Report from Santa Fe; Carl Hammerschlag

You Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from U.S. West, providing advanced telecommunication services to New Mexico homes and businesses. And by the best Western High Mesa Inn, your Santa Fe destination, where Alfredo's restaurants serve Santa Fe-style food at affordable prices. I'm Ernie Mills.

This is Refort from Santa Fe. Our guest today, Dr. Carl A. Hammerschlag, I want to get that right. And a writer visiting Santa Fe, but you're not a newcomer to Santa Fe. You first came to Santa Fe when you come out to the West from the East. Let's set the stage of a canker, a little background on yourself. I came to Santa Fe in 1965, I just graduated medical school and finished a rotating internship. I thought I knew everything, an occupational hazard for many newly minted physicians. And I came here with the caricatured pedigree of the mid-60s, and I joined the Indian Health Service as an alternative to going to Southeast Asia. I didn't know a whole lot about Native Americans. I cheered for their side in the movie, but I didn't know a whole lot. So this was a first-time experience for me. Now your discipline initially was as a general practitioner. And that's the role you took on the reservation at that time with the Health Service. Then you went back.

I did. I went back for my training in psychiatry in New Haven, and then I came back to the Southwest. This is where I lost my heart. And for the next 16 years, I was the chief of psychiatry for the Indian Health Service and the Phoenix Indian Medical Center. It's interesting when Yankees come out here, you know, same thing happens to journalists by the way. You come out and you know everything, and they soon teach you, you don't. You're bad. I went to Gallup, New Mexico in 1957. Same feeling though. You fall in love with the area. You have written two books. Now the books, in a sense, although the subject matter seems the same, they have a different direction, don't they? They do. The first book, The Dancing Healers, is essentially a transformational journey. What happens to this young, arrogant physician, which are often synonymous terms? And what it is he learned about, what he thought he knew everything about. It is the education of the physician about how to make the transition from doctor to healer. The second book, The Theft of the Spirit, is not a personal transformational journey.

It's how people can use the material themselves to face the ordinary transitions in their lives, and also the potential catastrophes. The title, and I want to hold up this because it's got a fascinating cover. It's The Theft of the Spirit, a journal to spiritual healing with Native Americans. That's an excellent cover on it. It's published by Simon and Schuster. It is on the book stands now, people are talking about. I think you said at the time, you can let him know that Hammer Schlag is right next to Hemingway, but I don't have to tell people that's just alphabetically. But the book is very well written, and I had gotten into when the Santa Fe is an area that's extremely interested in healing, and we have a lot of herbalist here also. And I picked out a book, Nature's Medicine, The Folklar Romance, Value of Herbal Remedies. This is put out in 1966 by Richard Lucas. At that time, at the use of herbs, again, a lot of the material we're looking at is not

new in a sense, but what he does in a sense, he will give some of the remedies as such, and makes no pretense about saying that this is scientific in a sense, that if there's an herb that might make your hair grow or something, this is what they will use, and you might want to try it or not, but as he says, check your physician first. But it was a sign even then of where people were starting to go back and learning from the past. And a lot of this is in your book, isn't it? It is. I think, you know, that's an interesting point. It is my personal belief that the whole history of civilization would be different. If we only viewed the people that ultimately we conquered as having some information to share with us, instead, the history of civilization is unfortunately repetitive. We think that because they lost, and we, whoever we is, one, that we have nothing to learn from those people. And the truth is that indigenous people have known something about healing and the use of pharmaceuticals, herbs for a thousand years.

You have spent, did you spend most of your time on the Hopi reservation, or did you spend Navajo reservation or both? Well, actually Phoenix was a central referral source for all of the reservation communities in Arizona. The Navajo had their own health service delivery system and their own psychiatrist, but certainly many urban Navajo people. I was involved with high flu a small plane to most of the reservations in the state regularly, taking clinic visits, and then stayed in Phoenix, a referral hospital. You referred to the Hopi as a microcosm of our society, as society as a whole. When you say society as a whole, are you talking about the Americans or the world's societies? Both. I think that the Hopi are still connected in a very real way to a place where they have emerged, at least in this general area of the oldest continuously inhabited villages in this continent, carbon dated back to a thousand, 900 years ago, continuously inhabited

villages on the Hopi reservation. Those people who make it in contemporary life are those who maintain some connection to something they believe in, just like the Hopi have sustained themselves. That in spite of the great changes in our civilization and the advances in our technology, the Hopi are still a soul-surviving temperate to a traditional worldview, a cosmology, that has sustained them in peace. You indicated, if I'm wrong, quickly, correct me, that the Hopi at one time was to satisfy disenchanted with the wrong government, with the Hopi society as such, and that disenchantment might be a reflection of what we've gone through. I'm not sure I talked about it in the book, or we may have had a conversation about that. I think that what happened in Hopi land is that there has been a set up between traditionalists and progressives. What's happened is that when the federal government came, it was difficult for them to deal with traditional religious leaders who held the seat of government, so essentially they created

a different kind of government, and unfortunately it set up the community into two different groups. Part of that has been extremely destructive, and some of the stories that we talk about in the book are how those connections that have sustained the people for thousands of years are becoming distorted because of changes in expectation and the new politicization of a community whose traditional leadership has lost some of its influence. Then what I was looking at then, here in the book, and I jumped back up, I can't because we did a recent television show with Frank Waters, I mean, the Grand Men, and I had asked him, I said, were you talking to the Indian, or to the white man, or to the Anglo, and he said, now he said, I wasn't teaching the Indian anything, I was trying to educate the white man about what the Indian has gone through, and a reflection of what you just said, that in some areas we've been very unkind to the Indian, and in this superimposition of our government upon theirs, and their traditional values as such.

Now there were references in the book, you know, to that. There are, I mean, there are many ways that we have been unkind, but competition for living space rarely breeds good neighborliness. I mean, Columbus did not discover America, I hope that comes as no great surprise. I mean Columbus discovered America, like somebody walking down the street, seeing the keys to your car and the ignition, and then driving it away, saying that he or she discovered it. That's how Columbus discovered America, there were people here for a long time. The truth is that the history of the last 100 years, longer, has been a history of disenfranchisement and neo-colonialism and cycle historical discontinuity, and that has not sat well in Indian country. You know, you use these vignettes throughout the book, and they're very personal. And like recently I've taken our 10-year-old after Universal Studios, and they have one spot on it, where you go through into one of the old movie sets, and if you go through a tunnel, you know, this tunnel starts to move, you know, it's almost like an earthquake type thing.

And if you're looking out the side, you know, you suddenly realize that in that little vehicle you're in, the bus that you're going upside down, later, you know, they tell you that vehicle never moved, it was the tunnel that was moving, but you have a bit in the book about that, about the light at the end of the tunnel. I do. Could you tell us? Well, that's an interesting story I hadn't heard before about Universal Studios, but it does bespeak a principle that says, how you see it may not be the way it is. The way you see it is is just the way you see it, but it doesn't mean it's the way it is. Other people are going to look at the same material, see it differently. And I think that's an interesting point, because I think that many times we get trapped in some perception that we have, and then we're unwilling to give it up. In the book I tell the story of a man who was facing very serious disease. I was in a group of people who were all looking at catastrophic illness, people who had cancer, people who had devastating disease. And this was a self-help group. Everybody in it was looking at some imminent potential disaster.

One man in the group in his early 30s had discovered three weeks before that he had a cancer of the liver, a primary hepatoma, and was told that he needed liver transplant. I mean, here's a man who was essentially healthy and discovered by accident while picking up his child that he had a lump in his side. They did needle biopsy, it was found to be a primary tumor. And now he was facing surgery in which he had a 50-50 chance of operative success. And in the group he went and said, I was healthy three weeks ago, I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. At which point another person in the group, a man in his late 20s who had just sustained a marrow transplant for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a man who had been on his deathbed, and who ultimately had a remission, had an operation, and now was thriving. And he came up to him and touched him and said, this is my story, and this is where I was. And he said, I said the same thing you did.

I did not believe there was a light at the end of the tunnel that I was going to drown. I was going to die. And he said, let me tell you what it is that I have discovered. The light at the end of the tunnel is not an illusion. The tunnel is. It turns out that it's how you come to it, not how it comes to you. It doesn't matter what we face. It matters only that we choose to look again at what it is we thought we knew, rather than to be certain that the way we see it is the only way it is. It's very much like the allegory of the cave, though, isn't it? We're looking at shadows behind the fire and they appear differently to almost everyone. Well, that's an interesting story. I don't know that your viewers are familiar with it, but Plato tells this wonderful story and allegory of slaves and kids. And it's exactly like that. He says, slaves are people who sit on a bench looking at shadows cast from the opening to the cave up against the blank slate wall so that their view of life is all shadow. If you were to take the chains off the slave and allow them to look at the light from a

different perspective to see the objects, not just as reflected shadows, then you could see life from a whole different perspective. He says, you are enslaved when the chains are off. You choose not to look at the light, but only see shadows. Most of us become chained by the shadows of our preconception rather than to look at the light from another perspective. I had another of your vignettes that I found quite meaningful. You know, we have done an awful lot of work in this area on driving well and intoxicated and abuse of alcohol. And a lot of the focus, of course, had been on the reservation in such a tighter laws and asking people to use restraint. I used to have a personal feeling that if you sat down and drank in a happy mode and you were sitting down with people who were happy that the effect of the liquor upon you was not nearly as bad as if you suddenly drank with people you didn't like or you were drinking and had someone, you know, intrude who was someone who wasn't nice, you know, might

start picking on you. I used to think of that as saying you had two pipes, there was a good pipe and a bad pipe. And as long as you were in a happy mode, you know, it went down there and it didn't have the same effect, but then if something bad happened, the bad pipe would open up. You have a section in there on the Bad Belly, tell us about it. Bad Belly, I don't know what it has to do with drinking and DWI and different pipes, but I do think as a general rule, the surrounding makes a difference in how we come to it. So if people are joyful and happy that it has some impact on how we see the world, but that's true generally, whether we're drinking or not. I think if you're surrounded yourself by people who believe and have joy and who come to life with the experience of every new day as a new possibility that that has impact. And if you hang around at the press of that atmosphere, that that too rubs off. I mean, our grandparents knew this, it doesn't take great genius. That was about the bad Belly. But the bad Belly story, now here's an interesting story. Doctors are trained in this country by and large to come to patients with good head.

That is, our knowledge is exceptional and we are scientifically and technologically extremely well-trained. And sometimes that's real helpful. I mean, if you have a detached retina, you want to know somebody who can use a laser beam to reattach it. But most of the practice of medicine is a much more human exchange and most of our training de-emphasizes how we come to patients as individuals because we are supposed to maintain a dispassionate objectivity. That is, we should keep ourselves a little bit detached so it doesn't impair our clinical judgment, our heads are well-trained. I once went to Belize. I was there on a vacation with my family and I happened to go to Samayan ruins and I asked the guide whether there were any Mayan healers left. I happened to be interested in traditional healing and he said it just so happened that his uncle was the last surviving full-blood Mayan healer. And it just so happens, one of those coincidences that are probably destined, that he lived

in a village on the way back to our hotel, that we just happened to be driving through so I just happened to stop. And he was holding clinic hours. There were people in an orange grove waiting to see him in a shack about four foot by five foot covered with banana palm fronds. Oh, Saturday evening post and a thing. Well, no Saturday evening post, nothing, just a bench actually and a table on which was a candle and some copal incense when my turn came, I went in with the driver who helped me speak in my elementary Spanish, but I didn't want to take up too much time. There were a lot of people waiting to see him, so I wanted to cut to the quick and ask him the really crucial questions. So this 93-year-old man whose name was Danielio Banti, who was declared a national treasure by the way, by the Belizean government and who was wearing a tradition Mayan white blouse that was embroidered and white pants tied with a rope belt and barefooted. I'm looking at him and I say to him, I'm a physician, I work with indigenous people,

I'm interested in healing, and I would like to ask you what's the most important thing you've learned that enables you to be a healer? I mean, in all these years, what's the most important thing that you've learned that enables you to heal? And the old man thinks about the question and finally says, through my interpreter, that the most important thing he's learned, that enables him to heal is not to take a cold drink on a hump day on an empty stomach. The interpreter tells me this, and I look at him with disbelief. Don't take a cold drink on a hump day on an empty stomach, that's the most important thing he's learned, so I'm sure that he has asked the question badly, or that somehow it was misinterpreted, I said, ask him again, so he asked him again, what's the most important thing you've learned that enables you to heal? And the old man looks at me smiling and says, the most important thing he's learned is don't take a cold drink on an empty stomach on a hump day, so I ask him, why? And the old man says, because it gives you bad belly, bad belly.

I still don't know what he means, so I say, what do you mean bad belly? And he says, you can't treat patients with bad belly. You have to come to patients with a good belly. And I understand this now, most of us who are trained in Western medicine come to our patients at best with no belly at all, good head, no belly. We are objective, we are detached, we are distanced, but we don't know our people, and they don't know us. They know the genius of our technology, but not the essence of our heart and spirit. It's very important to come to patients not only with good head, but with good belly too. I think that part of the problem we see in contemporary life, in terms of increases and malpractice suits, and the whole litigious atmosphere, is because we have separated and distanced ourselves from patients. We've become so technically adept by compartmentalizing patients into their body parts, so now we only relate to their eyes or their livers or their gastrointestinal system, but we don't spend any time talking to people.

The great crisis in medicine, and the reason I think that people are looking for alternatives, is because they can't spend enough time with their doctors who make them feel as if they truly care about who they are, not just what they've got. Now, there's a movement now, I think, more so than ever. And I don't think you can separate what you've been talking about from, you know, what you look upon as the Gestalt, you know, that you are to separate one thing from another. But there is a movement now, trying to bring these, what you're talking about into, you know, a better practice. I think so. Yeah. Describe it for us if you can. Well, I think that basically, and now we're talking about healthcare delivery in this country as an issue of managed competition. Now, did you ever hear a phrase that has less healing or quality to it? Bad belly. As if somehow medicine can be practiced as a managed competitive arena. I think that more and more, both doctors and patients recognize that the joy that comes from healing relationships has to do with how we come together. I think that more and more, my colleagues have become trapped by the business of medicine,

by the management of our competition, or by the reimbursement from third-party pairs. And it steals our spirit, that the reasons that most of us come into healing professions are because we care truly about people, and we would like to make a difference in their lives. But the management of medicine, by all kinds of influences outside of that relationship, now impact on what it is we can do with people, how long they can be hospitalized, what diagnoses are reimbursed for, whether or not an individual can have an extended stay. All of it colludes in managing the practice of medicine as some kind of an administrative exchange rather than a human condition. Well, when we recently had a, we called it for a while, a mystery epidemic out here, but it was a hunt, a hunt of virus, and the tribal leaders, the Native Americans, were upset with the way that the media handled it.

And I found it interesting because if we have a health fair, we find maybe one or two reporters talking about the health fair where you may save 8, 10, 20 lives, you get 600 reporters, reporting where 8 lives are lost, and some mystery epidemic is such. One of the major complaints was the lack of understanding about the culture of the Indians. Your own feeling, if you can, and I don't want to inhibit you in any way, about the hunt of virus. I know you feel strongly about it. Well, let's talk about that a little bit. Lots of people felt badly that the hunt of virus was called a novel illness or the novel flu. I mean, that kind of judgmentalism, like you could catch it from a native person. There are cases in which I have relatives who were fused to be served at restaurants because people were afraid that they would catch it. That kind of judgmentalism is very hard to bear in Indian country and very sensitive. The interesting thing with the hunt of virus is that from a Western perspective, and in New Mexico, the state has been involved enormously and state epidemiologists have made statements

that native people have heard as stop practicing your traditional ways. Whether it was said or not, I'm not sure, but how it was heard was stop dancing. The hunt of virus seems to be spread by rodentruppings. And the western way of looking at this is get rid of the rodents or eliminate the pathogen of virus itself. That's the way. So that if you dance, you can render the droppings airborne, and now you can more easily breathe them in. So you understand from a Western perspective that to eliminate doing some rituals, for example, would be a way to control the epidemic. Not to paraphrase from a native perspective, this is a short-sighted view. The traditional novel of people, to whom I speak, they laugh when they think about stopping to dance. They think they have to dance more. Why? They think that treating the hunt of virus by either eliminating the rats, or by finding a vaccine against the virus, or some chemical to treat it as a short-sighted view. It's like treating the fever of leukemia by giving aspirin.

We take the fever away, but it doesn't do anything for the underlying disease. Very bad belly. Bad belly. The old people they say, the reason that we're seeing hunt of virus, is because we are not taking good care of this earth, and we have not taught our stories to our children well. We have not taught our language and our stories. We have not taught them the what it is that has allowed us to sustain ourselves as a people since the beginning of time, is to perpetuate not only our language, but our cosmology, how we see the world. And the reason that we are seeing changes in climate is because we have not served our role as caretakers of the earth well enough. They believe that in order for us to deal with the hunt of virus to have to dance more. Why? We have lost touch and connection with the idea that to get well doesn't just mean to eliminate virus. It means that you're going to have to treat the place much better. Our bodies cannot be well if the air that we breathe is not well. If the waters of the real percol are distorted because of uranium tailings, if our ground waters are becoming contaminated, if there are programs that bury nuclear waste in the

earth of New Mexico, and that the potential is that if we don't take good care of the earth, it's not going to take good care of us. You can't be healthy. If your heart and lungs are in good shape, if you do all kinds of marathon running, you can't be healthy if the air you breathe is contaminated and poisoned or the water you drink, or if there's global warming causing changes in temperature, or changes in the ozone layer so that we have skin cancers here that do 10 times a national average, we need to take better care of the place. The old people, they see themselves as caretakers of the entire universe, not just the novel drive, and that the reason that we are seeing these outbreaks, these epidemics, has something to do with not taking good care of this place, this earth mother place. To deal with the virus is not going to change what it is we're facing as a civilization. They knew that there would come a disease, and they knew it would come this year, because the pinions were in bloom for months, and the extended season had something to do with increased rainfall. And what happened was that undoubtedly the rats have been multiplying, because of a

plentiful food supply, so what we may be seeing in terms of the antivirus, may say something simply about an increase in the rat population. Being a virus that may have always been present, the way to deal with antivirus is not solely eliminating rats, but to look at what it is we're doing to the earth, otherwise we will never sustain ourselves as a people, so we need to dance more. Well, we're dancing where we have about two minutes left, bringing the good head and the good body to our viewers now, a final message if you can for today. Good head and good body means that you have to stay connected inside, that what you know with your head and what you feel in your gut are equally important. Don't lose sight of the fact that most of us only believe what we know, that which can be experimentally proven, and we tend to minimize that which we can learn because we feel because we intuit it, pay attention to your gut to your belly. The truth is always closer to what you feel in your heart than what you know in your head, because the heart knows things the mind never thought of.

The heart you see has not yet been crippled with self-doubt, so if you want to pay attention to what's really important, pay attention to the voice in here, and then use it to make a difference in your life. There is a very quickly, you had mentioned once about, like in the 70s, when you take a Navajo rug that costs, say, from a rug from a chief, $1,200, and today if you go to South Bees, find that same rug going for a half million dollars, and what this is doing to the cultural values, one hand, people say you're getting a lot more money for it, it's not what's happening, isn't it? It's a complicated question that belies a short answer, but basically, when we escalate the value of traditional art, sometimes people steal it and sell it, and we see that happening with increasing frequency, one's birth rate, one's spirit becomes exploited as a marketable commodity, and they are disappearing. Our guest today is Dr. Karo Hamishlag, who is the author of The Theft of the Spirit. I want to read this again if I may, a journey to spiritual healing with Native Americans.

Karo, thank you for sharing that with us today. Thank you very much to be with you. I'm Arne Mose, and I'd like to thank you for sharing with us on Report from Santa Fe. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from U.S. West, providing advanced telecommunication services to New Mexico homes and businesses, and by the best western High Mesa Inn, your Santa Fe destination, where Alfredo's restaurants serve Santa Fe style food at affordable prices. Thank you very much.