Death of the Medicine Man

I had driven across the San Carlos Reservation before, but had never stopped.  This time I had come to Peridot with a purpose: to visit the grave of an Apache medicine man I had known years ago.  I was traveling alone from Phoenix to El Paso over Christmas break and had decided to stop at the small town on the reservation where Philip Castaneda was buried.  I had no idea how I would find the cemetery.  My only plan was to ask about the graveyard at the general store on Highway 70.  I knew enough about Apache culture, though, to realize my question might be met with silence.  The Apache people are cautious concerning matters of death.  I figured I had two things going for me: my sincerity and the name of a former friend, Craig Munson, who had worked with Philip on the Apache History Project.

I met Craig in the graduate anthropology program at Arizona State.  We roomed together in a small house near the university.  Philip Castaneda began coming around after a cultural anthropologist in the department suggested Craig study with Philip.  We soon learned that Philip worked tirelessly to benefit his people.  He kept the Apache language alive through his radio talk show in Globe.  He recorded an album of Apache songs.  He traveled the world, even visiting China, to educate others about the Apache way of life.  And, with Craig’s help, he started the Apache History Project.

For a powerful medicine man, Philip was soft spoken.  But he was demanding, often using Craig as if he were a social secretary rather than an anthropology student.  Sometimes even I drove Philip around.  I got to know him fairly well on those trips, but Craig was invited to share in Philip’s personal life.  When Philip’s own daughter underwent initiation into womanhood in the traditional Apache puberty ceremony, Craig recorded a beautiful video–The Dance of Changing Woman–to document the occasion.

As Craig’s relationship with Philip deepened, Craig began plans to write a book about his mentor.  As word spread about the project, it generated a lot of interest.  The renowned anthropologist Lewis Lopes even contacted Craig to offer assistance.  Lopes had met Philip once and believed Philip’s teachings should be introduced to a broader audience.

A sense of urgency soon permeated the project.  Philip had a bad heart, and his condition had progressively worsened.  He moved to Tucson to live with his son, a few blocks from the University Medical Center.  I had already moved to Tucson to enter the writing program at the U of A.  Craig came down one day from Tempe, and together we visited Philip.

 We were shocked when we saw him.  Bedridden, he was thin and gaunt.  His weak voice told us just how much his health had deteriorated, and we stayed only long enough to exchange pleasantries.  On the way out, when Craig asked Philip’s son about his father’s prognosis, the younger Apache shook his head.  I was saddened by the irony of what I had witnessed: a powerful medicine man, who could cure others of disease, was unable to heal himself.  How unjust reality seemed at times.  How unpredictable.  I was reminded of a scene from The Dance of Changing Woman when the four “gan,” the mountain spirits, appear.  As crown dancers, they represent the four corners of the earth.  Stability.  But suddenly, materializing out of darkness, whirling a bullroarer to frighten the children, the Gray One makes his entrance.  He is chaos, harbinger of disorder.

Philip’s heart failed a few weeks later.  He was only fifty-three.  Craig called from Tempe to tell me a traditional funeral would be held on the reservation.  I didn’t go.  A few weeks later, Craig and I went on a two-night backpacking trip into the Chiricahua Mountains.  On that trip he told me about the beautiful ceremony, attended by five hundred people.  Craig was moved by what he had seen.  And he spoke with passionate conviction about the kind of book he would write to commemorate his friend.

But in the years that followed, Craig lost sight of his goal.  He left anthropology—as I had—making a career for himself in the computer field.  Our paths diverged.  To this day, as far as I know, no book has been written about Philip Castaneda.

* * *

I had always regretted not attending Philip’s funeral, so I had come to Peridot to find his grave.  Apprehensive, I parked my car in the dirt lot at the general store.  Walking inside, I found a crowd of people.  I was the only non-Apache.  To a heavyset woman behind the register, I said, “Can you tell me how to get to the cemetery?  I knew Philip Castaneda, and I want to pay my respects to his grave.”

The woman barely looked at me, shaking her head.  I asked the same question of another woman behind the counter, and got the same response.  Now I felt the tension inside the store.  People began to create distance between themselves and me.  I had broached a taboo subject.  I thanked the two clerks and left the building.  Although I had anticipated this reaction, I felt discouraged.  How would I find the graveyard now?  Peridot was by no means a large town, but it was spread out among the desert’s valley and mesas, and I didn’t relish the idea of driving around aimlessly.

While I sat in my car deciding what to do, an old white Dodge pulled alongside.  I looked over at an Apache man, woman, and three children.  The man leaned across the woman and spoke through the open passenger window.  “Are you looking for the Castaneda residence?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised by this turn of events.  I hadn’t seen these people inside the store.

He said, “Drive back up the highway across the bridge and turn left.  The Castaneda home has a stand of bamboo in front of it.”

I thanked him as he and his family drove away, then set out for the Castaneda home.  But for some reason I made the mistake of turning left before the bridge, and I found myself driving through a ramshackle neighborhood of dilapidated houses and junked cars.  I saw first-hand the kind of abject poverty that plagues the San Carlos Reservation.  Traditionally, the Apaches were nomadic hunter/gatherers who revered the land they lived on.  Confinement to one area had destroyed their historic way of life.

When I realized my mistake I got back onto the highway and had no trouble finding the house with bamboos.  But a new dilemma presented itself.  I worried about the cultural propriety of walking up and knocking on the front door.  Fortunately, a young man was working on a red-primered pickup at the side of the house.  When he saw me, he walked in my direction, accompanied by an old hound dog so skinny I could count its ribs.

 The young man’s face was scarred by acne.  He wore a maroon 49ers ball cap.  When I explained my purpose in being here, he said, “I’m related to Philip, but I was in the army when he died.  I don’t know where his grave is.  But my aunt probably does.  You want to follow me?”

I followed his pickup back toward the bridge, then onto a road under it.  At a small neighborhood of mobile homes, he went to one and knocked on the door.  When nobody answered, he came to my window and said, “She’s not here.  But I have another aunt who might know about the cemetery.”

I followed him along another dirt road into a small neighborhood of white frame houses.  He knocked on the side door of one, then started talking to somebody I couldn’t see.  After a moment, he motioned me up, where he introduced me to his aunt, Iris, a thin woman with a long ponytail.  She had one of those classic Native American faces the photographer Edward S. Curtis had immortalized in black-and-white.

She smiled warmly.  “I’m Philip’s niece,” she said.  “I can take you to his grave as soon as my son comes back from his bike ride.”

The nephew excused himself, and I thanked him for his trouble.  Iris invited me inside, pointing for me to sit at the kitchen table.  She offered me a cup of coffee, which I declined.  The house was neat and clean, and I could see a big stereo system in the living room.  A small Christmas tree stood by the window.  While we waited, she leaned against a kitchen wall.  She said, “How did you know Philip?”

“I was a good friend of Craig Munson.”

“I knew Craig well,” she said.  “He never comes around anymore.  Nobody does.  I guess the anthropologists found out all they wanted to know about us.”  She laughed.

Before I could think of how to respond, she said, “Philip was unhappy with me because I divorced my first husband and married a guy who wasn’t Apache.  Philip had a dream that my second husband would be killed by the time our son was twelve.  About a month after our boy turned twelve, my second husband was killed in a car accident in Globe.”

It seemed an odd comment to make to a stranger.  Why had she revealed this information?

“How do you like my Christmas tree?” she said, walking into the living room.

I followed her.  “It’s pretty.”

Hanging on the wall beside it–much to my surprise–was a framed, signed color photograph of Luke Holmes, the head basketball coach at the U of A.  When I commented on it, she explained that her son had attended one of Holmes’s basketball camps.

The boy came home then.  He shook my hand when Iris introduced me as someone who had known Philip.  A moment later, when Iris and I walked outside, I said, “He seems like a nice kid.”

“He’s a good student, too, except he has dreams–like Philip.  He’s special that way, but it worries me.  If he takes the path of a holy man, he’ll neglect his schoolwork.”

The cemetery sat at the end of a hidden dirt road that branched into three forks.  She directed me to take the easternmost.  We stopped after a short distance and got out to climb a dirt path to a small, truncated hill–a tiny mesa overlooking the graveyard.  Blue mountains rimmed the horizon.  A large redtail hawk circled overhead.  Philip’s plot was covered by a concrete slab, with marble at the top.  Iris stood back as I approached the grave.

I didn’t have anything special to say to Philip.  How does one “pay respects” anyway?  I had always respected Philip and his accomplishments.  I only wished I could have known him better, as Craig Munson had.  I read the inscription on the headstone.

HERE LIES PHILIP CASTANEDA–A TEACHER TO ALL WHO

WOULD LISTEN.  HE TRIED TO KEEP THE APACHE WAY

ALIVE.

A few minutes later I took Iris back to her house, and thanked her for her help.  There was something rather desperate in her voice when she said, “If you’re ever back this way, stop in and say hello.”

I got on the highway then and drove through the rest of the reservation.  It was a different world here.  And yet it had become much the same as the world I had left behind–the one toward which I was heading again.  I felt happy to have come this way, though, fortunate to have seen the final resting place of Philip Castaneda.