RIGHTS: Indigenous Peoples Fight to Protect Healing Knowledge

By Marty Logan Reprint | | Print |

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, May 23 2002 (IPS) - Traditional native healing is under attack in the Canadian courts even as indigenous peoples gather at the United Nations to discuss how to promote and protect their cultures, say aboriginal groups here.

Last October, an Ecuadorian healer was arrested on northern Ontario’s Manitoulin Island after an elder died during a healing ceremony. Juan Uyankar, his son and helper Edgar, and an interpreter were charged with criminal negligence causing death. They face life in prison and have been blocked from leaving the country since their arrest.

Many indigenous Canadians say the charges demonstrate that mainstream society still does not accept their healing practices, which until recently were discouraged and often banned outright. However, Juan Uyankar’s lawyer plans to defend the case as a single unfortunate incident.

“The issue is not whether or not this ceremony is accepted – because it is – or whether or not it works – because it does,” says Bill Trudell.

“Maybe initially people say this is ‘hocus-pocus’, but after they study it for a while they realise this is a sacred procedure that has been going on for thousands of years,” adds the renowned Toronto-based criminal lawyer.

Elder Jane Maiangowi died after Juan Uyankar reportedly treated her with a potion including tobacco and ‘ayahuasca’, a herbal remedy long used by South American aboriginal peoples. The healer had reportedly ministered to more than 200 other people without incident.

Since then, speculation has centred on how ill the woman was before the treatment. Some aboriginals contend that since charges were laid after the death of an elder who was on her deathbed, someone must have an agenda to limit native healing.

“I don’t know why they’re doing it, but they’re not from here,” says Robinson Huron Grand Chief Glen Hare. “An individual passed and that’s unfortunate (but) if one of us dies on the table of a doctor, no one says a damned thing.”

Hare says the incident has split the residents of Wikwemikong, one of six Ojibway communities on Manitoulin. But the leader says he’s convinced the death was an accident.

Supporters of the Uyankars have formed a group to raise money for their defence.

“My husband and I pick medicine,” says Marie Eshikbok-Trudeau, an organiser of the Association in Support of Indigenous Medicine International (ASIMI) on Manitoulin. “We’re kind of taking a stand for our plants because they’re being attacked.”

She says police, who also charged the Uyankars with importing a controlled substance, do not understand aboriginal healing. “Our medicines are not a drug. They are sacred medicines that have been used for thousands of years.”

Protecting native healing and other traditional knowledge is a priority for many of the 900 people in New York attending the inaugural meeting of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the first full-time body devoted to such concerns.

The Forum was created to advise the U.N. economic and social council on how to treat aboriginal issues, including ways to coordinate the various agencies that deal with them. Its 16 members include eight indigenous and eight state-nominated experts, all appointed for three-year terms.

During last week’s session on the environment, Forum member Mililani Trask said governments have failed to create laws to protect indigenous knowledge, despite many of them having signed the Convention on Biodiversity, which calls for national legislation. Such knowledge is increasingly sought by drug companies looking for million-dollar cures for diseases such as cancer.

Trask suggested the Forum draft international standards to be imposed on governments.

Canada has yet to specifically protect indigenous knowledge but the government is set to pass laws regulating natural health products. The health department says those rules will not apply to traditional healers if they do not intend to market their products.

A 1994 national survey found that 10 percent of natives living on-reserve, five per cent of urban aboriginals and three per cent of Metis (the descendants of fur traders and native mothers) had consulted a traditional healer in the previous year.

About one-half of Canada’s more than 800,000 aboriginal people live on government-created reserves.

The newly established National Aboriginal Health Organisation (NAHO) is updating that survey.

“There’s a feeling that (healing) was extinguished, but it just went underground,” says NAHO’s James Lamouche. “In every aboriginal community if you knew who to talk to you would find someone who practises traditional healing.”

But he says healers remain deeply suspicious when authorities talk about regulating what they do. “There would be a huge resistance to it, especially because many healers grew up at a time when the government had banned it,” Lamouche says.

Residents of Akwesasne who once shied away from a traditional medicine and healing centre now knock on the door on weekends looking for advice.

“There has been a tremendous historical effort to eliminate traditional medicine,” says Lee Thomas, who works at the centre on the territory straddling the borders of the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and the U.S. state of New York. “It’s almost like ‘white is right’,” she says. “You have a group of people who actually ended up believing it.”

“Our people were afraid to practise their culture,” adds centre director Emme Mitchell, a nurse trained in mainstream medicine.

With its herbalists, pharmacologists, medicine men and other specialists, native healing is as complex as Western medicine, explain the women.