Traditional healing is threatened-Elders

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Juan and Edgar Uyunkar moved slowly around the makeshift courtroom in the council chambers of the Wikwemikong First Nation getting long hugs from supporters after their sentencing April 25. They pleaded guilty the day before to administering a noxious substance and trafficking in a controlled substance, charges that stemmed from the death of a woman who was taking part in a healing ceremony they were conducting.

A sympathetic ruling in the case from Justice Gerald Michel-one year conditional for the elder Uyunkar, and one day and time served for his son-provided little comfort to advocates for traditional medicine, who doubt the judges decision of the case provides any legal protection for the age-old practice.

In his ruling Justice Michel said, "These two persons are not before the court for having administered sacred medicines. Sacred medicines in different forms are administered almost throughout the world. . . They are before the court because the ingredients used in these occasions contained substances prohibited in Canada."

The comments, though they appear sympathetic to traditional healing, do not directly address the status of the practice of Indigenous or traditional medicine, said James Lamouche, a policy analyst with the National Aboriginal Health Organization (NAHO).

''This judge happened to be understanding and sympathetic, but there's nothing in the system that says that if this happens again that the next judge [won't] believe that this is witchcraft or something,'' Lamouche said in an interview from his Ottawa office.

NAHO wants the issue discussed, he added, because many Aboriginal Elders worry that governments could try to regulate healing and because the traditional knowledge involved in the practice must be protected.

"From an Aboriginal point of view, how we as Aboriginal people see traditional medicine, and how we want to move forward with it, has to be discussed,'' Lamouche said. ''There are so many issues in this respect, such as the protection of the knowledge, our languages, the plants and the land."

Representatives of NAHO, which was born out of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), attended a series of workshops and meetings with healers, Elders and other interested participants throughout the country in 2002 to discuss traditional healing. Lamouche said it plans to release a series of discussion papers this summer that will suggest ways to protect healing and other traditional knowledge, such as recognizing it as intellectual property or applying the constitutional right to health protection to it.

Lawyer Lloyd Greenspoon, who represented Edgar Uyunkar, said he was prepared to argue in court that traditional medicine is protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but that the healer's guilty plea made that unnecessary.

''This is going to be really important in the future,'' said Greenspoon, who told Windspeaker the Wikwemikong decision is likely not precedent-setting, because Justice Michel's comments about healing were outside of his main decision, obiter dictum in legal language.

Still, "it wasn't a negative decision for Aboriginal healing. That was the risk,'' added the lawyer. ''He could have found that the healing was connected to the death. He basically said 'only the Creator knows what caused the death'.''

In a paper soon to be released on its Web site (www.naho.ca) NAHO notes that as traditional healing comes into increased contact with mainstream culture, moves will have to be made to both protect it and ensure that the practice is not abused.

''The threat of government regulation of traditional medicine is not only a valid fear but also one that government agencies are currently assessing,'' reads the paper entitled Traditional Medicine in Contemporary Contexts: Protecting and Respecting Indigenous Knowledge, by McMaster University Indigenous studies professor Dawn Martin Hill.

When Health Canada designed a law to regulae "natural health products" last year, it said Aboriginal healers would be exempted because the regulations ignore items not sold on the open market and if items were created "at a particular moment in time for a particular patient." An Ontario law that governs physicians provides another example of a regulation that exempts Native healers. It excludes ''Aboriginal healers providing traditional healing services to Aboriginal persons or members of the Aboriginal community.''

The issue that emerges is: should national, or even international, exemptions exist for traditional healers?'' Hill's paper asks.

Despite governments' exemptions, many Native people still feel that traditional methods of healing are threatened, said Lamouche. "In our discussions with Elders throughout the country, a lot of them have voiced their concerns that the government and, to a lesser degree, the courts, will begin to become involved in this area, and the overwhelming majority . . . don't see and neither do they desire the government having a role in the area of traditional medicine.

"Almost everybody that we talked to says that traditional medicine has existed as a separate system of knowledge for millennia and it has its own systems of control and of transmission and development, and applying foreign concepts like regulation and liability and litigation to what traditional healers do and to Aboriginal concepts of health and healing is not going to be satisfactory to anybody," he added.

NAHO's discussions also included possible ethical guidelines or a code of conduct, Lamouche said. One such code, The Beliefs of the Elders: Codes of Ethics for Indigenous Medicine of the Colombian Amazon, was created by The Union of Yage Healers of the Colombian Amazon in 1999, reports the Hill paper.

''Any kind of code of conduct,'' said Lamouche, ''would have to come from Elders and healers themselves; it can't come from the top down. Even an Aboriginal organization such as ourselves couldn't dicate a code of ethics for Elders and healers.''