The Vision of Waaskonehkwe

This is a story of dreams and healing and the bridging of two cultures – a story of how dreams that began before Elaine Johnston was born have guided her life's vision of bringing together Western and aboriginal medicine for the greater well-being of humanity. Johnston, 45, is director of Canada's Assembly of First Nations Health Secretariat. She has been a healthcare professional for 25 years – registered nurse, clinical administrator, tribal executive, nursing teacher, and one-time helicopter ambulance paramedic.

She is Anishnawbe – half Ojibwa, half Potowatomi. She is the daughter of a chief, and granddaughter of a traditional healer and midwife who, half a century ago, was regularly consulted by a local white doctor because of her wisdom and knowledge.

Johnston has nursed in Pikangikum, one of the grimmest of Canada's Native reserves. A Northern Ontario Ojibwa community, it is drenched in poverty, addiction, open sewage, contaminated water, child sexual abuse, violence, infant deaths, and a horrendous rate of teenage suicides.

She has sat on hospital and social services boards, advised Canada's aboriginal chiefs on health, education, forestry, and economic development and been executive director of one of the country's largest First Nations tribal governments.

What the Elders Know

And, always, she has tried to be Waaskonehkwe – "the flower woman." This is the spiritual name her great-grandmother bestowed on her after dreaming of Johnston while she was still in her mother's womb.

"My great-grandmother saw me in a dream, when nobody knew my mother was pregnant," says Johnston, sitting in her Ottawa office, which is a 10-minute walk from Parliament Hill.

"In this dream, she saw a little girl walking towards her, in a field of flowers, carrying a spray of flowers. She asked the little girl in Ojibwa, 'Where are you going, little girl?' And the little girl said to her, 'I'm going right here, grandma. I'm coming here. I have a purpose here, and so you will be seeing me.'"

The next morning, Johnston's great-grandmother told Johnston's great aunt of her dream. "She said that when the time was ripe, I would know my spiritual name and the purpose and reason why I was here."

That time came 15 years ago, when Johnston's great-aunt told her she was Waaskonehkwe. She instructed Johnston to offer tobacco and prayers to the Creator for guidance and to ask the elders of her community the meaning of her great-grandmother's dream.

The elders told her to think about nature and Mother Earth and about what flowers do.

Which Johnston did – meditating on how flowers were gifts for beauty and for grieving; how flowers produced seeds and attracted insects and birds to broadcast the seeds throughout nature; how flowers were used for many traditional medicines; how flowers touched the intellect and the emotions, healed the body, were a balm to the spirit; and how flowers were a symbol of life's interconnectedness.

It is a lovely story.

Making the Dream Live

Johnson was trained in the science of Western nursing and instructed from childhood by her grandmother Agnes Commanda in the knowledge of traditional healing. She discovered at age 30 that her purpose in life is to combine Western medicine for treating the body, with Native medicine for treating the soul.

"We all have gifts to give each other," she says. "The indigenous people's gift is spirituality. That is the core of who we are as Anishnawbe people."

As a nursing student in university, she was struck by the fact that her instructors talked about the physical body, sometimes about the mind and the emotions, but never about the spiritual dimension of health.

It was the dream of her grandmother Agnes – who died seven years ago at age 95 – that she should be trained as a nurse so she could blend the two approaches to healing. It is Johnston's dream that one day Canada's publicly funded healthcare system will pay for visits to an aboriginal traditional healer as well as to a medical doctor.

It is an idea whose time has already come … somewhat. Institutions such as the Benson-Henry Institue for Mind Body Medicine broke medical ground in the area more than two decades ago. Studies are being done on the effects of prayer on surgical patients' recovery. The decoding of DNA has brought science closer to the workshop of God. The diagnostic manual of psychiatric illness has recognized spiritual affliction as a treatable condition.

It is her determination to bring Native spiritual healing – the holistic curative power of spiritual wellness – into the mainstream of 21st century medicine:

She speaks of her own experience nursing in Native communities – about a man, for example, who displayed all the signs of paranoid schizophrenia. He was adamant that people in the community had placed bad medicine on him and were intent on doing him harm.

A non-Native nurse who had been dealing with him asked Johnston for her assessment of his condition. Johnston, after talking to him, suggested he be sent to a traditional healer in a nearby community. After two weeks, the healer relieved the man of the spiritual bad medicine, and he returned home. "He came straight to the nursing station and pumped my hand and thanked me."

I do believe there are people who have schizophrenia – don't get me wrong; I know that for a fact. I'm a nurse. But I also think there are other things happening out there with people. We have so many stress-related problems – technology is getting to us. I think if we get back to the wholeness of ourselves, we will start to feel better about so many things."

She tells another story about a woman with classic symptoms of myocardial infarction who was sent for tests to a city hospital where nothing was found. She came back to her community in pain and with the same symptoms.

"I asked myself, what was I going to do for her that was different. So I went away and put my tobacco down [burned sacred tobacco as a spirit offering] and prayed to my grandmother."

At that moment, one of her nursing textbooks fell on the floor, open to a page on dental disease. Johnston read the page, and realized what was causing the woman pain.

Spooky?

"It's not spooky," says Johnston. "It was the way I was raised. I'm not the one healing. It's the Creator and the spirit guide."

Toward the Best of Both Worlds

Johnston describes the health clinic of the Anishnawbe Wikwemikong First Nation on Georgian Bay, where the language of medical science and spiritual healing has flowed together. "You come in the clinic door and you can go to the left for the traditional healer or to the right for the contemporary physician."

The healer has his lodge, his medicines, his sacred fire. The patient offers him tobacco. And if – possibly after praying to the Creator for insight into the patient's condition – the healer accepts the tobacco, he assumes responsibility for treatment.

He or she may use the sacred medicines: sweetgrass for the mind, sage for the body, cedar for the emotions, tobacco for the spirit. (Cedar tea is also good for colds, sinuses and, says Johnston, "it's a wonderful laxative.") He may use the pipe, the sacred fire, a drum, or the sweat lodge. He may put together a medicine bundle. He may pass his hands over the patient to detect negative energies in specific parts of the body. Always, at the center of treatment, is a petition to the Creator to grant permission for healing.

What is happening at Wikwemikong, says Johnston, is that traditional and contemporary medicine are being integrated, with consultations and referrals back and forth between the clinic's two sides.

In fact, she says, traditional healers across the country are beginning to meet together to discuss clinical practice standards and to explore the idea of establishing professional qualifications and of requiring healers to have community references – an evolution she finds healthy. "You want to make sure your healer is legitimate and won't do harm."

Waaskonehkwe, the flower woman, asks: "Will we ever see [public healthcare] paying for traditional healing? I hope so, because if we can connect back to the spirit we're going to take care of some of the costs of healthcare because everything is interconnected. Will that ever happen in my lifetime? I don't know. But is it something I strive for? Yes."

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