Sham Shamans Anger Native Americans -- Exorbitant Fees Paid For `Cures' For Aids, Cancer

The mystique of pulsing drums and chanting singers, healing rituals depicted in movies such as "Dances With Wolves," is causing headaches among authentic Native-American medicine men.

Non-Indians with terminal diseases such as AIDS or cancer are seeking them out in growing numbers for cures. New Agers and others offer cash to attend spiritual ceremonies.

Of even more concern to tribal spokesmen are what they call "plastic" medicine men, or frauds posing as medicine men. Often living in the cities, they charge exorbitant prices for healing and spiritual ceremonies.

Native-American leaders, however, believe medicine men lose their powers and stir up evil and disharmony if they leave the place where the Creator gave them their powers.

"A lot of their power comes from the area where they were born," says Charles Cambridge, a Navajo and anthropologist who teaches ethnic studies at the University of Colorado in Denver.

Cambridge says most fraudulent medicine men fall into two categories: apprentices who dropped out and untrained people who "decided to con non-Indians for economic reasons."

Rick Two Dogs, a respected Oglala Lakota medicine man at Porcupine on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, traces his medicine-man lineage back at least 250 years.

He says when he received his vision, he was told to stay there and help his people.

"If you are an authentic medicine man, the powers you draw from the Earth are here; the people we are supposed to help are here," says Two Dogs. "The gift to heal follows the blood line."

"After the movie `Dances With Wolves' we've had a lot of people with Sioux blood using that as a springboard to line their own pockets" by posing as spiritual healers, says Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota and publisher of Indian Country Today in Rapid City, S.D.

Giago says heredity is the true test of a medicine man.

"If you can find a medicine man who started three or four years ago because he had a dream, that's a bunch of baloney," Giago says. "It takes decades of instruction to become a legitimately recognized holy man of any tribe."

The charging of fees - up to thousands of dollars to "cure" a terminally ill AIDS or cancer patient - is the big tip-off the medicine man is a fraud.

"Traditional medicine men are not allowed to charge a fee," says Two Dogs. "If people want to give us something, we'll accept it. But we can't ask for a fee."

Such gifts usually include tobacco, food, clothing or other useful items.

Two Dogs, 43, says the past two years has seen a sharp increase in non-Indians seeking out medicine men, but the trend began a decade ago.

Two Dogs says terminally ill white people approach him on the reservation for cures. "I've had people approach me with cancer and a few people with AIDS, but I said I can't help them," Two Dogs says. The first thing they would say is, `I would give you $5,000 or $10,000. . . .' I say, `I can't help you because of the way you approached me. It is not a question of money.' "