The Luckiest Man Alive?

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Keeney acknowledges that most native people contend with harsh living conditions and are constantly under siege from corporations and governments that want control of their lands. Yet despite this hardship, they experience a level of exhilaration about being alive that is missing for many of us in the modern world, he says. Deprived of the comfort and excitement of technological civilization, as well as its stress and alienation, indigenous people keep in touch with some basic elements of being human that we neglect. For them, religion, medicine, mental health, art, and just plain fun are not separate activities, but one unified pursuit around which much of their community life is organized. This is the focus of Keeney’s research—the healing powers, for both body and mind, of indigenous people’s religion, rituals, music, and dance.

Keeney’s work stands as something of a contradiction to what Western culture professes. Yet there’s nothing arrogant or confrontational in the way he challenges our conventional wisdom. He doesn’t lecture, he whoops and dances. He doesn’t make us feel foolish, he helps us find truths within our souls that we may have always known were there. He illuminates the attractive possibility that the universe does not operate strictly by the mechanistic rules we’ve all been taught.

In the two years since I first met Keeney, I’ve noticed that interesting things happen when he’s around. He entered my life completely unannounced. Following up on an invitation from my colleague Nina Utne, he stopped by the office to talk to the staff about indigenous healing traditions. I was just back from vacation, grouchy about being at my desk rather than swimming in Lake Superior, and definitely not in the mood for some paleface showman spouting native nostrums.

But Keeney wowed me, not least because of the way he wiggled and grunted his way across the floor of our library, a look of childlike bliss on his face, without a trace of embarrassment.

I was also fascinated by his views on a topic I had long and secretly wondered about. I’ve always been graced and cursed with a lot of physical energy. Sitting still for 20 years of schooling was often an ordeal, and my various experiments with yoga, meditation, and tai chi have been utter disasters. Whenever I fall ill or get run-down, everyone counsels rest, which sounds to me like torture. Staying in bed, quiet and reposed with a mug of herbal tea, makes me feel even more miserable. I’ve found the best way to regain vitality is to get up, move around, and dive headlong into some new project around the house. Yet I’ve also worried that this shows how dangerously driven and revved-up I truly am—a walking medical time bomb. So when Keeney told us that native medicine men and women sometimes cure ailing people by getting them to dance furiously around a fire, I wanted to cheer.

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