Medicine Women on the Rez

My dad and I were driving back from the All Roads Film Festival in Santa Fe last month and we were making small talk about some of the films we saw that day and how some of them were just plain wondrous. Two of the filmmakers were talking about life as a kid on the Rez. One mentioned casually that as a little girl she was sent to a medicine woman because she cussed too much and said it with a straight face. My dad started laughing uncontrollably. Big belly laughs. We were expecting her visit to a Medicine Woman to be for something profound, like finding your spirit helper or something, not a little girl cussing too much.

I really loved that story and remembered that my cure for cussing as a kid was a bar of soap down the old pie-hole from my mom. It's one of my more vivid memories, and unfortuanately my malady wasn't anything so grand as spirit dreams or anything like that either. Dang.