David R. Kopacz (DK): Mike, I think you and I first met around the same time I started working with Joseph Rael, maybe around 2014. That was when you and your team were coming to the monthly Whole Health work group meetings we started and then you invited me and Jenny Salmon, our team nurse, to the Veterans Sweat Lodge at American Lake VA, where you were the Ceremonial Elder. Why don’t you introduce yourself?

 

Michael Allen/Aubrey Lee (ML): My name is Michael Allen Aubrey/Lee. I served in the US Army from 1968 to 1974, and I served in Vietnam 1968-1969-1970. I come from the Blackfeet reservation in Browning, Montana. I’m also from the Lakota Nation and Seven Council Fire and the Sihásapa or the Blackfeet Nation. I belong to the Crazy Dog society on my reservation, which is the veteran society. I’ve been holding a talking circle and sweat lodge ceremony for veterans at American Lake VA hospital since 1989. We started our talking circle, and that branched into an inipi ceremony which is what we call it, which is a “sweat lodge” in translation. For many years, we took our veterans off the campus and then in 2012 we started holding our sweat lodge on campus, at a site called Picnic Island, that we call Eagle Medicine Island.

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DK: Thank you Mike for the years of good work you have been doing. How do you view posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from a Native compared to a clinical perspective?

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Iwauzan azuyeya: Sickness as a Result of Being in Battle with People

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ML: Well, PTSD is a diagnosis in the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual], used worldwide. And to me, in the Native community, we’re looking at the body, we’re looking at the mind, we’re looking at feelings, and spirituality. One of the ways we treat PTSD is by cleansing our spirit in the Native American sweat lodge. First off, the word “inipi” means “to go into.” Our word for “sweat lodge” is inipi olowan. And we go into it to cleanse ourselves – to sweat, to cleanse our spirit, and to sing. And that’s part of our healing process as Native Americans and that’s pretty widely used in our cultures. We cleanse our spirits with our smudge, which we call pejuta, which is gray grass or sage, we have about 40 different types of sage (not including the cooking sage) and we use that to cleanse our spirit, just as we use soap and water to cleanse our bodies.

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When it comes to PTSD, I see that it’s not only prevalent in war, but in our society, that we have a sickness in our life and that’s been from amongst the very beginnings of our existence to now.

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In the combat zone, when we face our enemy in war, that’s where we experience total posttraumatic stress disorder, which we call iwauzan azuyeya. Iwauzan azuyeya means “a sickness as a result of people being in battle with people and themselves,” which encompasses all things. When you face a traumatic situation in your life, you have to overcome that battle in some ways.

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The mind, and the body, and the feelings are all connected. So we work on how to handle the things in your mind, with healing of the sickness of being in battle with people, and then in our bodies. How do we take care of our bodies? That means getting good sleep. And refreshing ourselves with recognizing that our minds need time to rest as do our bodies. So getting rest for the body until the mind catches up. And then in your feelings, which encompasses our emotions and all the triggers that are from our senses: sight, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling. So we try to use our root medicines, to find out, to get to the point of the problem for a human being. And to me, all of us are brought into this world as gentle spirits, and we are spirits having a human experience.

 

DK: What makes something a root medicine? Is it using something that has roots or something that gets to the root cause?

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ML: Both. I would say both, that is the short answer! The longer answer is that we want to bring someone back to something that is so obvious that they don’t notice it. For instance, the Earth is a big stone and it is covered with stones. Now, I might bring a bottle filled with stones and tell someone, “Your medicine is in one of these stones. I don’t know which one. You need to find it.” Then the little stone brings them back to the Big Stone of the Earth.

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Now, with lavender, for instance. What color is it? It is purple. And how do you make purple? It is made up of red – that is blood, the heart, life – and blue – which is the same thing as black, so that is death, darkness. When we use lavender it is bringing both of these elements of life and death into the person’s awareness. Now this doesn’t have to be their conscious awareness, they can be learning without knowing they are learning – that is the way root medicines work.

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Sage, now that is one of our most important root medicines. We use it to cleanse the spirit. And in our water, we use sage – only sage – and the sage transitions from being water into becoming medicine. You can drink it as tea. But sage has another property when you’re in our sweat lodges. We use it in our water because it bathes the skin. And it helps you keep your skin cooler and keeps it from getting overheated or blistering. And if somebody gets overheated, we put the sage and the lavender into a tea bag. When the sage is in the water, we heat it up, and it turns it into tea. And a tea is something that you use medicinally for drinking. And it’s also something we use for heating, keeping the skin from burning, or having an over-exertion in the hot sun.

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Cedar is poisonous if you ingest it, but we use it as smoke because cedar takes away our sickness. In the Sun Dance we put a big ring of cedar around the dancers to protect them from sickness. Sweetgrass is from our Earth Mother. We braid it together while it is still connected to the Earth. We braid it and tie off one end and tie off the other end and only then do we cut it.

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Everything we use is a rooted medicine.

 

DK: Thank you for that explanation Mike. Joseph Rael calls sage “the wise one” (Kopacz & Rael, 2018). From the way the two of you talk, it sounds like everything has a deeper meaning and interconnection which is different than the reductionistic approach in Western medicine of isolating chemical ingredients from their source and environment. How do you apply rooted medicine for veterans?

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ML: The rooted medicines are right in front of us, but we don’t see their deep meaning unless we really go into them. I spent five years studying ash. An Elder once held up a piece of ash from the fire to me and said, “This is life.” I spent five years studying ash and trying to understand it at a deeper level. I took ash to sleep with me, into the sweat lodge, on all my journeys. And I realized that ash ties us to the one-leggeds, the Tree Nation. Trees give us houses, toothpicks, canoes, drum sticks, and so many other things – that is what the Tree Nation provides for us. And the trees connect us through their roots to the Earth and that is why ash is a root medicine.

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So how do we deal with the trauma of being in war? For veterans who go into a combat zone, we see a lot of PTSD and that experience of being in battle with people affects our moral values or moral compass. And so we have to cleanse our spirit. In our life, as human beings, we never see death, all we see is the body going away. We don’t see the spirit on its pathway back to Creator.

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So there are many aspects of PTSD in a Native American view, and that’s from the almost 600 federally recognized tribes and the many more that aren’t federally recognized, which brings it up to about 1000 tribes in the United States.[i] So when somebody comes to us, we don’t judge them for the quantum of their blood [percentage of Native blood or heritage], or the color of their skin, because the Spirit brings them to us for the purpose of healing. In our talking circles, we handle that by doing distractive healing.

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DK: What is distractive healing? Joseph Rael talks about unconscious healing, for instance looking at artwork and taking in the healing energy unconsciously without needing to understand it with the mind. Is distractive healing like that?

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ML: I suppose so. When people come to me, I believe that Spirit guides them to me and they may not know why and I may not know why, but I believe there is a reason that we come together, just like there is a reason that you and I have come together over these years. When a veteran comes in they are distracted by a lot of different feelings: anger, sadness, pain. The first thing I do is I distract them from what they are carrying. I start drumming. I distract them with singing, maybe in a language that they don’t understand. I give them a break from their family situations, their suicidal thoughts, their financial worries. It gives them an alternative pathway. I introduce them to the idea of talking sticks where they can only talk when they are holding the talking stick. I introduce a different culture, a song, a pathway of healing.

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I suppose it is like what Beautiful Painted Arrow calls unconscious healing. For instance, I’ll tell them I am going to sing them an ancient sacred song – then I’ll sing the Mighty Mouse cartoon theme song, or Yellow Submarine but make it about living on a reservation. I do something that shocks them out of their mindset when they came in. Or I’ll ask them, “Why do we say that stones are oldest relatives?” Then I’ll say, “Because they’ve been around since the ‘60s!” Distractive healing puts them in a different place.

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When you come to us, we put your focus on drumming and singing and learning. And the songs that we sing, every one of them is a prayer. So our effort is to reunite you with the Creator, in a healing experience, because the first thing that goes away when you face your enemy in war is your spirituality – your question of, “How is this okay with God to do this?” And so, that is the first major trauma to meet, the loss of your spirituality.

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Vietnam

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ML: I am a combat veteran, I flew aircraft, helicopters, in Vietnam. We flew into combat with 15 aircraft for our flights. Going into a battle, you have to make a choice. Whether flying the aircraft, using various armaments, or whether you’re in the back with a crew chief firing the M60s when you face your enemy – you have to make a choice. I know for myself, the very first time I faced my enemy, I had to make a quick decision, because I came from a background that taking a life was wrong. And so the first time I faced my enemy there were three of them, and I had to make a decision. And I only had a split moment to make that decision. Because there were 15 other aircraft involved, and in each aircraft, we carried 11 passengers and we had four crew members. So we have to make a split decision and we ended up making that decision because that’s what we’re trained to do. And that’s all we have is a moment. To pull the trigger creates the major trauma for those in combat who have to face their enemy and take a life. That’s the beginning of combat posttraumatic stress disorder, in my way of looking at it.

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DK: You know, Mike, there’s a concept that we’re starting to talk about called “moral injury” that goes along with PTSD. It sounds similar to what you’re speaking of, this sense of doing something that goes against one’s values and losing touch with one’s spirituality. You do what is right in the military world, but when you come back to the civilian world, it can create a kind of moral conflict. For instance, Karl Marlantes, a Marine veteran who served in Vietnam, said that the “Marine Corps taught me how to kill but it didn’t teach me how to deal with killing” (Marlantes, 2011, pg. 3). How does iwauzan azuyeya relate to the idea of moral injury?

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Going to the Root

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ML: In our culture, all of our medicines are rooted. We use sage for cleansing our spirit. We use cedar, in a smoke way, for cleansing our spirit and the sickness of people. We use bear root for our lungs and our breathing portion of our body. So we approach things with going back to the root in healing. And all of our problems have a root that got us there.

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One of the things I learned from the many programs at the VA is getting to the root of triggers. There are tools that they give us to recognize that these triggers are created by something we see or smell. For instance, driving through some places in Tacoma, you’ll get an instant smell of Asian food – that automatically triggers you. For me, one of the things that was interesting was I used to drive with my window down and I would get into a euphoric way of being. I realized that we had no windows, we had no doors in our aircraft in Vietnam. We had the wind from the prop, the wind flying at a hundred miles an hour, I would feel the wind on my face and on my skin. And then I realized why I was feeling this difference in my body.

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So recognizing these triggers is one of the primary things to help us to understand how we can start our healing. Then, realizing that we are not able to take a life away, only the body. We also look at the way we think and our thinking processes, recognizing two different kinds of thinking. One is speaking from our heart to our head, and one is speaking from our head to our heart. So we want them to learn to speak from their heart, and to put their hand on their heart when they are speaking. So that you remember you’re speaking from your heart and to recognize that when we go overseas, one of the things that happens is we lose contact with our families and friends. When we become mission-oriented, we forget, all we have left is our memory of what we left with. And that carries us. And so often when we come back from overseas and then go back into the civilian world, it’s not the same as it was before. The same thing for us, when we go into any country, whether it’s a combat zone or not, Germany, you start to adapt to the smells, and the taste, and the hearing, and the seeing of things. That becomes your temporary memory. Then when you go back home, everything changes, you’re going back into that place, where things are not like you thought, life has moved on without you. So you have to learn to adapt to the new life that you’re coming back into. And especially in our Iraq and Afghanistan wars, where we have multiple tours, you barely get settled home and you have to turn around and go back. So, you know, there’s so much complexity in things that seems simple. But you can work through that. And I, for myself, have worked with the VA and learning so many things that I can put in my toolbox.

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Praying for Your Enemies​

 

ML: From my culture, every day I said a prayer when I was in Vietnam, I said to my enemy, “We’re going to meet today, you’re going to fight for your people, I’m going to fight for mine.” But in the Indian way, we put a mask on, we paint our face, when we go in there, because we don’t want to kill somebody, we just want to scare the hell out of them. Our power has got to be our strength. So we have to mentally build power. When we go into that combat zone, I say to my enemy, “I pray for your family, and your friends, and your life itself. Don’t meet me today in that combat zone, because I am going to be victorious. My power is great.” And that’s what took us into our combat, we felt that we were more powerful. That’s what they build up in you in the military, we are the power source and you’re the weak. And that’s why we’re going to survive. It didn’t always happen. Otherwise, we couldn’t do what we did on a daily basis, mentally. And that’s how you become survivors, eventually. And facing insanity, because war is insanity, I became emotionally and spiritually – I became numb to everything in life.

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But it still affected us when we came back. That moral dilemma you asked about – I realized, very shortly, in the combat that it was wrong. So I went to a chaplain, I said to him, “I have this dilemma here, I feel that if I quit what I’m doing, I will quit on the people that rely on me. So I don’t want to quit, but in my childhood teachings, this was wrong to kill people the way we’re doing it.” But we didn’t use words like “kill” in the military, we used “erase,” “evaporate,” “eliminate” – they weren’t people. I said to the chaplain, “What am I going to do?” And he said to me, that “God put the sword in your hand and this is his war.” But having been a student and paying attention, I never read that, I never heard it. I just heard that it was wrong. And so I realized that the one person I could turn to, the chaplain, wasn’t going to be the person I could go to for my moral dilemma.

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So I had to make that decision for myself. My decision was, if I can go back home, then I will deal with this issue. So I brought all these feelings and all these thoughts and all this moral dilemma back home. And when I got here, I could use my sage to start cleansing myself and my sweat lodges to start healing myself from the things that didn’t belong to me, the toxins of war. Then I realized later on, I was not alone in that arena. I started sharing the sweat lodge and the healing ceremonies with all my fellow veterans, whether they were Native or not, whether they – I didn’t judge them for the color of their skin. I just knew that they were spirits, like me having a human experience, and we faced a moral dilemma. That’s the first thing that you face is your moral dilemma. How do you deal with moral injury? The only way we can do that was by cleansing our spirit and then healing and then going onward.

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The Difficulty of Taking Off the Mask

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DK: You mentioned putting on the mask, I wonder if some veterans have a hard time taking off the mask, or maybe recognizing their face once they take the mask off. Could there sometimes be imprints from the mask even once the mask is taken off?

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ML: Well for us, in our language – and I go back to our languages as a root – our spirit is wanagi. In dealing with this, we call that the shadow man. And the shadow as we all know, lives with us wherever we go. So now how do you live instead of surviving is the question.

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I’m working with a veteran right now, a female veteran, she spent eight years in the military in the Army and she’s been wearing this mask. Now she’s been out for 30 years, but she’s still always in combat with people. There are two things to recognize in a veteran, one is that 1000-mile stare when talking about a certain thing. And they put up their shields right away for protection. They become strong, they flare up like, like when dinosaurs flare up. They don’t even realize that they put this mask on. It’s a long process to understand that this mask is what you put on for protection in war, because it’s not right to do certain things in war. Anytime we do things that we know are not right – it’s like anybody that takes a cookie from the cookie jar knows it is wrong. Because we know killing is wrong, but we don’t have a way of dealing with it. So once we recognize that you have a mask on – that’s why the first thing veterans often talk about is their war experiences, they are speaking from their war masks.

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With this female veteran, I’m not asking her to take off her mask. I’m showing her ways to notice how wearing her mask at home affects your families, your children, your spouse, your community, society itself. See, you put on that mask on for what we call a “look-see,” and you see through that mask as if you are still in a combat zone. One of the things I learned a long time ago is when I find somebody like that, I have them stand at attention. Then I relieve them of duty. “You are no longer on duty. You are relieved of duty,” I say.

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So this particular person, this woman has a gun that looks like a real gun, but it shoots pepper spray. She carries it with her everywhere. I asked her, “How many years have you carried it and when have you ever had to use it?” “Well,” she says, “I’ve never had to use it.” Then I tell her, because you have it, you think you’re safe, but it’s an illusion.”

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My niece’s husband went to Iraq, he came home and the next thing you know, both of them have M-16s beside their bed, fully locked and loaded. So I asked him, “How many years has it been? When was the last time somebody tried to break into your home and do something to you?” “Well,” he said, “we’ve lived here five years and never had to use it.” Then I tell him, “Put it away, put it in the safe. You don’t need that. The safety you feel with that gun is an illusion.” There’s 330 million people in the United States. So yes, things are gonna happen sometimes. But if you put the little number beside what actually happens to people. You don’t need a weapon very often.

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Approaching Conflict From Peace Instead of War

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ML: I had a guy try to hijack my truck here not too long ago. He jumped on the passenger’s side. I tried to get him out, but he wouldn’t get out. So I shut my truck off, I ran around, and I grabbed him. I carry a concealed weapon. I have a license. So I pulled out my 45, my “1911” we call it in the military. I pull it out and I told him to get out and he jumped into the driver’s side from the passenger’s side, over the console of my truck. I tugged on him. I put my 1911 away because I didn’t see a physical threat to me, other than maybe a bump or bruise. So I put it away and it took me 20 minutes to wrestle this guy out of my truck.

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Later, I contacted the police and the officer said, “Why didn’t you shoot him?” Those are police officers who have a mask on, probably veterans. “You have the rights to do that,” he said. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I never hit the guy. I just wrestled him. I’m fortunate that I’m in good shape. I wrestled him out of my truck, because I didn’t want to shoot him. So the police asked “Why didn’t you shoot him?” I’ve been in combat. I don’t want to shoot people. I have a way I can handle them. And if I couldn’t handle him, he could take my truck. I’m not going to kill him over my truck. That’s what people do, they’re so quick to fire, so quick to hurt people. They don’t take that moment of time to think, especially veterans, we’re so defensive. We put that mask on and we don’t take it off. So when you take that mask off, you’re right. I’ve never heard that about leaving an impression before. Does it leave an imprint on your face? Yes it does. And it is slow to come off, but it does come off and you can lay the mask down.

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DK: I’m sorry that happened to you, Mike. A friend of mine recently had a gun pulled on him at an ATM at night when he was in his car taking money out and it was a similar type of shock, you know, you’re going about your business and all of a sudden you’re in a confrontation.

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ML: Yeah, it is that way, nowadays. One of the guys that I met, by going into the prisons and volunteering and pouring water [doing sweat lodge] he was into drugs really bad. His outlook was he’d watch people go up the ATM, and he’d say, “Give me my money! That’s my money!” And he was gonna do bodily harm if they didn’t give it to him. He’s a big guy and he scared them. And he talked to them like that, “This is my money! Get your hands off my money!” That’s how he did it. He was an Army veteran. I’ve been working with that guy, he’s out of the prisons, and now he goes to sweat lodge, he’s on entirely different pathway and got married. But when I first met him, he was very dangerous and very, very serious about what he was doing. But that’s part of his army training, he was in an airborne unit, and he put that mask on. I talked to him about wearing that mask and taking it off and leaving it off. You know, it’s not easy, but if we need it in an emergency situation, we use it, say to go into burning buildings and pull people out. For a time with the fire department, that’s what I did, accidents, overseeing injured or dying women and children– trying to do your best. I carry a dozen children in my mind, but through my work I’m able to move forward.

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Bob Coalson

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ML: I learned that through Bob Coalson who was a therapist at American Lake VA hospital. Over a certain amount of years, I’ve been fortunate to take a lot of therapist and bring them into sweat lodge and bring them into another way, because you face so much negativity all day long as a therapist working with veterans. You have to have some outlet for it, whether it’s talking with another therapist, or purifying and letting go of the negative energy, because it hangs on you. So I give them the opportunity to cleanse their spirits and smudge their bodies down.

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DK:  When you invited Jenny Salmon and me into the sweat lodge, you said something like “The sweat lodge is for all veterans, not just Native American veterans, because all veterans are brothers and sisters, so it’s for all veterans. And it’s not just for veterans, but it is also for doctors and nurses and therapists too, because anyone working with war and trauma can get sick from it, and who will take care of the veterans if the doctors and nurses and therapists are sick? Therefore the inipi olowan, the sweat lodge is for everyone at the VA.” It was a very beautiful and inclusive thing that you said.

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ML: I learned this from Bob Coalson, the therapist from American Lake VA that I knew for 25 years, when he crossed over. On the last day he was here on Earth, I told him, “I’m on my way over.” “Don’t,” he said. “I’m coming,” I said. He said, “Mike, I have got no more time for negativity, make me laugh.” So I took my drum and I said that I forgot the words to this song and I wondered if he knew them. Well, this was a song I had taught him, so we both knew that I hadn’t forgotten the words. But I told him, “For the life of me I cannot remember the words.” And I started drumming and then he started singing – see, that’s another example of distractive healing. Then we started the conversation after the song.

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“I have no more room for negativity in my life,” he said. On the other side there is no negativity. It is all colors and brilliance. The Creator only gives us a little space for letting in negativity, or positivity for that matter, into our lives. If we were to experience the enormity of anger or sadness or joy as great as it was on the other side, it would blow our minds.

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Laughter is a great medicine, but too much can make you sick, just as too much of anything can make you sick. In my life I always try to remember that, I don’t want to take people down a negative pathway. I don’t want people to turn my words into concrete. The next day, Bob passed over to the other side. He always had this strong North Carolina accent. Sometimes people would ask me about how to sing words to certain songs, because he would sing them one way and I would say them another way – but that was just his accent. “They are both right, because that’s the way  Bob sings it,” I’d tell them. He was an amazing, amazing man. I realized that my lot in life is that I’m a student of life.

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The Black Wolf and the White Wolf​

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ML: In our way of being, as Native people, we have positive energies and negative energies. The negative energy has to be dealt with. We call it the black wolf and the white wolf.

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The black wolf represents the path of darkness, evil, the ending of lives. The white wolf cares about life and taking care of people. The black wolf hated the white wolf so much that it came out of the darkness into the light and killed two young white wolves before retreating to the darkness.

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The elder white wolf realizes that the black wolf is bound and determined to kill off goodness. So he goes into the darkness of the black wolf’s woods. But the deeper he went into the woods, the weaker he got and the black wolf had almost caught him – he could feel the black wolf’s breath on his tail as he ran. But the white wolf knew a short cut out of the darkness. He was trying to lure the black wolf, but in going in the darkness he was almost lost himself. The white wolf got out, just barely.

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So there is this realization that when you stray into darkness, no matter what the purpose, you could be lost. That is how it is with drugs, one thing leads to another – maybe nicotine to marijuana to alcohol and maybe even more. Darkness always leads somewhere worse than you expected. Darkness, or evil, owns the fence, and you cross over at your peril. That is why we ask, “Which wolf are you feeding?” We believe that the white wolf is in the heart and the black wolf is in the head. When you speak from your head you can end up condemning something. But when you speak from the heart you are speaking from goodness.

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DK: That reminds me of what Nietzsche warned, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you” (Nietzsche, 1989, aphorism 146, pg. 89). Maybe that is what happens to therapists and doctors and nurses, they spend so much time working with the darkness that veterans are carrying that the darkness infects them, like the ideas of secondary traumatic stress or vicarious traumatization.

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ML: That’s one of the things I said many years ago to doctors and therapists, is don’t look at yourselves as your title, look at yourselves as healers – and as a healer, you have to heal yourself. You have to go in and take care of yourself and use smudging to release negative energies. I don’t look at them as clinicians, and physicians, and practitioners, but I look at them as spirits having a human experience.

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We all are going to return to that spirit world one day, and I wouldn’t want them to come spirit world when I’m there and think that I didn’t offer them some cleansing of their spirit, their sickness. And so iwauzan azyuyeya, sickness as a result of being in battle with people and yourself. And eventually, you take that into your home, unless you cleanse yourself, stop a minute, before you leave, take a deep breath, go to the tree, touch it, let it go, it doesn’t belong, you leave it alone, take it back to the Earth to the root medicine of a tree, just let it go. And then go home.

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You clinicians, you’ve got to do it yourself, too. If you don’t take off the negative energy, it can cause you to have extremely bad health, where your immune system gets weak. Because it’s stress that’s on your shoulders. It’s on your body. That’s what I was taught too, at the VA, not only in my culture. I am truly blessed to have been able to finally wake up and go to the VA and seek counseling and help. I’m very thankful for the VA. But as I started to go back into my culture, I learned that we have to cleanse ourselves of the negative energy that we are carrying from iwauzan azuyeya, and that gets on the doctors and nurses, too. So it’s important to me, because you can’t heal me or help me if you don’t heal yourself, if you don’t feel good. Let it go.

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DK: Thank you for that healing work that you have done all these years, Mike, for veterans and for staff. You know, I’ve been thinking about the confrontation you had with the man trying to take your truck. You could have gone into a war mentality and come out shooting. But even though you were in conflict, it was more of a peace mentality than a war mentality. You were in it to resolve the conflict, not to hurt someone, and not to get hurt yourself.

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Joseph Rael has described his vision of the War Gods when we were working on our book, Walking the Medicine Wheel. He said that we humans created the War Gods because of our fear and that we thought that war would make us feel safe from fear. When Joseph confronted the War Gods, they resisted, but eventually as he engaged with them he realized that they were just doing what we had created them to do – and at that point they turned into Peace Gods. He often says that “what comes around goes around.” And that if we put out fear or we put out war, “it will come back and hit us in the bum” (Kopacz & Rael, 2016, pgs. xxxv, 3-5, 53). The antidote to war, it seems for Joseph, is to come home from war, not to continue the war, to bury the weapons, as the Elders at Picuris Pueblo did when they heard about the deaths caused by the atomic bombs dropped in Japan. Even though they weren’t the ones who dropped the bomb, they took the weapons of the Pueblo and buried them to try to counter the act of war.

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Can you beat PTSD by going to war with it? Or will going to war with something just create more war? Particularly if the sicknesses of iwauzan azuyeya can continue as being at war with yourself?

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Walking a Different Road

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ML: Well, I don’t believe you can beat it, but I believe you can find ways to live with it. It always crops up but once you recognize it you can make a different choice. There’s the teaching about the five days of life. The first day, you fall into a hole and you have no understanding why you’re there – and it takes you forever to get out of the hole on the first day. On the second day you fall back into the hole. And you’re wondering, why am I back in here? It doesn’t take you quite so long to get out of it because you don’t like it. The third day you come along, you fall into the hole and you stay a short time because you hate it. And the fourth day you go around the hole. And on the fifth day, you take a different path.

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And that’s the process. So, it’s learning which day you are in. I don’t want to be in day one in my life and I don’t want to be in day two in my life. Even so, I do end up there, but it doesn’t take me long to get out of the hole. I recognize it. I don’t like it. But on the fifth day, you a take different road. For me I like to stay in day five.

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When that guy tried to – I knew I could shoot him. I actually put my forty-five up to his head and said, “Get out of my truck or I will shoot you.” But he didn’t move him. I realized – he wasn’t there. I wasn’t talking to someone who was conscious about what he was doing. He was drugged up or whatever, on meth or bath salts or something – I realized, there was no rationalizing with this guy at all.

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And so then it was survival for myself. I didn’t want to be faced with going backwards. I didn’t want to go back into day one. That would have been the path of least resistance. And so for me, it was the sadness in seeing this guy sick, and I didn’t want to go back into day one, because I’d been there. I want to keep the ground – see, in the military, they teach you, do not give up your gained ground. So I just didn’t want to give it up. I said “No.”

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And it was sad to hear those police officers say, “Hey, I would have shot him.” That’s the first thing they do, pull those guns out. Everything you see – pull the gun out! Well, I was taught if you’re not going to pull that gun out and fire it, don’t pull it out. Period. But that’s the mentality, we’ve come into society where that’s what happens for any little thing – pull the gun out! So yeah, I didn’t want to hurt that guy. It was protection for me, as well as for him.

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Then I put the gun out of my way so that I couldn’t access it again. My first instinct was to pull it out and maybe that would get him out, but then my second instinct, once I saw he wasn’t there, I locked it back down. Nope. This isn’t going to help this guy, it’s not going to help either one of us. And the bottom line is – it’s a truck. If he steals my truck, which I had the keys to, he couldn’t take it, he could do whatever he wanted to, but he wasn’t going to drive it. I could just walk away and call 911. I was surrounded by all kinds of people behind me, you know it was at a stoplight. The Portland Avenue stoplight, and it was backed up and they didn’t do anything. I did yell out to one guy, “Help me! Get this guy off of me.” But I guess he didn’t want to jump in. But eventually, I put as much pressure on as he did and pulled him out of my truck and he got out of there. So, we need to do something different than we’re doing. For me, as a veteran, that is getting back to my roots, and understanding things and then surrounding myself with positive energy all the time. That’s what I do. I surround myself with positive energy, and I leave the negative energy alone.

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Beautiful Painted Arrow

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ML: Let’s talk about Beautiful Painted Arrow. I’ve talked a lot about him over the years. About his medicines that he uses and his giving things back to the Earth.

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DK: Yes, let’s talk about Joseph’s work. He shared the ceremony that when a Veteran leaves for war, he or she should scoop up a pile of earth, offer it to Father Sky, pour it back to Mother Earth, and then smooth the pile back into the Earth, first with one hand and then with the other. And then, upon return from war, even before entering the home, the Veteran should do the ceremony again, letting go of anything being carried that it is no longer necessary for that Veteran to carry (like letting go of the negative energy you speak of) (Kopacz & Rael, 2016, pgs. xx-xxi).[ii]

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When we were working on our book, Joseph called me one afternoon, as I was getting out of work at the VA, and he said he had just had a vision that God (Wah-Mah-Chi in Tiwa, which means Breath-Matter-Movement) keeps a held-back place of goodness in all of our hearts, no matter what we have done or what has been done to us (Kopacz & Rael, 2016, pgs. 252-253). This reminds me of what you talk about when you say that human beings are gentle spirits.

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ML: Well, I’ve been doing sweat lodges, and in fact just a week ago I talked about that mound of dirt that he does. For us, when we make our altar in the sweat lodges, it’s the mound of dirt from the hole we dig for the stones in the center of the sweat lodge, it holds the Mountain Spirits, everything that we need to know when we do hambleche [vision quest] is in that altar. I tell people to build their own altar, their own way of doing it, I tell them build your little altar of all the things that you don’t want in this world, and then give it back to the Earth Mother, let it go. And I do add, maybe a small twist on it, and say, find a place where you’re not going to come back  to. See I don’t want it to be a cemetery they come back to and memorialize. Just take some time, go off somewhere, just pick a spot and use mole dirt with it because it comes from the two worlds that comes with the underneath of the world. Mole dirt comes from the things you cannot see – the Fish Nation which includes the creepy crawlies, the Worm Nation, the kit fox, the moles, the thing you don’t see in this earth that are very much a part of this.

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So I added to what Beautiful Painted Arrow does, take a little bit of mole dirt, and put it there. And then when you’re putting that back down, it’s your altar. It’s what you don’t want and let it go. And I tell them, this came from Beautiful Painted Arrow.

I just added to use mole dirt and to find some place that you are never going to go to again. Don’t look back at it. Because if you look back at it, you’re gonna call it forward. So don’t look back at it.

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DK: I like what you added with the mole dirt from the unseen and the underneath. I’ll tell Joseph about that.

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It seems like a lot of the Native ways of approaching PTSD and illness are about reconnecting to positive energy and letting go of negative energy. In psychiatric medicine the focus is on getting rid of things, getting rid of symptoms, but we rarely talk about reconnecting to the positive and growing health – except in the Whole Health model at VA. You’ve talked about connecting to emotions, connecting spirit, to the directions, connecting to the Earth. Can you say more about connection medicine versus separation medicine?

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ML: Well, to me, it’s like being on a treadmill. You can’t out run the treadmill and you cannot run life. So you have to learn how to handle each of those situations that confront you. One of those ways that we do, to get back in touch with us, is sweat lodge and rooted medicines. We give them a medicine bag, for protection, to carry with them. Some of the medicines are life medicines, so we tie them up so you can’t open them up. Some of them are things you can add to any medicine bag. Then they put that on, we put it underneath our shirts, we don’t put it out for show and tell. That’s our protection. Then, at a point in time when you’re confused, you can just reach up and grab your medicine bag. See, as Sun Dancers we’ve been pierced in the chest. So if I’m in that confrontation, I put my hands on my scars from Sun Dance. I’m a Sun Dancer – this is where I gotta be. This is what I agreed to do them and I walk with the sacred pipe. I have to maintain a certain situation. I don’t wear a white collar, but I do walk a certain path and, and in certain instances, people, they heal from seeing you. And so I don’t think you can out run it. I don’t think you can ever leave it.

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I don’t believe in – what’s the word that they came up with about twenty years ago – closure? Yeah, I don’t believe in closure. I believe in acceptance. Okay, a friend of mine, her granddaughter was murdered at three years old. You don’t forget that, there’s no closure to that. Every time she thinks about her, she grieves. Her face, her demeanor, it changes. So, we give her something that she can do – to put the little girl into her medicine bag and hold it and pray with it. When she gets those memories, she can think, “I’m right here now with her.” And she can tell her granddaughter, “I’m right here, I’m not going nowhere.” She can hold her medicine bag and say to her granddaughter, “I remember you, I’ll never forget you.” So you give them a way that they can connect back. But, like I say, there’s no closure to the healing. It’s accepting and then learning.

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DK: That makes sense. Because with closure, people often say, “How do I get rid of X, Y, or Z?” “How do I get rid of these nightmares?” “These panic attacks?” Or, “How do I get rid of PTSD?” And I’ll say, “Well, it’s part of who you are.” So you are right, you can’t outrun it, you can’t get away from it, but you can come into new relationship with it.

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ML: You know, you and nurse Jenny Salmon have brought a lot of things to this VA Hospital that VA medicine wheel you talk about, and that healing way looking at things.

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DK: 

At VA we are always working on Whole Health,[iii] which grows out of the Circle of Health that includes all the different human dimensions of mind, body, spirit, surroundings, and relationships – sometimes I think of it a little like the VA Medicine Wheel. I’ve been running a Whole Health drop-in class meditation class. We talk about what’s going on in veterans’ lives for half-an-hour, and then we do some kind of meditation for half-an-hour. Whole Health gives veterans tools and connections so that they can grow their health in their daily lives, not just when they come to the VA. The VA Whole Health website has the Personal Health Inventory that veterans can do to focus on what matters most to them, on what they want their health for. There are also a lot of meditations, tai chi trainings, yoga practices, even biofeedback programs that veterans can access for free through the website. Veterans can use these practices to reconnect with themselves and bring themselves back into wholeness.

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In closing Mike, any advice you’d give to somebody who doesn’t have access to sweat lodge or can’t find a Native healer to consult with? What are a couple of things that people could do differently in their lives? To have a different relationship to PTSD and themselves?

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ML: Well, when we are doing the talking circle, we are drumming and singing; Learning about our culture, about the dances, taking them out to pow wows, reconnecting with pow wows, taking them to you know, a longhouse, canoe journey. They can attend stand down. There’s our smokehouse, reconnecting with the Tribe. People can always give me a call. You know, or give you a call.

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I’ve often thought that there might be a guidebook for the VA. One of the things that really stood out in my mind was the alternative pathways group [Whole Health work group] that you started, it grew like wildfire. There were lots of people interested in that.

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All these things at the VA have helped thousands upon thousands of veterans in their healing and understanding, like the Heroes Program at American Lake. Also, there’s a program coming out right now that I’m helping with. It’s a Native American app. So it shows pathway, wisdom, and different things, so I’m reviewing that for them. They’ve got a team in Colorado, Utah, Texas, and other teams. They asked me if I would review it because I see it as a veteran, and I see it as a Native American veteran. I’m blessed that I get to do that kind of stuff.

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DK: That reminds me, there is a VA App Store where anyone can download free apps, like Live Whole Health or Mindfulness Coach.

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ML: But what we need to really have in the VA system, is access to Elders that can help, the Tribal Elders. I have put together a book of every VA center in the United States. And I have a book of every Tribal organization in the United States. That took a bit of research and time. And if we had something like that, you could find Elders.

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DK: What about somebody who doesn’t have a Tribal connection, someone who isn’t Native and can’t connect with an Elder?

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ML: Find some sage. Nowadays, you can get it everywhere – online even. Cleanse your spirit. The biggest thing that you are going to learn is that there’s two ways of cleansing yourself. One is your body with soap. The other is your spirit (wanagi) with sage (pejehota, or gray grass). Using only a leaf of it, just one leaf, because you don’t want to over medicate people. There are those great big wands – you don’t need that – it’s just a waste of the sage. Remember that the medicine, pejuta, comes from the Earth, our Mother.

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My words are not Absolute, they are full of Truth, as my Elders have taught me.

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Endnotes

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This interview has also been submitted as a chapter for the second edition of Courtenay Nold's book Total War on PTSD.

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[i] There are currently 574 federally recognized Tribes/Nations that have formal treaty recognition with the United States. (“Tribal Leaders Directory,” U.S. Department of the Interior, Indian Affairs, accessed 7/25/24). Non-federally recognized Tribes/Nations are those that have a cultural and historical identity and yet never entered into treaties with the United States government. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified nearly 400 non-federally recognized Tribes/Nations in 2012 (“Federal Funding for Non-Federally Recognized Tribes,” GAO webpage, accessed 7/25/24).

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[ii] We made a video of Joseph performing this ceremony, called “A Healing Ritual for Veterans Going to War and Returning,” available on YouTube.

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[iii] Whole Health is an initiative started by the national VA Office of Patient Centered Care & Cultural Transformation to promote Veterans’ and staff health and well-being. It is a holistic approach that uses the Circle of Health to bring together body, mind, relationships, and spirituality to create health and not just treat disease. There is a VA Whole Health website with great information for staff and Veterans. There is also a 23023 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report, Achieving Whole Health: A New Approach for Veterans and the Nation that is available as a free pdf download or as a hard copy book.

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References:

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Kopacz, D. & Rael, J. (2016). Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD, Tulsa: Pointer Oak.  p. xxxv, 3-5, 53.

Kopacz, D., & Rael, J. (2018). Sage – The Wise One. The International Journal of Professional Holistic Aromatherapy; 6(4): 17-21.

Marlantes, K. (2011). What it is Like to Go to War. New York: Grove Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1989). Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (translated by Walter Kaufmann). New York: Vintage Books.