Aboriginal healers (sometimes called shamans) have very different ways of understanding health and disease from their biomedical counterparts.  Each person is unique and has his or her own story that explains his health or illness.  These stories involve relationships to all levels of existence (including spirit and other people) and provide the clues to how to heal.  The developing perspective of narrative medicine has this same emphasis -- that the stories patients tell are often more important than the specific diagnosis. Dr. Mehl-Marona shows how narratives provide a bridge for shamans and doctors to relate and explores how changes in stories lead to transformations in which healing occurs.

Goals:
To examine how doctors and shamans can relate for the benefit of the patient.

Learning Objectives:
• Describe three ways in which shamans view health and illness that are different from biomedical practitioners
• Evaluate the role of story or narrative in structuring experience and perception
• Provide  at least three examples of ways in which changing the person and family's stories about the illness led to transformation and healing


Workshop: Indigenous Knowledge and Dialogues: Ways of Knowing Used by Healers and Shamans
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Ballroom 3:30pm to 5:30pm

Crucial to shamanic and aboriginal healing practice is the concept of indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing.  Healers derive their understanding of illness within a person, family, and community, by creating a story about the birth and nurturing of that illness that includes inputs from non-ordinary beings (also called spirits).  We will explore how shamans communicate with helper spirits, nature spirits, spirits of the illness, and more, to gain information that aids in healing.  We will practice some approaches to communicate in this manner.

Goals:
Participants will increase their understanding of indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing.

Learning Objectives:
• To describe three ways in which healers validate indigenous knowledge
• Compare and contrast indigenous knowledge with biomedical approachesm
• Describe three means of communicating with non-ordinary reality to obtain information to aid in healing


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