WAY OF THE SHAMAN
By Laura Ann
Phillips
October 11, 2000
Ricardo Cruz
is an Amerindian shaman: a healer and holy man - a role found in most first nation
tribes.
After our interview at the
Forestry Division’s Cleaver Woods Recreation Site in Arima, Cruz and I were
walking past the ajoupa – a replica of an Amerindian hut and one of the main
sights there – on our way out.
A
small group of students had just begun a tour there, and the forest officer who
was conducting the tour spotted us.
“Ricardo! Ricardo!” he
called.
Gesturing to Cruz, the
officer said to the students, “This is one of them.”
They peered at Cruz in the
dim light.
“This is what they used to
look like. See the kind of
hair?”
He
raised Cruz’s cap.
“So, you have a real, live
Amerindian in front of you,” the officer declared.
Cruz quietly excused
himself.
While Amerindian cultures
have become more accepted over the past 15 years or so, their belief system
remains little understood, still considered odd, backward or
evil.
The
writings of conquerors and colonials have helped to perpetuate those
beliefs.
As
recently as 1968, a pamphlet entitled “The Amerindians in St Lucia”, by the Rev
C. Jesse proclaimed that shamans were “intermediaries of evil
spirits.”
“From serious accounts left
by early missionaries,” he wrote, “it would seem proved that the shamans dealt
with the devil and were at times possessed by him.”
At
24, Cruz still remembers when first nation tribes were persecuted in the United
States where he grew up.
His
father, a member of the Taino tribe of Puerto Rico, used to tell people he was
Hispanic or mixed with Chinese.
Cruz’s mother is
Trinidadian, originally from Lengua, and a mixture of the Karinya and Warao
tribes.
The
terms indigenous peoples and first nations, Cruz said, were preferable to
“Amerindian” or “Carib” as names by which to describe his
people.
“[The names don’t] define
what tribe you’re from or where you’re from, but they reflect more respect for
indigenous peoples, for first peoples,” said Cruz.
The
term “Carib” is a derogatory term, he said, introduced by the Spanish
conquerors.
“Carib means ‘cannibal’,” he
explained. “That term was used to
refer to people who fought back.
That is the name which kind of stuck.
“Our goal is to eventually
phase that out.”
That, and a lot of other
things.
Like the ignorance
surrounding their collective belief system.
Stories of what his people
believe varies from tribe to tribe, Cruz said, mainly because they were handed
down through the oral tradition.
Inter-tribal marriages
swallowed up some of the details, too, but the philosophies, he said, are
essentially the same.
Indigenous cultures believe
that all life is connected and dependent – physically and spiritually – upon the
earth and the sun.
“The Earth is our mother,”
Cruz explained. “Everything we need
comes from the earth. The sun is a
manifestation of God, who is our father.”
“The sun is always there,
looking over us. From the sun, we
get light, heat, gravity and time.
Everything would perish without the sun.”
All
creation, he said – the rain, the sun, the plants – are manifestations of
God.
Human beings are just
another member of that system which governs all things.
“Plants take light and
energy from the sun, people, or animals eat the plants, people feed on the
animal. People die and break down
and plants feed on them.”
But
humans have lost sight of their place in this system, Cruz said, believing
themselves to be higher, better than other life forms.
In
their culture, he said, that it is considered a manifestation of evil. When that happens, people can become
like a cancer on the earth – destructive.
“There’s an opposition to
God, a spirit which is jealous of him and wants to destroy his world,” said
Cruz. “He puts the idea in man’s
head that he should try to be superior to God.”
“The Tainian belief (his
father’s tribe) is that the Creator God had a brother,” Cruz said. “When God started to create the
universe, his brother said he could do better.”
Details vary in the oral
tradition, Cruz pointed out, so even though the stories speak of “God’s
brother”, it isn’t a literal reference.
Rather, they refer to someone close to God.
“The creations his brother
made remained in the world and started misinforming people of their true place,”
he said, “So man looks at the forest and says it’s evil.”
“He
doesn’t know his place and brings evil on everything
else.”
Another part of the fall-out
is that humans also began to fear death, Cruz said.
Some also believe that
colonization and violence were “suggested to a group of people by evil spirits”,
Cruz said.
Shamanism may be in the
Cruz’s ancestry. He knows of
relatives, and has heard of others, on both his parents’ sides of the family who
were so skilled.
But
the word “shaman’ is not found in the vocabulary of indigenous
peoples.
The
tribal medicine man would have been called a “biai” (pronounced “bee-eye”) or
‘piai.”
The
origin of the word “shaman” is Scandinavian, Cruz said, and was adopted by
anthropologists to describe the medicine men and women they
encountered.
Both genders can be
shamans. There is no word in first
nation cultures which differentiates between a male and female healer, Cruz
said.
Still, it is a role for
which one must be chosen.
Cruz believes he was
selected by the spirits, although, he said, he is not a spiritual
leader.
There are, however, people
who come to him regularly for guidance or with medical
complaints.
That is why shamans must
understand how the spiritual and physical worlds are connected, he said, and
about the medicinal properties of plants and animal life and how to apply that
knowledge.
“That is what separates a
shaman from a herbalist,” Cruz said.
Prior to his death earlier
this year, Cruz’s grandfather helped him along the path by teaching him about
the medicinal and spiritual properties of plants.
His
spirits, Cruz said, taught him the rest.
He
regularly spent periods of prayer and fasting in the forests to commune with
those spirits, he said.
Cruz now lives with his
wife, Jennifer, and 15-month old daughter, Ara, in the Cumaca
forest.
He
intends to pass his knowledge on to his children and keep a keen eye out for the
one who seems most accepting of the way – the one who the spirits may choose as
the next shaman.
In
the interim, he intends to help those around him experience the God who is all
around them.
“People say God is all
around but they don’t see it.
[They] always look to new life, focusing on the spiritual attainment of
that life, and take for granted their mother, the earth,” said
Cruz.
“Have your religion, but you
still need to open your eyes to see what’s around you.”