Looking forward to 2011

Our newest book,  Two Toms: Lessons from a Shoshone Doctor,  will be available Spring 2011 from the University of Utah Press.  It's called Two Toms because it's about a Shoshone doctor, Tom Wesaw, and me, Tom Johnson.  On the Wind River, Wyoming Reservation, we were known collectively as Two Toms.


The picture above shows the circular arbor of a pow-wow - a three-day event held each summer by the Shoshone of Wind River, Wyoming, and also by the Arapaho.  Dancing and dance-contests for all ages and for men and women take place each afternoon and evening, with colorful garb.  Tom Wesaw and I often visited the pow-wow and for Tom it was a chance to renew acquaintances and for me, a chance to meet new people.   .   

On one of our trips to visit a client who needed doctoring, I drove past this old abandoned one-room log cabin, that may have been a home for an entire family in the 1930's, a period of extreme poverty.

Moccasin Lake at 8,000 feet in the Wind River Range.

The reservation I worked on extends to the continental divide, well into the Wind River Range.

Abandoned Cabin, Wind River

When I began field work on the Wind River Reservation as a graduate student, I decided to compare living conditions in the 1930's when everyone was poor to the late 1960's, when the Wind River Shoshone and Arapaho had been getting some revenue from their oil and gas leases and had more assistance in providing better housing.  This one-room log house was typical of the way people lived in the 1930's and only the more fortunate Shoshone like Tom Wesaw, who worked in the flour-mill, had a frame house with more than a single room.

Whole families would live in this one room, sleeping in beds around the inside of the room.  Often, houses had only a dirt floor, and many people still lived in army-style canvas tents. One Arapaho woman described life in one of those houses as warm and cozy but there was a downside: diseases like tuberculosis spread quickly when people live so close to each other and in the 1930's there was still no cure for tuberculosis. By the 1960's, drugs had almost eliminated that dreaded disease.

This lone house beside the road with its boarded-up front door is a grim reminder of what life was like on the reservation only a few years earlier.  

Moccasin Lake

Moccasin Lake high in the Wind River Range is a secluded area in Wyoming's Wind River Reservation at about 8,000 feet altitude.  A long winding road with many switchbacks leads to it.  In this area grow a variety of pine trees that are used for building the Sun Dance lodge and sweat lodges.

During the Sun Dance in July, Shoshone who are charged with constructing the lodge take a truck to this area and select the most perfect trees to be cut for building the lodge.  In this photo, you can see how the glaciers scoured the mountainous slopes so that very little vegetation grows in the region beyond the lake. In the far distance is St. Lawrence Basin, a grassy plateau that is a summer pasture for cattle owned by members of the Shoshone nation.

I never went up here with Tom Wesaw, but did hike on the Bear's Ear Trail in the late 1960's, which goes deep into the mountains.  For several years during the 1970's, the Shoshone Tribe declared this area to be off- limits to non tribal members.  It was a protest against too many non-Indians using the Reservation for recreational purposes.  Even a couple of years ago, the road to Moccasin Lake had been blocked again and for the same reasons but the blockade was later lifted.

What Does A Shoshone Doctor Do?

In our upcoming book, Two Toms: Lessons from a Shoshone Doctor, coming from the University of Utah Press in Spring of 2011,  I tell the story of my experiences living with a Shoshone doctor or religious healer.

 A Shoshone doctor is formed by a transfer of sacred knowledge from an elder.  it takes many years of experience to become an Indian doctor.  The doctor I studied under was 83 years old when I spent nine months under his roof.  He taught me that healing has a spiritual dimension not often found in our culture.  It is a religious act. It asks that God bless and show favor to the person being healed.

 As a leader in the Native American Church, the annual Sun Dance, and in sweat lodge meetings, the Shoshone doctor I lived with was was most like a therapist but the context was always spiritual.  He was conscious of people's everyday problems and offered advice through prayers.

He didn't charge anything for his services.      

-Tom