In my travels as a Native American Flute maker, I was constantly asked about Medicine Men or Women, or told that so and so studied under a Lacota or Cherokee medicine man by the name of...(pick any animal name you want here as long as it has Wolf or Eagle in it. -Oh,  and  it has to be Cherokee, or some Horse culture people.)  When some one tells you they are a Medicine Man or Woman you  know immediately that  they are not what they claim.  True Medicine people do not put out their shingle!  People who need to know they are Medicine people know without being told.  For those that don't know, it wouldn't make a difference if they were told.  These people do a lot of harm, and take a lot of money from unsuspecting people by claiming to be (you name the culture) Shamans.

To all of you out there looking to try Indian Religion for something new, keep your money in your pocket!  A true Indian Holy Man doesn't charge.  They don't advertise.

I know there are well meaning people out there who are searching.  I was one, and what I learned is that if you believe that the Spiritual walk of Indian People is true, and has merit, you should understand that to perform a Ceremony improperly would do more damage than good to all our relations, and to the Earth Mother.  If you don't believe in the validity of the ceremony, why waste the money and the effort to do it!

This is an excellent article.

Please read it before writing me for the name of a Medicine Person.

Remember!  Fools rush in where Angles fear to tread!

Exposing the fake medicine men and women
 

 by Tim Giago
 

 In the early 1990's I asked my staff writer at Indian Country
Today, Avis Little Eagle, to write an investigative series on fake
medicine men and women. She tackled what turned out to be a 10-part
series with trepidation.
 

 It seemed that everywhere we turned in those days, there was
another catalog or news story featuring medicine men and women of
dubious distinction. An eerie similarity arose in the backgrounds of
many of these would be healers and spiritualists.
 

 So many of these new age shaman made similar claims. They had been
adopted by a medicine man (it was always a man and he was usually
Lakota or Cherokee). They had learned all of the centuries old
methods of healing and ministering by these traditional teachers and
when they felt they were ready, they set out on their own to spread
the good news of Indian medicine and healing.
 

 In the many catalogs where their ads were placed most had assumed
names they presumed to be Native American (Blue Dove, Swift Deer,
etc.) and set up shop. They developed a system of monetary charges
for sweat lodge ceremonies, vision quests and so on. Of course, every
true Lakota and Cherokee knows that there are no charges for the
services of the medicine people.
 

 Most of the new age shaman were not Indian at all. When questioned
about their roots by Little Eagle they became angry and defensive.
Many proclaimed their rights to practice Indian medicine by virtue of
their adoption by Lakota holy men. Many would not, or could not,
reveal the names of their so-called mentors.
 

 Others said, usually quite vehemently, that they never enrolled
with an Indian tribe and never would because it was the government's
way of keeping them down. They would say, "I don't need a Bureau of
Indian Affairs number to know who I am." Most didn't understand or
realize that it was an Indian tribe that considered who or who is
not a tribal member not the BIA.
 

 Little Eagle, who last month was elected vice president of the
Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and who is the editor and publisher of the
McLaughlin, SD, based Teton Times, a weekly newspaper that serves
her tribe, began to grow more apprehensive as her weekly series
progressed because she was now receiving outright threats.
 

 One fake shaman, Harley Swift Deer Regan, became very vocal in his
threats. He had just been featured in an HBO Special called "Real
Sex" in which he allegedly revealed the sex secrets of the Cherokee
people. Then Principle Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Wilma
Mankiller, protested the lack of authenticity of this show to HBO
executives demanding a retraction of the shows contents. Of course,
that never happened.
 

 Regan's phone calls to Little Eagle became more ominous. But he
wasn't the only one. Some of the women shaman exposed in the
investigative series by Little Eagle also went from a defensive
position to an extremely offensive stance. They also threatened Avis
with lawsuits and worse. Of course, as the editor of Indian Country
Today, Avis came to me with all of the threats and I had to really
encourage her not to give up on the series but instead to let me
handle the threatened lawsuits.
 

 You have to understand that some of the false shaman professed to
have extraordinary powers. They attacked Avis with threats of a
curse or they told her that they would put bad medicine on her and
her family. A series of personal bad happenings to Avis totally
unrelated to the series or to the shaman only served to increase the
fear that was developing in her mind.
 

 At last Avis started to write Part 10, the final issue of the
series. It was a summation of all the nine other parts of the series
and her conclusions. As I walked by to pat her on the back as she
labored at that last part she had a look of great relief on her
face. Her lunch hour came right in the middle of it so she
cheerfully headed home to eat.
 

 Not five minutes had passed since her departure when her computer
monitor suddenly exploded in smoke and flames. Wow! All of the staff
still in the office reacted in horror. I immediately told the crew
to get her monitor out of there and replace it with an exact
duplicate. Of course all of the memory was in the hard drive so
nothing was lost and her computer was just sitting there ready for
her to resume the article when she returned from lunch.
 

 I swore my staff to secrecy and no one ever told Avis about the
mysterious fire that erupted in her monitor. In fact, this is the
first time I am revealing this because Avis did finish the 10-part
series that day and breathed a sigh of relief. I'm afraid she would
have reacted quite differently if she knew what had happened while
she was at lunch.
 

 A coincidence? One would suppose so, but no doubt those who delve
into the dark regions of illicit shamanism do so for a reason. Evil
can be manifested in many ways and in this day and age of modern
technology; many of us do not understand the depths of spiritualism,
real and imagined.
 

 The series by Avis exposed many false shamans and she believes to
this day that the new owners of Indian Country Today should retrieve
her series from the dustbins of the newspaper morgue and re-publish
them because there are still many false shamans out there.