Synopsis
While in medical school (which I did not have the privilege of completing), once a week we had a small group discussion class called Focus On Problems. Each group had a leader, a member of the medical school staff or someone closely associated with the school, usually an MD or Ph.D. Our group leader was Dean of the Medical School, H. David Wilson, MD. One class period focused on working with patients of different ethnic backgrounds. Dr. Wilson asked me what were some of the traditions of my tribe in regard to medicine that would be helpful for a doctor to know. My reply was that I had been raised like a white, that I had grown up learning about various herbal and natural remedies, but that I knew nothing about the specific medical traditions, ceremonial or secular, of my people. I had always longed to know of the traditions of my people before that, but circumstances of my family history had not allowed it. That question in the Focus On Problems class caused that longing to intensify into a sharp pang of longing that would not be satisfied until many years later. While in the first two years of medical school as a nontraditional student, I was in an environment that encouraged the development of the knowledge of Native American traditions. We had Native American speakers that came and elaborated on Native American traditions. One area that was lacking was tribal histories, not recent tribal histories, but what academics label prehistory. I remember one of the speakers sitting at my table after her presentation. I commented to her that when white man came, they did all they could to destroy our social and religious fabric, so the old traditions were not passed down to most of the remaining members of the tribes. "Now we know nothing of our old history. There is nothing left. The white side of my family history is easy to know, but not my Cherokee and Choctaw side". She replied by saying that, yes, many of our
About the Author
Charla Jean Morris was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma just across the line out of the Cherokee Nation in Creek Nation in 1950. She came to life in the old Brick Muskogee General Hospital, a stout brick building that succumbed to termites and was torn down a few years ago. The building was just a few blocks from her first childhood home on K Street of that town. It was only two or three blocks, as the bird flies, from Spaulding City Park, where the citizens swam in a spring fed pool bordered with cypress trees all around the continuous stone step accesses to the pool until a cement pool as built across the street in the largest area of the park. The thing that impressed her about that old spring fed pool, now relegated to pond status, was that there was, and still is, an exact scaled down copy of Miss Liberty, our nation's Statue of Liberty, in the middle of the shallow end. Her dad had joined the National Guard before she was born, but was allowed to come home at her birth. It wasn't long until his Unit was drafted by the president for the Korean War of M.A.S.H. fame. While he was training as a radio man, including operation and repair, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia. When he was shipped off overseas, she and her mother moved back from Georgia into a duplex a few blocks down K Street from her Grandma Coodey's house. When her dad came back, they moved forty miles to Tahlequah, where her dad completed his B.A. in Physics with a minor in English. They moved to various towns in Oklahoma while her dad taught in Adair public schools. Their residences included a country home east of Pryor, a house in Vinita, a house in Adair, and then a house west of Adair. While living there, her dad was asked to go teach for a church academy in Nebraska. There they lived in a rural setting on campus near Shelton, Nebraska. Next they moved to Las Vegas, New Mexico, where her dad finished his Masters in Math and Science. They had spent
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