been treating illnesses successfully for thousands of years. After the arrival of Europeans on this continent, however, medicine became one of the battlefields in the cultural war.
Both patients and students of healing had to choose between traditional practices and Western medicine. Patients who used herbs or went to medicine people felt compelled to keep that secret from their Western doctors, who wanted to focus upon treating the patient’s body without regard for the mind or spirit.
Indians who went to medical school, meanwhile, found a fiercely competitive, inhumane atmosphere, which would not tolerate their commitments to family or their cultural taboos. Instead of humility, a basic value of Native culture, they found affirmation of egotistical behavior.
Cheyenne Memories, Margot Liberty, 1972. These memories painstakingly collected over the years are considered highly accurate.
One of the memories came from Stands In Timbers’ grandparents who told how they as children hunted buffalo in a “big hole” near present day Sundance, Wyoming. This could very well refer to the Vore Buffalo Jump (VBJ) which is near Sundance and between Devil’s Tower and the Black Hills, then a highly traveled route for many Plains Tribes, including the Northern Cheyenne. The VBJ, a historic and archaeological site documents that various Plains Tribes used this location and method of harvesting buffalo for about three centuries.