Richard Joaquin was born in 1946 into the Gila River Indian Community, one of four federally recognized tribes of the Tohono O’odham Indian Community (Salt River, Ak-Chin and the Tohono O’odham Nation are the other three.) At one time, the Tohono O’odham community covered a large portion of the southwestern region of the United States and northern parts of Mexico.

Joaquin distinctly remembers when he moved to the Ak-Chin reservation.

“It was Sept. 3, 1961,” Joaquin says. “I always remember that date and I don’t know why. But I moved here to work on the farms. I didn’t enjoy school very much and wanted to work with my hands in the fields.”

It was among the fields and with the other men of the tribe he began to learn more about his culture. They would talk, and he would listen. They would camp out by the corrals, near old burial grounds. Under the stars, the elders would talk about their ways.

He went to a Catholic school growing up on the Gila River reservation where only English could be spoken. Though he speaks his native tongue, he acknowledges the effect on later generations to speak only English.

“I believe that was really the first cut to our ancestors,” Joaquin says. “When we began to lose our language, we began to lose our culture.”

Part of the culture is desert lore — the medicine man is supposed to have special powers that can see into a spiritual universe. Joaquin says it was very much a part of Tohono O’odham life, but over the years, Western society and medicine have taken on a much bigger and dominating role in the community.

Joaquin can only think of a dozen or so medicine men and women who are still around. Yet, they are still called upon for ceremonies that the outside world is not allowed to see, and they still practice the gift of healing given to them by their ancestors and from the creator, I’itoi.

I’itoi means “man in the maze” and the intricate designs often seen in traditional Tohono O’odham basket weaving and pottery is a tribute to the creator and the Tohono O’odham way of life.

Joaquin’s ability in becoming a medicine man was not taught to him by someone else. He says individuals are chosen by their ancestors and I’itoi. Through visions and their own understanding, medicine men receive their knowledge of herbs, remedies and healing powers.

“It’s a gift to a certain person in a role they are to take,” Joaquin says. “They slowly start doing what the gifts are and only those individuals will know. No one else will be able to learn them and each medicine man is different.”

Stories, ceremonies and secrets

Joaquin says there are different levels of spiritual awareness for a medicine man. Like the gift itself, a medicine man cannot learn his place in life, only accept it. The levels vary in their understanding and gift of healing, and in the past, he has known of medicine men who have had great healing powers.

“My brother-in-law had a broken leg and he went to go see this medicine man that was said to fix broken bones,” Joaquin says.

The medicine man began a process of praying while feeling the leg with his hands and moving his feathers back and forth over the leg. Joaquin says his brother-in-law’s leg was healed and the only advice the medicine man gave his brother-in-law was to “take it easy.”

That happened in the 1970s, and Joaquin says he hasn’t heard of any medicine man having that power since.

Joaquin also talks about his uncle, who had been diagnosed with diabetes and went to a medicine man.

“The medicine man told him about a plant he would find near Tucson,” Joaquin says. “He says ‘go over there, you’ll find it and it will help you.’”

Joaquin says a medicine man will know immediately the place on your body where you are sick. However, the sickness is difficult to describe by the definitions of Western society.

“We say there is white man’s sickness and Indian sickness,” Joaquin says.

If a comparison was made for the white community to understand, Joaquin says it would be like a symptom of depression, where there is a particular pain in the body even though X-ray or medical tests say everything is all right.

“A medicine man will go over you with his staff with feathers, and he will pray,” Joaquin says. “He will then suck the pain out of the body and spit it out.”

Joaquin says when the medicine man pulls the ailment out, there are times when that ailment is a poisonous curse. He says anyone can have a curse put upon them, and it’s usually because the person had done harm to an animal or person. In many cases, it is usually the spirit of the animal or person that curses the individual.

Joaquin doesn’t talk about his own experiences of healing and praying for individuals, for reasons akin to traditional doctor-patient confidentiality. He says medicine men do not brag or advertise; it is only through word of mouth that knowledge about them gets around.

Joaquin doesn’t talk about what happens at traditional ceremonies the outside world is not permitted to witness. Even in the Indian community, members of the tribe who experience visions during the ceremonies are to keep their visions to themselves. Furthermore, no member is allowed to take pictures or video, or to draw what they see. The medicine man or woman in charge of the ceremony keeps watch.

“The medicine man or woman sees everything,” Joaquin says. “They also make sure no bad spirits enter the circle.”

There is one ceremony in particular that is rarely discussed, a reburial ceremony. The ceremony is held when buried ancestors of the Tohono O’odham people have to be moved because the land has been desecrated in some way. Joaquin says those participating in the ceremony, called runners, will fast for four days. After four days, they will be painted. At dusk, they run from where their ancestors were buried to their ancestors’ “new home.” The spirits of the ancestors travel with the runners.

“They will run, and they will run always looking forward, never looking back. They cannot look back,” Joaquin says.

Joaquin says looking backward will send the spirit of their ancestors back from where they came. The run itself is usually three to five miles and is chosen by the medicine man.

“When the runners arrive at the new grounds, they will have a ceremony until four in the morning,” Joaquin says.

Four is a special number in the Tohono O’odham culture because it represents north, south, east and west. Joaquin has four eagle feathers on his sacred praying staff, as eagles are sacred in his culture.

According to Joaquin, in Tohono O’odham legend there was once a boy who sat every day watching the eagles flying. The boy prayed to become an eagle so that he might soar through the clouds. And, one day, the boy’s parents couldn’t find him. They looked everywhere; finally they looked up and saw an eagle that was wearing the boy’s necklace and knew the boy had transformed himself. From then on, no one was to harm an eagle.

Like the gift of being a medicine man, obtaining feathers cannot be acquired through an individual’s own will, meaning one cannot harm an eagle, buy a feather or even ask someone for a feather. They may pray for a feather, and all Joaquin can say about it is, “When the right moment comes, it will be given.”

The journey continued

Now in his mid-60s, Joaquin often finds himself looking back as much as he is looking forward. His wife, Dora Jane, died in 2000 from breast cancer, but Joaquin says her spirit often comes to the house and checks up on him in the moonlit hours when the spirits walk. At first, he says he was scared when he felt her touch upon his head. From time to time, he will hear the same sounds in the hallway his wife’s slippers used to make.

“She is just making sure everything is OK,” Joaquin says. “When the spirits are here, they are not here to harm you; they just want to see how you are doing.”

Joaquin smiles as he remembers her. Together they had five children and one daughter died at 17 in an automobile accident. His four other children still live in the area.

Joaquin also had his own brush with death. Recently, his kidneys began to fail and he became bedridden as his body swelled, becoming black and blue. Though everyone wanted him to go to the hospital, Joaquin refused. He figured if he checked in, he wouldn’t check out. 

He says it may have been stubbornness, but on the fourth day something happened.

“I had a vision,” Joaquin says. “Everything was white all around me, like white curtains. I realized it was a coffin, and I was in my own coffin. That’s when I agreed to go to the hospital. I knew the vision was telling me I was going to die soon if I didn’t.”

Doctors told Joaquin if he had waited another day he would have lost his life. Instead, he lost a leg and has to go through dialysis twice a week. Despite his own cultural knowledge of medicine and healing, Joaquin says both Western doctors and medicine men have their place. The same infusion exists with religion, as Catholicism has become the primary religion within the community.

“It’s all the same proverbs and lessons from our ancestors,” Joaquin says. “And prayer has also been and remains an important part of our lives.”

Joaquin has more than a dozen grandchildren, whom he says give him new energy and make him feel young. They are around him every day making him laugh as they run in endless circles.

But he also sees how the Western world has influenced them, rapidly removing them from their original culture. Joaquin says it is not exclusive to any one people; it is happening all over, in all cultures.

“The material world is taking over the spiritual,” Joaquin says. “Traditions and a peoples’ identity are being lost with it.”

Joaquin says there is still a lot for the Western world to learn from the desert. He believes there are herbs and remedies spread throughout the mountains and the lowlands where the rivers used to run. He says there are cures for many diseases, even for cancer, though Western medicine dismisses these claims. As Joaquin looks and listens to the birds singing in the field, his hope is that his people never dismiss them, too.