Western vs Traditional Medicine

By Leslie Hsu Oh

Photo credit: http://arowantree.blogspot.com

“Yew, Mom,” I said, peering into the pot.  “I think I see a cockroach, some snake skin...”

“Les, please don’t look at it.  You’re not helping.”

We had driven from Southern California to San Francisco to see a Chinese doctor who, after examining X-rays of Mā Ma’s liver cancer, prescribed a soup made up of thirty-two ingredients. One of the largest Chinese pharmacists in Los Angeles prepared three bags for her to boil and drink each day. The house smelled of bitter licorice tinged with herbs for a month before Mā Ma decided she couldn’t drink a drop more.

Another Chinese remedy required boiling a long, weed-like grass with a blue duck egg. A friend who was cured of liver cancer gave us the name of an old school teacher who lived about an hour away. I yanked long strands of grass from this man’s yard, filling several plastic bags for Mā Ma. The teacher looked like those Kung Fu masters in old Chinese movies. He tugged on his long stringy beard while he gave us instructions on how to plant them in our yard.

Once a month, we drove to a duck farm where I combed rows of eggs for any that reflected blue. The owner of the farm was a kind man with a smile that seemed to disappear on the sides of his face and a bushy beard which shook when he laughed. He wouldn’t take Mā Ma’s money for the eggs, but accepted boxes of fruit and flowers. Then, one day, we started bringing fruit and flowers to a veteran’s hospital, where he lay on a bed looking weaker and smaller every time we visited. We stopped going to the farm after Mā Ma received a phone call. She cried all night long.

If it were up to Mā Ma, she would’ve tried traditional medicine only. She had her limits. She wouldn’t pay more than a certain amount of money on non-Western treatments. Drinking urine was out of the question. But her doctors and insurance company had limits that Mā Ma believed ended her life. The insurance company would not pay for anything but Western biomedical treatments. Bà Ba and I forced her to choose one Western treatment, even though we had watched my eighteen-year-old brother die from the same disease after aggressive Western treatments that included a liver transplant.  Finally, she selected chemo embolism, but still had doubts. She asked her doctor, “When you inject the alcohol around the tumor, won’t you be pulling out cancer cells into my abdomen through the needle track?”

Her doctor answered with annoyance, “Ninety nine percent I guarantee you that it won’t. Try to be a patient, not a doctor.”

In the end, she was right. About a year after her diagnosis, she died with numerous cancer cells clustered like grapes along her abdominal cavity.

Since Mā Ma’s death in 1994, I’ve dedicated much of my life to making it easier for folks to access traditional medicines. On the Navajo Reservation, a plan I developed in graduate school with Chinle Comprehensive Health Care Facility blossomed into an Office of Native Medicine where patients can see traditional healers and receive ceremonies performed in a hogan and a Native healing room. Alaska Natives can receive free services at Southcentral Foundation’s Traditional Healing Clinic. For non-Natives, most traditional healing services still remain out-of-pocket.

Living in Alaska allowed me frequent lunch dates, home visits, and medicinal plant harvesting trips with traditional healers such as the renowned Rita Blumenstein, whom I recently featured in a cover story in First Alaskans Magazine and offered our readers a sneak peak in “Native Traditions of Giving” and “Life Off the Grid.”

Rita Blumenstein talks to a plant before she harvests it.
Photo credit: Leslie Hsu Oh

On Mother’s Day in 2011, my kids and I drove Blumenstein to a secret spot where she harvests petrushki. My daughter Kyra, who was five, and my son Ethan, who was two, peppered Blumenstein with questions on the long drive. She blew them kisses and told me exactly what I needed to hear, that I am a good mother.

With sprinkles of water from gray skies cooling my cheeks, I followed in Blumenstein’s footsteps along the shore. Over a decade of being part of her life, I was still in awe that this internationally revered woman makes time in her packed schedule for me.

Tightening her bright blue hood around her face, she broke out into a mischievous smile and beckoned me close. She stretched out both hands, leaned down towards a round low shrub, and closed her eyes. Her lips moved and I wished I could have heard what she said.

She pulled out a plastic bag from her backpack and said to me, “Take just a little from each.”

Then, she snapped off several stems and whispered to the plant, “Thank you.” She brushed the leaflets against my nose. I inhaled a cilantro-like fragrance. “Petrushki!” she hollered happily and hurried off to the next shrub with the speed of a child collecting candy that scattered from a piñata.

As we harvested, Blumenstein taught me about some of the other plants growing in the area. She pointed out the ones to avoid. She kept saying to me, “I just love you so much,” filling the emptiness that my mother’s death had left within.

Ethan says "thank you" to a petrushki leaf.
Photo credit: Leslie Hsu Oh

When my kids tired of digging in the sand, they each drifted towards me on their own time. I repeated what Blumenstein taught me. To respect the plants. Talk to them. Say thank you. Leave some for other animals and people.

Kyra approached each shrub with all her masculine energy. I warned her not to step on the plants, to be gentle. Blumenstein watched in the distance as I instructed Kyra not to grab fistfuls of petrushki but just a stem at a time.

“Like this Mommee?” she asked, waving three stems bristling with leaflets in my face. Her cheeks flushed pink from the past hour on the beach.

“That’s better. Now, what do you do?” I asked.

Kyra grabbed the plastic bag out of my hands and stuffed some leaflets roughly in. Then, she punctuated two pats on each shrub with “Thank You.”

“Ethan, your turn,” she grabbed her brother’s arm. Both Blumenstein and I watched proudly as she repeated my instructions.

Before we left the beach, I asked both kids to give Blumenstein what they harvested. Blumenstein told us that she couldn’t think of a better Mother’s Day gift.

Now living in the Washington, D.C. area, I worry that my children are being deprived of the myriad of ways that traditional medicine can heal spiritually, emotionally, physically, and mentally. For those of you who live in big cities, I’d love to hear how you access traditional medicine?

Off the Beaten Track: Native Traditions of Giving

After living in Alaska for seven years, Leslie Hsu Oh returns to the Washington, D.C., area with a wealth of adventures from the Last Frontier. Her work appears in Cirque, First Alaskans Magazine, Fourth Genre (forthcoming), Kids These Days!, Rosebud Magazine, Stoneboat, and Under the Sun. “Between the Lines” was listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2010. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage, where she currently teaches, and a master’s from Harvard University. Check out her web site (www.lesliehsuoh.com) or find her on Facebook. 

My four-year-old son runs down the hall wailing, “Jiĕ Jie [Older Sister in Mandarin] ate all the grapes and didn’t share any with me.” My seven-year-old tries to defend herself, but the evidence is bulging in her squirrel cheeks.

“Kyra, what happened?” I shake my head with disappointment. A year living in the Washington, D.C., area and already they had forgotten an important lesson they learned from Alaska Natives since birth.

When we lived in Alaska, we often relaxed on the benches facing seven 56x32-inch plasma screens in the Anchorage Museum’s Living Our Cultures, Sharing our Heritage: The First Peoples of Alaska exhibit and listened to Elders and youth speak about giving in 10 (Athabascan, Eyak, Haida, Iñupiaq, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Unangan, Sugpiaq, Yup’ik, and Saint Lawrence Island Yup’ik) approximately two-minute video vignettes looping across seven monitors.

Kyra and Ethan share their first harvest
of petrushki, also known as beach lovage,
with Auntie Rita, a renowned traditional healer
and member of the International Council
of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers.

It was my way of simulating the old days, when daily, children could gather at the foot of an Elder after dinner and listen to his or her stories. At a minimum, I hoped that my children could understand the importance of giving, unmarred by the Western expectation for something in return.

In the Yup’ik video, Alice Rearden (Cucuaq Aluskak) speaks about ella, or awareness. Growing up in Napakiak, her Elders taught her “that if you are out walking and see a piece of driftwood sticking out of the mud, you should pull it out and turn it over so that the muddy part can dry. That piece of wood is alive and aware, and it will feel gratitude for your kindness.”

Her features are delicate, but when she speaks, her voice is laced with the weight of more than 12 years of wisdom, gleaned from serving as lead translator for the Calista Elders Council. The video pans to a scene of fish hanging on a dry rack while Rearden says off screen: “We always grew up with that sense, of not putting yourself first or above others. Giving gifts to people, those kinds of, you know, unselfish gestures that you do for people—it will come back in turn.”

Kyra harvests petrushki on the coast of
Turnagain Arm, Alaska. She learns
not to take too much, so other people
and animals can harvest too.

Working with cultural anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan, Rearden, who is now 35, translates books such as Ellavut: Our Yup’ik World and Weather, the ninth in a series produced by the Calista Elders Council to document Yup’ik oral traditions. Yup’ik Elders explain that "those who are capable must help those less fortunate through sharing food and doing chores for them. We were admonished: ‘Even though an old woman wants to pay you, you do not receive it.’ When an elderly woman or man is given something or helped, she is extremely grateful and thanks you with enthusiasm. And they give the person who helped them something beneficial, thinking of something in their minds that will aid him positively in his life.

“Yup’ik discussions of the ethics of sharing describe its consequences in terms of its nonmaterial return—the grateful thoughts it elicits.…Today, sharing knowledge is as critical as sharing food in both the transfer and transformation of Yup’ik moral standards. Admonitions to act with compassion and restraint remain foundational not only in Yup’ik interpersonal interaction but in their relations
with their environment.”

In Anchorage, the sharing of subsistence foods has become the warp thread weaving together Native and non-Native communities. While dip-netting, I always collected fish heads from non-Native neighboring fishermen and delivered them to Elders whom I worked with in town. During holiday seasons, the post offices are bustling with ice boxes packed with subsistence foods that are being mailed to the Lower 48.

Every summer, we take the kids dip netting at the mouth of the Kenai River.
The kids help us clean, pack, freeze, and ship salmon to relatives in the Lower 48.

As a mother of three, Kyle (13), Kayla (11), and Christopher (4), Rearden trades ideas with me on how to teach our kids tuvqakiyaraq, the custom of sharing, in an urban setting. Rearden grew up “feeling shame to get more than someone else. Whenever I was asked to share, I always gave the other person a bigger piece. I would cut a candy in half and be ashamed to take the bigger piece.”

She raises her children, who were all born in Anchorage, with these ideas: “The more you give, the more you get back. If we are stingy, like if you don’t share your toys, then [they] will break right away. When you give, it will come back to you. Your selfless act is always rewarded. They see that I don’t hold back when it comes to helping in any situation. I hope they [her kids] watch me and observe what I do.”

Kyra thanks the salmon for giving up his life to feed us.

Because it is hard to keep traditions like tuvqakiyaraq in the city, Rearden goes out of her way to share food. She often hosts feasts where she cooks all day, serving her most precious subsistence foods, making sure her kids see that she is serving her last bag of salmonberries. She says, “it’s just enough for them to see. I am always talking to them and explaining the reasons behind sharing, the reason why it’s important to give to others and have compassion for others.”

With the holiday season upon us and this month being Native American Heritage Month, I take an apple out of the refrigerator and cut it in two. I present both pieces to Kyra.

Smiling mischievously at me, she snatches both pieces and presses them to her heart. Ethan starts to stomp his baby feet anxiously. “What will you give me in return?” she asks her pouting brother. Then, seeing the color drain from my face, she says, “I’m just kidding, Mom,” and deposits the largest piece in his little hands.