What if the path to healing isn’t just through Western medicine, but through tradition, spirit and community? In this episode, Dr. Denise Millstine hosts a powerful conversation with author Aaron John Curtis and Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke, exploring traditional Native healing through Curtis’s debut novel Old School Indian. As they unpack the journey of protagonist Abe Jacobs — a man navigating a mysterious autoimmune illness and rediscovering his voice — the episode dives deep into the role of spirituality and cultural identity in healing.
What if the path to healing isn’t just through Western medicine, but through tradition, spirit and community? In this episode, Dr. Denise Millstine hosts a powerful conversation with author Aaron John Curtis and Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke, exploring traditional Native healing through Curtis’s debut novel Old School Indian. As they unpack the journey of protagonist Abe Jacobs — a man navigating a mysterious autoimmune illness and rediscovering his voice — the episode dives deep into the role of spirituality and cultural identity in healing.
This episode was made possible with the generous support of Ken Stevens.
We talked with:
Purchase OLD SCHOOL INDIAN.
Got feedback?
Dr. Denise Millstine
Welcome to the “Read. Talk. Grow.” podcast, where we explore health topics through books. Our topic today is traditional healing, specifically Native medicine. Our book is “Old School Indian” by Aaron John Curtis. I'm your host, Dr. Denise Millstine. I'm an assistant professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic, where I practice women's health, internal medicine, and integrative medicine.
Aaron John Curtis, who is an enrolled member of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, which he’ll tell you is the white name for the American side of Ahkwesáhsne. Aaron has judged for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance prizes, the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Since 2004, Aaron has been Quartermaster at Books & Books, Miami’s largest independent bookstore. “Old School Indian” is his debut novel. Aaron, welcome to the show.
Aaron John Curtis
Thank you.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke is the executive director at Red Road Medicine, a World Health Organization Civil Society Organization. She's also the CEO of her medical practice, SheDoc.com and a Minister of Wholeness at Shadow Rock Church in Phoenix, Arizona. She's a founding diplomat of both the American Board of Holistic Medicine and the American Board of Integrative Medicine. Dr. Clark's integrative approach blends Western medicine with traditional Native healing and spirituality in her practice known as accu-wholeness, which emphasizes healing of the body, mind, and soul. Patricia, welcome to the show.
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
Thank you.
Dr. Denise Millstine
“Old School Indian” is a novel about Abe Jacobs, a middle aged man of Ghanaian gay Hakka descent who's been living in Miami, ignoring his writing career while working in a bookstore, married to his college girlfriend, and navigating a rare autoimmune multisystem disease which has stumped his conventional medical doctors and for which he is being directed to his great uncle Budge, who is a traditional healer.
Okay, you both know how “Read. Talk. Grow.” works; we discuss books that portray health topics in an effort to better understand health experiences through story. In this case, we'll discuss traditional Native healing. Aaron, congratulations on the success of your first novel. You've said in interviews that this took you ten years to write and is, at least in part, autofiction. Will you tell our listeners about your inspiration for the book.
Aaron John Curtis
Sure, so ten years from the first short story to publication, with two-year editing process after I submitted it to the publisher. In 2015, I started having lesions show up on my legs. And in retrospect, I probably had the first symptoms maybe eight years before that and these are things that didn't make it into the book just because it was, you can't have everything, but it was a lot of, weight gain and fatigue, and just my joints felt very strange when I would bend them like they were filled with liquid kind of thing.And it wasn't necessarily painful. It was just this. The pain came later, but started this, this just kind of tightness because I was a bookseller. So it was a lot of up and down ladders, a lot of squatting to shelve the lower shelves and that kind of thing. And I'd just be like, oh, my knees and hips and elbows feel strange. But the pain didn't come until a couple of years before the lesions showed up. We thought, because I'd been traveling, that it was, it was MRSA, and they treated it like MRSA.
Dr. Denise Millstine
MRSA being an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection.
Aaron John Curtis
Yes. I was in the mountains of Northern California. So they're like, oh, well, he picked something up. And it would look better for five days to a week and then it just flare up again, that whole right leg. And they just started running tests, biopsies and blood tests and they couldn't figure out anything. And it was that I think the scene is in the book event, second visit to the rheumatologist, where she had checked off almost the entire diagnostic sheet where they tested for everything. And she just stared at me, kind of stared me in the eye and said, fascinating.
And it was very scary because it been months and they they had nothing. And I was in a writer's group at the time. So all this kind of bitter frustration with the medical system came out in the short story I was writing. And my fellow writers thought it was good that I should just flesh it out and I fleshed it out into a novella. They like that, too. So they asked me to flesh it out into a novel. It eventually became “Old School Indian.”
Dr. Denise Millstine
And here you are. Yeah. I often will say to my patients, you never want to be interesting to a physician, particularly a physician like Patricia and myself. We've been practicing for decades.
Patricia, tell us your reaction to the book. And also describe for our listeners what it's like to be a traditional healer who's also trained as a conventional physician.
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
Well, I found it very interesting that half his book was about dysfunction, and the other half was about Uncle Budge, the healer. And that's very traditional Native medicine. Western physicians are not trained to look beyond the biomedical, the interesting molecular biology and pathophysiology. They don't go beyond that. Whereas this book showed the importance of the mental soul medicine along with the body medicine.
And that's what traditional Native medicine healers are taught, that half our training is theology. In my case, theology and psychology and half is medicine. And we never just look at the body piece of it. We put it in context of the whole person. And my traditional Native medicine training really was a good start before I went to Western medical training. And integrative medicine is trying to utilize much of what I learned as a traditional Native healer.
Dr. Denise Millstine
It's so beautiful and there's so much wisdom and tradition that in our biomedical model, we have a tendency to just dispose of for claims of evidence and how much more evidence do you need than thousands of years of people being healthy and being healed and all that comes with that.
So, Aaron, so curious, Abe's condition in the book is something you call systemic necrotizing periarteritis, which is SNiP. I was listening to the book, reading the book and thinking, gosh, I've never heard of this condition. And I'm glad that makes me an honest physician because you made it up. It's a fiction in and of itself, but you've alluded to some of your own medical and symptom experiences, but it's actually closely related to something called polyarteritis nodosa. Would you tell our listeners what that is and how SNiP is kind of closely related.
Aaron John Curtis
Sure. Polyarteritis nodosa is a disease where your immune system attacks the medium sized blood vessels in your body. What I found interesting about it was that they could not decide whether it was it would jump systems or not, or just stay in my skin, or if it was going to travel. They did a lot of blood work and a lot of, what do you call that when they take, like, images of your organs and all that stuff, like to make sure everything's working right.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Imaging, MRI, CAT scans, those kinds of things.
Aaron John Curtis
Yeah. So they were doing a lot of that to make sure it wasn't going anywhere they couldn't see it. In the original story there was no healer, even though I do have a great uncle who in my family, who was a healer, who became a model for Budge.
But as I was writing it, I was getting better, you know, over the course of ten years. Getting back to that place of the pain and the fear and the lesions multiplying and all that. It was scary. So the Native understanding, you call it “setting a table.” So it's like you're setting a table for something you're inviting it in. And it just felt like as I was healing, to go back to that place was just courting something I didn't want in my life. So basically I kept a lot of the symptoms the same and just changed the name.
Dr. Denise Millstine
I cannot imagine this novel without a healer. I'm so glad to you and your writing group and your editors for helping you find Budge as a character, because he really is, well, quite a character, but but really high impact.
So we've just learned, Patricia, that Budge wasn't part of the original plan, and he also wasn't part of the original plan for Abe. So he didn't set out to find a healer when he went home to Ahkwesahsne, the reservation where he had been raised and where his family was living, but he found himself being nudged. I don't know, Aaron. Maybe shoved by his family into, Budge’s trailer to have these healing sessions. Will you talk about the tension that Abe felt between this sort of conventional medicine, one foot in conventional medicine and one foot in Native healing, and how that was difficult for him and pushing him to confront what he believed in and what he could hope for.
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
I can speak to how that has occurred inside of me. My first 17 years of training was in not only Native medicine, but traditional Native medicine. And what do I mean by that? You know, if we stop to think Western medicine today sees the randomized controlled trial as the gold standard. But do you know that the first one occurred in 1948, only 77 years ago. Obviously, science and medicine is older than 77 years.
And so the traditional Native medicine that I learned is literally case studies for 40,000 years.
So that's how I started. And then my elders told me to go off to seminary because for us, the theology and the medicine are really two parts of the same. Just like in integrative medicine, we talk about body, mind and soul, and we see this as intertwined woven tapestry where you pull on one and you interact with the other. They are not different psychiatry, a priest, a physician, they're intertwined. And so our skills are intertwined.
So I went from traditional Native healing training to seminary, where I got my doctorate in theology and psychology, to medical school. And medical school, I was shocked. All they cared about was really a biomedical approach to the human body. I was a closeted traditional Native healer. I wouldn't have thought of saying in Minnesota at the U, that I was a healer. I was studying to be a physician and they aren't necessarily the same thing.
So patients who come to me, who are Native understand immediately that woven interconnectedness.
Aaron John Curtis
What fascinated me about my great uncle, was that, this was Butch in real life, not Budge from the book. Is that he could look when you walked in a room and just by the way, you were carrying yourself or moving through the world, he could tell that something was off and, you know like Patricia was saying, that didn't start with blood work or whatever, it started with questions and it's like kind of what's going on.
His observations and his healings have before and after testing that is verifiable for one, for another, it's just the way, and who knows how, he can just spot it. You know, when’s the last time you saw this type of specialist? It's like, oh, okay. And then we find out, you know, that there's something going on inside.
Getting back to your question of Abe’s resistance, I think it's when you live on the rez and you're or you're visiting a lot, then it comes up a lot. It's just a way of seeing the world where the veil between what we can see, what we can't see, the physical and the spiritual, it's a lot thinner. And it's a lot, as Patricia was saying integrated, just into your daily life.
Like the teachings of the great good way, it's a political system, but it's also a spiritual system kind of religion and just kind of a way or it being that you act every day. Abe, I know from living in Miami for many years that this, this kind of happens to you. You’re away from your family and from the rez and just when things like that come up, instead of just, oh, yeah, it's like the sky is blue that day. It's just very matter of fact. When those things come up, you baque from it. You just you can't it just feels whoa. It feels you're like, no, thank you. And Abe needs to go through that process with this great uncle to, have you back to that mentality, you know, lower his defenses to where he can accept that.
Dr. Denise Millstine
I think that's so clearly depicted in the novel. And you feel for Abe because, you know, he wants to trust these two doctors, this dermatologist and this rheumatologist, who aren't giving him answers, who are throwing therapies at him, who are trying. I mean, they they truly care about trying.
Aaron John Curtis
Yeah. I was going to say it's not for lack of trying.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Yeah. And I mean, a lot of people don't feel so held by conventional medicine, but still the character is not getting better and so is turning with the nudging of his community, of his family, particularly towards this other paradigm of healing.
So, Patricia, I want to ask you a question about Budge. So he's healed a few people in the community when we meet him, but he's also not healed Abe's father from some vision loss that he had, and Budge himself has had trauma and addiction in his past. He was seen by his sister, Budge’s sister sees him as having this healing gift that he later learns to cultivate and to explore and to provide to others in the community. So the question I have for you is are traditional healers trained? Do they naturally have to have a power or an ability that then can be cultivated?
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
Healers and physicians are human, and I don't know any human who doesn't have tragedy in their life. Let's just remember that they aren't robots. They aren’t AI. They're humans.
I can speak from my experience in my tradition. Commonly a healer is chosen by a community, and I use that word very importantly, specifically because we don't decide we're going to become a healer, like decide to go and apply for medical school. We are chosen by the community and commonly a difficult birth is seen by the elders as God saying, perhaps this is someone who is to be a healer. Again, a brokenness in the healer.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Meaning their own birth, not having given birth to somebody in a difficult way. But when you came into the world, if it was difficult.
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
When I came into the world, I was a difficult birth. My mother is Rh-negative, my father is Rh-positive, I am Rh-positive. I was born in 53 before RhoGAM, which is a shot that we now give women who have this incompatibility of blood.
But because I was born before that, my birth was in question. The whole community knew that. And so that was the first mark that the elders thought, huh. So what they chose to do was to follow me very closely, the elders for the first six years of my life. And what were they looking for? They were looking to see if I walked with integrity. Did I have good relationships within myself, with my creator and with all relations? Was I trustworthy? How did I move through the world. And only once it was determined that I had the character to learn the knowledge and the medicine of our ways, was I asked to come and, start my training. So a very different way of choosing a healer in our traditional Native way versus I want to be a doctor and I'm going to go to medical school.
Dr. Denise Millstine
I'm the top of my class. I'm the smartest kid in the room. I'm going to be a doctor. This has a lot more to do with who you are as a human being and a member of your community.
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
Absolutely. And in Western medicine, it's a way to have a good job, to be respected in the community, but less so today than perhaps 50 years ago. But for us, you are being gifted with precious sacred knowledge. And if you are not a person with character, you could do more harm than good. So there's a piece of the natural person, but there's very rigorous training. My training to be a traditional Native healer was 17 years of intense, almost full-time training under seven mentors. My medical training was far less than that.
Dr. Denise Millstine
That's incredible when you look at them side by side, isn't it?
Aaron, Budge, is of course, a fictional character, but you give him this literal power. So the first time that he treats Abe, Budge tells Abe, some people say touching me is like leaning against a transformer because he feels this kind of buzzing through his system from the healing. Is that something that's real, or is that a complete fiction? Is this energy transfer something you would say often occurs in traditional healing?
Aaron John Curtis
I took that detail from my mom, actually, because it's kind of like that, but she doesn't. She's not a healer. She's related. So might have been something she would explore, but she just never did. I have seen one of her party tricks. It doesn't happen every time, but the wind up watches the numbers and the clock based whatever, not digital. She could put one of those on and the thing would just spin, and it's just her field. And I was like, I want to get that detail to Budge just to try to. I don't want to say other worldliness, but it is there.
One of the fascinating things that Patricia said about that brokenness is that for the Six Nations a lot of the people who are practicing medicine are people who have lost their first-born child. There's a brokenness. When you said that I was like, wow, that's something that the healers here look for.
I don't know that Butch went through any traditional. I never asked because I only saw him in action a few times. And when someone is is healing someone, you're just kind of like, maybe awe a strong word, but you're just kind of like that. It's very impressive to see retrospectively. I wish I'd asked him a thousand questions, but in the moment, it never occurred to me to, like, pluck apart how he came by this knowledge. I just know that on Ahkwesáhsne, he was known as something you could approach, but I don't know. Saw him in action was I was directed by him. It was him. I, you know, just had a family gathering me and like, oh, seeing something that someone that knows going on or maybe didn't know was going on that he would just get some ceremony gone to to help them out.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Hey listeners, we hope you're enjoying this episode of “Read. Talk. Grow.” If you find our discussions helpful and insightful, please take a moment to subscribe to and rate “Read. Talk. Grow.” on your preferred podcast platform and don't forget to tell your friends to listen. Your support will help us reach more readers and those eager to learn about health through books. As always, feel free to drop us a line at readtalkgrow@mayo.edu with suggestions for books, topics or any comments. Thanks for listening.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Well, and I don't think you described Budge as having a formal training. He recognizes his addiction. He recognizes his trauma. He does his own healing from what he's been through. And then maybe this is a misstatement, but sort of stumbles into at least what becomes his most well-known successful healing with a small boy.
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
Yes. And Denise, I push back that he stumbled into it. Native people who walk the old way, we are very spiritual. Everything we do is spiritual. We do ceremony throughout the day. And so as a culture, we have a lot of healing power, just being a person in the culture. So there's a healing power that you grow up in and it's like a sixth sense.
There is something about the Native spirituality that empowers us to be healers, even if we aren't formally trained.
Dr. Denise Millstine
I think what you're describing, Patricia, is that the training is a complete immersion. So you are living, breathing, walking, absorbing, learning, as you're cultivating these healing gifts and how remarkable that is. It's not like school from 8 to 3 Monday through Friday. And then you go to a different way of life. It's always in you.
There's an interesting component to the first healing session that Budge and Abe have, where Budge asks Abe, next time you come bring an offering. And Abe is skeptical. This brings to him like Budge is just trying to make a buck. But that's not right. I think it's that Budge is asking Abe to actually invest. Does one of you want to comment on this idea of the offering for the healing?
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
Yes. I took an oath to never accept money for my work as a healer. Native, Traditional Native culture has a give away economy, not a green greenback economy. And so the person who is most respected in a clan is the one who gives away the most. And healers are seen in that genre. So gifts can be a way for us to sustain ourselves. And gifts receive more power because it's given in a spirit of community. For example, the tobacco that I use in ceremony, I can't go buy. It has to be gifted to me because that empowers the tobacco with more medicine.
Aaron John Curtis
And in a practical level, if Budge is being a full time healer and just kind of picking up odd jobs here and there, the practical level, his neighbors need to take care of. So, you know, the food is incredible. For example, here you can eat this or the next stop, but it is a it's a gesture of respect. And it shows that you're treating their their gift of their medicine seriously. And it's an exchange. And so energy, more than it is a pain. And yeah, that's another thing that you should have known and would know better be it state instead of leaving like, you know, 1819.
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
From a healer perspective, we don't heal at somebody like Western doctors do. Western doctors do treatment at somebody, but we do not believe that there is any healing unless the person shows up and participates. And so you will do little things to get them to invest in themselves. I've heard in Western training, you can't care more about the patient than they care about themselves. Well, we understand that healing is not going to occur. We might be able to manage the chronic illness, but there's no healing that occurs if the patient isn't participating.
Dr. Denise Millstine
I loved the contrast between Budge insisting Abe bring a bit of himself to the healing sessions, and the rheumatologist and the dermatologist. One of them particularly kept insisting that Abe stay off the internet, not try to explore the knowledge on his own. And was that an intentional contrast, like where one paradigm is, I'll tell you what to do when you need to know. And the other was like, nope, you got to come on into this process as well.
Aaron John Curtis
That was not a conscious decision. That was just a kind of writing from life. I wanted that device of something a little deeper, directly repaid, that he needs to give more than something that he's kind of rehashed for other members of his family, get something from the self, from his heart. That was just kind of a way of giving Budge that kind of, for lack of a better term, otherworldly insight.
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
Well, this made-up autoimmune disease is perfect to teach what an integrative approach ought to be. Very few diseases are purely biomolecular. They include that whole person. And so what we found in autoimmune disease or a more current example is Covid.
You know, I spent 2020 and 2021 on the Navajo Nation with the "Diné" nation. And I saw Western doctors come in and they had nothing to offer. And then traditional Native healers came in and families survived because we saw it as a holistic approach. The spirituality that we evoked in ceremony was good medicine. It helped heal. It helped protect.
You know, I had to laugh at a rheumatologist and a dermatologist. I mean, they push drugs that suppress the immune system, and they didn't even see the other dimensions of this illness. So I thought it was a brilliant, more holistic approach.
Dr. Denise Millstine
And Aaron, maybe for some of our listeners who have never really stopped to consider traditional Native healing, what the elements would, would look like, can you just highlight some of the things that would happen in a session. You could either speak to your experience or to Abe's experience. What are some of the components of the actuality of what that those sessions looked like?
Aaron John Curtis
I did the, the three so that he could go on. It could be a little bit more cinematic, and he'd go on more of a journey. But his demeanor, it's very, just kind of matter of fact about everything. That's taken up from Butch because it's all it was all very matter of fact, and he would enlist help, and it would just be whoever was in the room at the time. Basically consists of laying a hand, laying hands, and he would talk it through what he was, what he was doing and what he wanted from the person who was having the healing and for the people who were assisting.
Dr. Denise Millstine
I think a big component being the laying on hands, but you just mentioned with Butch, this is confusing. Butch is your real uncle, it’s the real person, and Budge is a fictional character inspired by Butch.
Aaron John Curtis
Butch is my actual my great uncle.
Dr. Denise Millstine
But in the sessions with Budge in the book, there's nobody else physically in the room with them. They're doing these sessions, the two of them where Budge lives. But there are other people in the room in other ways, which I thought was fascinating. For example, Abe's sister makes a salve that he then incorporates into how he's treating some of Abe's wounds.
So I wonder if either of you wants to comment on that importance of pulling in the community, literally pulling in the community to this healing process, whether it's through something they've created or an energy they're adding. Any comments about how that must be part of it.
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
Well, one of the seven areas of medicine that I learned is a traditional Native healer, was community. So there's a whole years of training about what is community and how does it participate in healing. I recently saw a sign on, on somebody's yard saying community is good medicine, and we believe in community and when you say there was nobody else in the room, the ancestors were in the room.
And, you know, Euro-American think of that as angels for us. The ancestors are there with us every day, all day long. And a healer may call upon those ancestors to help give wisdom and to provide further community. So these elements, as you call them, are important to bring in the community. It's common for us to say you're as healthy as your relationships, and that relationship is with yourself, with your creator, and all of life around you, which may include rocks, four-legged, the winged, all of living beings are part of the community. And without community, there's no true healing.
Aaron John Curtis
100%.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Yeah, that's really beautifully said and you're absolutely right. One other element of Abe's healing, Aaron, though, is his writing. So his uncle encourages him. His father encourages him. But as Abe's health was slipping, he was also getting further away from his own writing, which had been really important in his own, expression. Will you talk about how that was also important for him to heal.
Aaron John Curtis
I think it's him trying to find his voice. And I think it has to do with what the struggle was that sure, he wanted to walk this path and he kept being called to it, whether he wanted it or not. But he was trying to just treat that doubt with, with alcohol, with Abe.
For me, it's like doing what God put you here to do. And if you are not doing what God put you here to do, you're missing that spiritual piece. What Patricia calls that soul piece. That inner divine spark that's in you. If you're not integrating that into your light, then your body is open to, to sickness and all that kind of thing. And I think that that was Abe’s struggle was that he knows he should be focusing more on his talent, but he doesn't. And that's what invites sickness in.
And I think it's it's not necessarily I need to put my art out in world to change the world. You're doing it to change yourself. And it wasn't that I had stopped writing at any point during the illness journey, but I just know that the days when I wake up at five and I write first, that the rest of the day is is much better. Cause I'm just happier, better for the people around me. And, I wanted that for eight just to be, like, fully actualized through art.
Dr. Denise Millstine
There's a really beautiful part of the book where Budge gives Abe a handcrafted notebook at the end of his first healing session, and there's a quote for our listeners where Abe says, “The notebook might not be the key to rediscovering his voice, but holding it makes him feel like maybe he could trust the run of his thoughts again. And what a blessing that would be.” I just love that Aaron so beautifully.
Aaron John Curtis
I was rereading a lot of my diaries from when they were struggling to diagnose me and just and then afterwards where it was like, well, the steroids were actually pretty effective, but they could not keep them on me forever. And sure, you guys know the side effects a lot better than I do as a layperson, but they're trying to come up with a long term, solution to treat me with.
And just the idea that if they couldn't, then its just going to get worse and worse and, you know, vascular dementia of that whole thing. And yes, there was a lot of fear and I lost track of why I thought of it based on what you pray. So what you said.
Dr. Denise Millstine
I’m assuming it was that, some of these quotes come from your own thoughts during your own journey.
Aaron John Curtis
Yeah. Normally, I'm a pretty levelheaded, like, you know, just peaceful person. But when that was going on, I couldn't even just sit in a room with thoughts. It's just like rabid little animals in my head just running around and so I brought that to Abe, I'm glad it resonated with you because that's part of why I did it. It was just it felt like I could see my own desperation rereading those old diary entries and I was like, oh, I need to get this to Abe to kind of let the reader in to what he is going through.
Dr. Denise Millstine
And I'd like to think what an inspiration for people who are reading your book and who are going through their own health journey, particularly if it's one that's not linear, that they're looking at that within themselves, and whether it's writing or singing or some other form of expression, they're finding their voice and learning how important that is if they are to actually be healed.
We're almost out of time, but I think it would be remiss to not talk for a minute about the language in the book. So listeners who haven't read the book will have to read the book to figure out the very clever structure of it, that I don't want to ruin for them. But at the very beginning, there's a part where you talk about using the term Indian and say that, readers might find that offensive, but that's, “A fish we’ll gut later.”
I just wonder if you both will comment briefly on how important language is and who owns the language, and gets to decide how we talk about Indian, Native American, Native healing cultures, or any other term that people might want to use.
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
Language is memory. Memory from way back millennia. You know, we know our culture through our language, and the language doesn't have to be just verbal.
Aaron, you mentioned laughter. Laughter is another excellent example of the mind body spirit being intertwined. Why? Because, you know, I have patients who who, the Euro Americans will come in and say, I'm depressed, but a Native person will come in and say, I've lost my laughter. And we know from science that laughter evokes lots of biomolecular players from endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin, cortisol, serotonin. It's very much intertwined with our bodies. So communication amongst our community is our culture, and culture and community are good medicine.
Aaron John Curtis
I write kind of broadly, but every time I ended up writing a Native story, whatever that means, it always ends up being about language. And I think it's just loss of language is something that my mom, at 81, is still trying to reconcile. And just with all that, so much trauma that you can't get past to bring that language back.
I was really gratified that my publisher had asked me when I went to the audiobook, they were like, oh, here's a list of words we need to pronounce. And I'm like, I know a dozen words, in Kanienʼkéha and Kanienʼkéha is one of them, so I should not read the book.
So there was a few people on the rez working on language preservation. I gave them their names, and this woman who used to work with Ahkwesáhsne Freedom School on language preservation and now does, fundraising through Friends of Ahkwesáhsne. She DM’d me on Instagram was like, who are you? Did you write this book? Why are you writing about Ahkwesáhsne? I started naming family members who were born and raised there and who still lived there. [And she said] OK, OK, ,. So she helped them with the pronunciation and Jason Grasl’s a Blackfeet actor who read the book and I think he just I think he just kills it, does an amazing job. But I picked him because when he said “tota” Because that's how the book starts with pronunciation guide, “tota, it sounded like he would say it his whole life and that just kind of, it put me on notice.
Dr. Denise Millstine
And the audiobook is marvelous. So for our listeners who haven't read or listened to the book, whether you do it in print or you do it via the audiobook, go out and read “Old School Indian” by Aaron John Curtis. It has been such a pleasure to talk to both of you about traditional healing. Thank you for being on “Read. Talk. Grow.”
Aaron John Curtis
Thanks, Denise. Thanks, Patricia.
Dr. Patricia StandTal Clarke
Indeed, See ya.
Dr. Denise Millstine
“Read. Talk. Grow.”is a product of the Women's Health Center at Mayo Clinic. This episode was made possible by the generous support of Ken Stevens. Our producer is Lisa Speckhard Pasque and our recording engineer is Rick Andresen.
Visit our show notes to see the books discussed today and for links to other health education materials. Follow us on social media like Instagram and Facebook, or reach out directly to our email readtalkgrow@mayo.edu with suggestions for books or topic ideas. We'd love to hear from you.
This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not designed to replace a physician's medical assessment and judgment. Information presented should not be relied on as medical advice. Please contact a health care professional for medical assistance if needed for questions pertaining to your own health. Keep reading everyone!