Meeting the Medicine Men: An Englishman's Travels Among the Navajo | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles Langley
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1018558
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 296
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 1857885074
Dewey Decimal Number: 978.90049726
EAN: 9781857885071
ASIN: 1857885074
Publication Date: May 25, 2008
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Product Description
A chance meeting with a young Navajo Indian propels an English traveler out of his middle-class life and into the world of North American Indian Medicine Men, a world where people genuinely believe that witchcraft can bring ruin, even death, and only Medicine Men have the knowledge to lift curses and restore the sick to health. Along the way, he travels across the beautiful Southwest, famous for its fabled Route 66 and breath-taking scenery.
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fascinating though controversial August 4, 2008
Langley, a jaded newspaper editor from London, travels to the American Southwest and gradually is allowed to become an apprentice to Blue Horse, a Navajo Medicine Man. In his book, he recounts Blue Horse's skill at "de-witching" and removing curses from individuals and families. He also describes a session in a sweat lodge, a Beautyway ceremony, and his visions while taking peyote along the San Juan River with a Navajo friend.
One has to be careful with books like this. Marlo Morgan's MUTANT MESSAGE DOWN UNDER, presumably about an American woman's "walkabout" with Australian Aborigines and the ancient wisdom she learned from them, was almost entirely made up. Langley, who has since become a student of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, is sincere, but his outsider's account should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt (no pun intended). That's not to say that a Navajo "insider's" account of wichcraft, healing, and visions shouldn't be taken with a grain of salt either. But some of the book seems padded for atmosphere, and parts of the book have the ring of fiction, such as a scene in which a "death car" pursues Langley in his rental car across a northern Arizona highway. But who's to say?
The other issue is to what extent a white author should divulge information he is privileged to witness in a traditional Native culture. Too often, traditional Native knowledge is coopted by the New age community. The book has the endorsement on the back of Emerson Jackson, Sr., a Navajo elder and former president of the Native American Church of North America, whose members legally take peyote as a kind of sacrament during ceremonies. Langley writes with great respect for Navajo people and traditions. But one wonders if Blue Horse or Langley's Navajo friends who were on the receiving end of witchcraft and curses would have been as likely to welcome him in their ceremonies had they known he would write a book divulging such secrets. Tony Hillerman was criticized by many on the Navajo Nation for incorporating traditional Navajo ceremonial knowledge in his mysteries.
I found Langley's sensational account hard to put down. He writes with skepticism at first, but then credulity when the situation calls for it, and humor, especially in describing how his Navajo friends become gradually more accepting of his being a "bilagaana"/white man. His book, thankfully, attempts to be a factual account and does not have that "New age/shaman wisdom" ring to it, but reminds us that in lower-48-states America, pockets of traditional cultures have preserved beliefs, wisdom, and traditions that go back thousands of years, and may have a lot to say to our crazy contemporary world.
For a better book, though, about a white man's journey across the Navajo Nation, try Douglas Preston's beautiful TALKING TO THE GROUND, about a horseback journey Preston and his wife and daughter took across the northern Navajo Nation, and the landscapes, people, and knowledge they encounter there.
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