Vol. 14, No. 4, Summer 2001

An Interview with Lorin Smith

Malcolm Margolin

Malcolm Margolin interviewed Kashaya Pomo dreamer and healer Lorin Smith on August 11, 2000. Readers may want to refer to an earlier article about Smith in the Winter 1990 issue (Volume 4, No. 2) of News from Native California.

Margolin: How have you been for the last ten years?
Smith: For the last ten years I've been travelling in different states in America. I’ve been teaching different groups of people what I know about working with herbs and what to look for on people with different sicknesses. I do bodywork sometimes, teaching them what to look for and what part of the body to work on. Somebody’s got a bad heart or got relationship problems. Some have surgeries and their pains don't go away. I teach them what part of the body to work, not on the scar itself because the scar is dead and it’s got no feeling. I let them work around it, and to get the pains out of their bodies. The first thing I do when I work on somebody is check to see how his or her brain is doing. Maybe there's something up there that needs energy.

M: How do you check the brain?
S: I can tell if I put my hands on both sides of your head. You know how your heart beats, and how you can feel it if you put your hand there? Well, it's the same thing for me if I put my hands on both sides of your head like this. If I don't feel anything on the left side of your brain, then I sing it, and put energy in it from my hands. I work with my hands because energy comes through my hands, but I use song sometimes to save my body energy. I can feel the beat, almost like your heartbeat, from the right side, and from the left side I can tell that if there's nothing there, it needs to be energized with song. I do prayers over somebody and then when I get that corrected I check the heart to see how your heart is doing. I can tell from my hands if your heart's got a little skip in it, like a heart murmur. I can tell. I can feel what's not working right. If I'm really strong and my head is really clear I can see inside your body, see what's going on, and that's from learning things from the elders, from the songs. I take herbs sometimes where I can see through people's bodies. It means I'm in good shape, you know, I'm not too tired. I guess for you, you’d be more familiar with X-ray machines and such. I can see inside your body if I'm in really good condition, but if not, then I can go with my feelings through my hands and tell what's wrong with you. I've been working with a lot of people with different problems. What I look for blockages. I would make you drink herbs or I'd sing songs, or I'd do bodywork to clear out the blockages in your body, and so those are the things I do.

M: What causes illness? What is illness?
S: Illness for me is like a person not really taking care of themselves. You overwork yourself. A lot of people work—work long hours—and a lot of them don't give themselves time to rest their body. They keep constantly working and working. You forget to feed yourself sometimes. You'll eat a sandwich and or you'll just have a cup of coffee or something. You know, you’re burning energy whatever you do, whether you're awake or not, you lose energy in your body. When you don't feed yourself and you don't give yourself time to rest, then through the years, your body starts to wear down.

M: So what are the blockages?
S: You get injured; a lot of times you work your heart overtime, you don't give your heart any rest. Through the years, you know, everything in your body slows down because you don't give yourself rest and you don't eat properly. A lot of people travel and the thing they do the most is find a fast food place. They don't really sit down and really eat. As soon as they eat, they just take off. They’re not really resting the body. A lot of them don't go for walks any more like they used to. A lot of them have bad habits like using too much sugar and salt, which is bad for your body. Especially with people that drink coffee—they drink more when they feel tired. They drink a lot of coffee, and the thing is, people who drink a lot of coffee use a lot of sugar all the time. Most things that people eat are sweet because they don't have time to sit down and eat. They go for sweet things because that takes care of their hunger, but you notice when you eat sweet stuff, you're hungry not too long after that. People keep doing all these things and you get high blood pressure and or you get diabetic. Then you're nervous all the time because when you use sugar, it bothers you in every part of your joints and if you keep using sugar you'll hurt badly, like arthritis.

The reason I know is because it happened to me. There wasn't anybody who could help me because I was doing it to myself. One of the teachers who is not alive today, Anne Jarvis, said no one can help you because you're not helping yourself. She was speaking to a Pomo and she said, "You're using too much sugar." I was doing to myself like I said—I was travelling around and wasn't eating properly and was using a lot of sugar and salt. All my joints hurt so badly, and I was sitting on a sofa like I'm sitting here and it was just like sitting on nails. Too much sugar. Even when I drove, the steering wheel was like that, it was like someone sticking needles in your fingers.

M: You must have been a young man, though, say thirty or forty years old.
S: I was still learning how to take care of myself. I was young at that time, and figured, hey I can handle all this sweet stuff, hey I'm young, you know. Little did I know that sooner or later it would catch up to me. Anne Jarvis came to me when I was in a room by myself and said—see I used to ask those healers why they couldn’t find what's wrong with me—and she said, "See, they can't help you because you're not helping yourself." She was speaking in Pomo. She said you're using too much sugar and salt and she said it would take three months—not like I'd quit sugar today and the next day eat sugar again. You have to stop using sugar and salt for three months.

It didn't make too much sense at the time because you know I'm hurting all over because I went to a lot of healers and they did bodywork on me. I had all these things done to me. They even did acupuncture and they couldn't help me because I wasn't helping myself. I kept on using sugar and salt. I was into soda pop and stuff. I was into Pepsi like most people are. After three months [of no salt and no sugar], there was only one day left to go. It was around noon time. I was walking around by myself, and I remembered Anne Jarvis said it's going to take three months, and then it'll all be gone at once. That last day at 12 o'clock, it [pain] was still there. Then when the day passed, then it all just quit all at once. It was kind of hard to believe that something like that would happen, but when I followed every instruction, it really took three months to leave all the sugar and salt out, and it just stopped, like you turned a faucet off or something.

M: What advice do you have for people who want to lead a healthy life? How do people avoid having to see the doctor? Let's say somebody never wants to see you. What advice are you going to give them?
S: Anne’s advice was to go with vegetables and leave fried stuff alone. She said I needed to eat boiled potatoes, vegetables, and nothing that’s fried for three months. I was crazy about potatoes and stuff. I had beans and I would put salt on them or put ketchup on them or something like that. So most of my food was boiled or baked. And so that’s my advice for people who are nervous and low on energy: to boil their food, to bake their food, eat a lot of vegetables, but not to use any kind of dressing if you know you can bring the energy back in your body. And water...the first thing when you get up in the morning, drink water, not beer, or wine, or tea or coffee...that’s what she told me to do. And she was even saying to leave milk out ...just water, and if I had tea I had to leave out sugar, which was hard to do because I had been using sugar for years. After that [the cleansing] I felt so clear. I cleaned myself up of all the sugar and salt. Before, even when I lay down on a soft pillow, my head hurt because it was filled with sugar, pies, and candies. Anything that was sweet was no good for me and I had to leave all that alone for three months. I still drink juice but somewhere there’s a voice behind me that says, "be careful what you do" because it really hurts to have too much sugar in the body. It gets so bad even when you move your eyes around. And if you touch something, something like this, you know your fingers hurt like somebody sticking needles in them. And if you cross your legs you feel it in your hip, in your knees, in your ankles, because everything feels dry like you got no liquid in your body or something.

M: So where does this energy come from? You say when you eat it takes away your energy. Is it something people generate themselves?
S: It comes from the outside, what we have in the world today. That’s why we’re alive, because of the energy we need in this world.

M: So it’s outside of us.
S: What happens when you use too much sugar and don’t eat the right food is we don’t feel the energy no matter where we go. We could go to the ocean, to the mountain; you know how you feel when you feel there’s some energy there or at the high elevations. Some people like it up there because they feel there’s something there that their body needs. You don’t feel that when you use too much sugar.

M: So what the sugar is doing is stopping…so you can’t hear, can’t receive the energy that’s surrounding you. It creates too much noise, these blockages. So this energy…is this weya that we’re talking about?
S: Yes, this is weya that’s been left by the Creator to let us live.

M: And when the Creator left this world, he left behind this divine energy?
S: Yeah.

M: Is it all around us?
S: Yeah, it’s all around. From the oceans, the rivers, the mountains, the trees, even bay leaves. Bay leaves—people say you cook them. But we use bay leaves to heal people. I learned how to use bay leaves. When the Creator put it here, it was meant for people to use to heal with. A lot of people even use it for "smudging." People that never even met me, they are smudging in their house. They like the smell of it, somehow they feel it cleanses their house.

M: Is it because the bay leaves have the energy, the weya? Space for the energy to come? How does it work?
S: It’s a way of making the energy of the bay leaves come alive by using it, you know, like burning it. Sometimes I use the bay leaves. I break off a branch from a bay tree and place it on your body if it’s weak. I had three branches of bay leaves that I put on a person, a woman. She had a cyst that was the size of a golf ball inside her stomach. Then I made her drink spice bush, you can make tea out of that. Then I sang songs over her for more than an hour, then I put bay leaves on her to seal the energy inside her body. Then she left. The doctor wanted to do surgery on her. They wanted to see what it was and she was scared—that’s why she came to me. At the time I didn’t know what I could do for her. But Anne Jarvis, who was a healer before our time, told me three bay leaves, branches of bay leaves on her body, and spice bush…you boil the spice bush.

That woman came back in about a month’s time. She had gone back to the same doctor who was going to do surgery on her and they said they had to do surgery, and then send it to the lab to verify what it really was. But they said, "We have to cut you open and take it out," so she went back and they couldn’t find anything. There was nothing there.

Somehow she had known more than I did that I could help her. People know what healers can do. Sometimes we know what it’s gonna take, but sometimes they know what we can help them with. So even if you go somewhere and you need a surgery, somehow you need to know it’s your decision, it’s not what the doctors tell you. You have a feeling how that doctor can help you, what they need to remove out of you so you feel safe with that. Somehow it makes you heal faster because you have this feeling that this doctor can help you and that’s what happened to me when the woman really believed that I could help her. When Anne Jarvis told me what I could do, I didn’t know how long it was going to take. The woman didn’t have to go to that doctor because there was nothing there anymore.

M: When you follow instructions, do you mean things you remember Anne Jarvis telling you a long time ago? Or what?
S: No, it comes to me. When I get puzzled, she comes to me to tell me what I can do. It takes me longer to figure it out by myself. I didn’t know at the time how powerful bay leaves could be for healing a human body. She showed me how to do it knowing how to use the energy from any kind of leaves or angelica root or sage, knowing what songs to use, what prayers. In my prayer, I use names like "cyst" or whatever’s inside there. I say to the Creator that I don’t know what to do and I really need these prayers to help me with this and show me what to do, knowing that Anne Jarvis was working with the Creator when she was doing her healing. But see she did all her prayers in Pomo, she never did her prayers in English. So I wouldn’t use English, only to people that wouldn’t understand or know what I’m saying. Like if I were doing healing work for you, you’d want to know what I was saying in my prayers. I’d be speaking English so you’d understand. But if you didn’t need to know about it, then I’d speak in my native tongue because I feel that the energy is stronger in my language than speaking English. For many years that’s how they did their healing work. That’s what I learned as I started to learn about healing. But I can heal people with the English language, too. But much faster with my native language.

M: The times that I would go up to the roundhouse, this way of the spirit, it was kind of like feeling the air change, feeling the thickness of things, feeling the goodness flowing around…as a human are you able to focus it, are you able to use it?
S: I do prayers in a ceremony house before I go to Santa Fe or work with other people. Before I go to teach them, I go into the roundhouse because that’s where I really feel the wave of energy and it’s always there. I go inside it and it’s a powerful place—something so special there. It’s almost like there are people there, like the healers or other people that worked in the ceremony house left some good energy. When I leave from Kashaya to go to Santa Fe and do individual healing or healing sessions, I talk to the people and ask them do they want to hear songs first, or my prayers in my language. Sometimes they want to know some language that covers some of the body parts because healers from before my time would mention body parts inside of you, like your heart or whatever. Blood is balike, heart is zimphoo. They mentioned parts of the body asking the Creator for his help and to receive more weya to work them into the patient. I do prayers in my language and I ask Anne Jarvis or others for help, like my grandfather Tom Smith. He’d explain to me something that is so simple to do. Sometimes I get so tired, I can’t see. I can’t figure out what’s wrong. Sometimes the answer is in something simple that grows on this land, something I can use and how to use it, how to do my prayer. I never think I’m so good at it that I don’t need them anymore, so I always talk to them. I clear my head and see how people before had the same problems we do.

M: Do bad people get sick more than good people?
S: I think more good people get sick.

M: I think so, too! Why is that?
S: People that do bad things are the ones that don’t care what they do. They don’t really believe in anybody, they don’t believe in Christ or anybody, any healer, so they just live the way they do. They feel they live the way they want to live and they don’t follow any rules. They don’t care what happens to me or you but somehow they find out a way where they can take care of themselves. They feel they’re not in the same group as us and they learn to live with bad habits and somehow they get used to that. They don’t have to bathe everyday, they don’t have to wash their food, and somehow their body gets used to it. We try to live the right way, so our bodies are not immune to all that.

M: It’s like goodness is a fragile condition.
S: In the old days, on our reservation, all of us were born at home. My mother never saw a doctor and so all of our brothers and sisters were born at home. There were times where we never really got sick like the rest of the kids in school because we had a rough life. All the healing was done at home for us but I think it really made us strong in a way. We weren’t really delicate like the people who live the modern ways and see a doctor when they got a headache. It makes the body stronger and makes the mind stronger. You learn to take care of yourself. We didn’t go to the hospital unless we really got injured. We had no shoes you know, we had hardly anything. Somehow it helped us to be stronger, for our bodies to be stronger. But when we go to doctors, when we go to them all the time and we don’t believe our families can cure or help us, that’s what we get used to, that’s how we grow up. But for our people who never had money to go see doctors, most of the healing was done at home by parents. My cousin Bun cut his foot with an axe…he was chopping wood and he cut his foot with a sharp axe. They didn’t take him to the hospital because they couldn’t afford it—no insurance or anything—so all the healing was done in the family. That’s an example of who Bun was. He was really strong in his ways and he really believed in the old ways. That’s an example of how people learn to survive. Some people scared of getting sick…I think a lot of times it’s in your mind. I could be wrong there, too, but that’s the experience our people had. But they think it’s strange for us to live that way because we don’t have the money—we never had the money. We learned how to heal from healers like Anne Jarvis. We had healers on the reservation who made us learn to take care of ourselves.