Healing

Tayo for the first time is confronting his past and is starting to heal his sickness.  He travels a far distance with his uncle Robert to meet a new medicine man, Betonie. Tayo is doubtful that any medicine man can understand him, but he notices that Betonie does not act like any other medicine man.  Betonie is much different than old man Kush in the sense that he is a current medicine man, where as Kush is a very old and a traditional medicine man. Betonie integrated the traditional ways of a medicine man with western medicine.  He understands that healing and medicine have to change with time.  “In the old days it was simple.  A medicine man could get by without all these things.  But nowadays…”(Silko 111).  Healing and ceremonies are meant to evolve with time, not to stay completely stagnant.  “They think that if a singer tampers with any part of the ritual, great harm can be done great power unleashed…but long ago when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began, if only in the aging of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle’s claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation singing chants”(Silko 116).  At a time it was fine to preform traditional ceremonies, but once the white people came, ceremonies need to be changed due to the shift in ages. Betonie is able to integrate and adapt to these changes.  Betonie teaches Tayo that he can be one with nature and machine.  All of the cardboard boxes filled with old cloths, rags, telephone books, reddish willow twigs, dried sage and mountain tobacco are an example of combing nature with materials.  Betonie is “comfortable” living with poverty and trash all around him because he is connected to the land of his ancestors.  “We know these hills, we are comfortable here…not the comfort of big houses or rich food or even clean streets, but the comfort of belonging with the land, and the peace of being with these hills”(Silko 108).  Betonie sees it as the Navajos were here in Gallup first and this land will always be theirs; it is the white people’s city that  

is out of place.

Tayo begins to let out his thoughts about Josiah, Rocky and Emo.  Tayo tells Betonie about how he let Josiah die in the Philippine jungles with the rest of the Japanese soldiers, even though it was impossible for Josiah to physically be there.  Betonie goes on to tell Tayo that he is not crazy for thinking that; “It isn’t surprising you saw him with them.  You saw who they were.  Thirty thousand years ago they were not strangers. You saw what the evil had done: you saw the witchery ranging as wide as this world”(Silko 114).  Betonie explains how we all come from the same place; we are all human.  This goes along with what John Trudell said in Reel Injun, that humans created the concept of race and other differences between them.  White people and Native Americans are social constructs that separate humans based on their skin color.  This causes people assume that all White people or Indians act the same way and have the same characteristics.  Tayo sees all white people as thieves and destroyers of their homeland, while all white people see Indians as second-class citizens that are not as civilized.  Betonie tells Tayo, “nothing is that simple…you don’t write off all the people, just like you don’t trust all the Indians”(Silko 118).  One can’t use overlying stereotypes to judge an individual; evil does not come from a race or a group, but from an individual.  Emo is an example of an individual that represents evil.  Emo believes that, “the land is no good, and we must go after what they have, and take it from them”(Silko 122).  Emo thinks that Indians have nothing compared to white people and that Indian ceremonies cannot help in this day and age.  But, Betonie explains how the evilness or the witchery, “want us to believe all evil resides with white people…but white people are only tools that the witchery manipulates; and I tell you, we can deal with white people, with their machines and their beliefs”(Silko 122).  This goes back to explain how one has to transition through time and change to survive; “There are balances and harmonies always shifting, always necessary to maintain”(Silko 120).  Tayo is beginning to understand evil resides in individuals and that change is necessary to life.