Healing Modality

As the spread of COVID-19 has slowed its burn through the Navajo Nation, several Indigenous filmmakers and creators have managed to complete part of the production of a documentary. Its focus is even more relevant in today's modern pandemic life: the striking parallels between homeopathy and traditional Navajo healing practices and how homeopathy could be used as another mode of healing on the reservation.

Hózhóogo Iiná—Homeopathy for Indigenous America, directed and produced by Leahn Cox and funded by donations to GoFundMe and a John Pinto Grant from the New Mexico Film Office, is both a personal and professional endeavor.

Cox is a member of the Navajo Nation who grew up in Gallup, though she now lives and works in Santa Fe. Her upbringing as a Diné woman and her experience and education in homeopathy and other healing arts drove her to start the project, which she plans to screen in chapter houses across the Navajo Nation, as well as in Albuquerque and border towns.

"I definitely have had interest in bringing homeopathy and making it more available in places with limited access to these types of alternative resources, particularly now in the Navajo Nation," Cox tells SFR. "I have been trying to offer [homeopathy] where I live, where I'm from, and to family members. But there's so much confusion and so that's one reason the film, I think, could put it in terms of understanding it in the sense of talking about ancient Indigenous knowledge."

The GoFundMe has raised $2,475 of a $20,000 goal. The state grant named after a late Navajo senator gave the project $5,000, which has funded the bulk of the work. Cox aims to raise at least another $5,000 to pay for an animator for a portion of Hózhóogo Iiná. She also hopes to turn it into a larger project where she explores the use of homeopathy in other Indigenous communities across North America.

Germans developed homeopathic medicine over 200 years ago, and based it on two main premises: that a disease can be cured by a substance that produces similar symptoms in healthy people and that the lower the dose of the medication, the greater its effectiveness, according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. The medicines used in homeopathy come from plants, animals and minerals.

The fundamentals of homeopathy tie in neatly with Navajo traditional healing practices, Cox says.

"Homeopathy is about this vibrational signature of substances in the environment and you take it and inspire your own vitality to heal," Cox says. "So through ancient knowledge you have…this understanding there's an inner spirit form in our environment and that when you really understand that you use that knowledge for healing."

Cox interviews several people in Hózhóogo Iiná to get the connection across to viewers. Donald Denetdeal, one of the interviewees, is also the primary consultant for the project on the Navajo holistic perspective. Denetdeal is a retired professor of Navajo Studies from Diné College. In the documentary, he discusses the Navajo idea that an inner spirit existing within everything in nature is what's doing the healing, just as homeopathy recognizes an energy form in plants and other elements.

But Hózhóogo Iiná is about more than just the parallels between the two healing modalities, one formed many thousands of miles away and another here in the Southwest. The documentary intends to explore, in a practical way, the potential of the use of homeopathy on the Navajo Nation as well as to increase Indigenous peoples' interest in their own traditional healing.

"In this time of increasing health inequality and especially now, in quarantine, we have had to start thinking of utilizing the wisdom of our heritage when it comes to healing our communities," says project photographer and editor Dax Thomas, whose heritage is of Acoma and Laguna pueblos and who now lives and works in Laguna Pueblo.

"With homeopathy there is an inherent respect for nature and a holistic perspective that is certainly compatible with our traditional methods of healing. It could provide safe and effective solutions, especially in our rural areas where there are less options and a primary reliance on [Indian Health Service]. It supports self sufficiency—as we return to healing with nature around us—using
herbs, prayers."