outer-jessie's Diaryland Diary

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I could be wrong...

Hm...here's the thing. Nope, that's a bad way to start. Here isn't the thing.

G is one religion, and I am another (specifically, I am not another). Actually she is not so much a religion but a culture, an indigenous American culture. That is all fine, more power to everyone who contributes to all that makes a culture what it is. But not all elements of a culture are equally good.

I'm talking this out because I'm trying to understand it; don't judge me until I'm done.

In G's culture, it is common to have ceremonies done by a medicine person (usually men, but I suppose it could be a woman too). There is nothing wrong with that; it is both a connection to ones ancestors and culture and place over time, and a way to attend to the spiritual elements of being human. But sometimes it very much seems to me that the people who conduct these ceremonies prey on people for money. They tap into their fears and superstitions and anxieties about other people and tell them they must conduct such-and-such an expensive ceremony on them in order to reverse whatever it is.

As I've mentioned before, G's family lost their oldest daughter last spring, G's older sister. G's next younger sister was planning a ceremony for last summer for the family, especially her sons, which was of course pushed off when the elder sister died. The younger sister is having a baby this spring, so they had the ceremony (now directed toward the new baby instead of the sons and extended family, but whatever) this spring instead. Now obviously this sister is in a very vulnerable position; she's pregnant AND recovering from the loss of her oldest sister. This is why I find it so irresponsible, cruel, manipulative, treacherous, what have you, that the medicine person told this sister that "someone" was trying to harm the family, that she had to have another expensive ceremony right away, "before something else happens."

What I'm told is that this person didn't know that the older sister had been killed. But that he said that the "someone" trying to harm the family was "the reason that you lost your sister". To that I say, bullshit. He could have easily found out this information, and he certainly seems to be attempting to use it to his advantage. On a pregnant woman! To tell a pregnant woman, your baby is in danger, the fact that you lost your sister is proof that someone's after you, pay me several hundred dollars and I'll fix it...this is the lowest of the most immoral things you can do to a person. Doesn't matter how much I value your culture, your practices, your beliefs; using them to wring money out of desperate people is wrong.

That's all I have to say about that.

9:04 a.m. - 2011-03-30

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