Gourd Dance Honors Veterans, Eases PTSD
Wednesday, 16 November 2011 07:54
When Tom Holm returned from his tour of duty in Vietnam in the late 1960s, he had trouble with sleeping, nightmares, and uncontrollable stress reactions to certain sounds, smells and situations. Sometimes, when he woke up from a nightmare and was still disoriented, he dove for cover, and brought his wife down with him.
43 years later, he’s still having nightmares.
“I tease my wife by saying, ‘you must be crazy because a sane woman would have left me by now,’” he says.
Holm is a retired University of Arizona professor. In 1996, he published Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls, a book about how the Native American’s experience in the Vietnam war differ from other ethnic groups. One way he copes with the lingering symptoms of his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), is through the Veteran’s Day Gourd Dance, held every year on the University of Arizona mall.
The gourd dance is a type of ceremony meant to honor warriors. It originated with the Kiowa tribe. According to legend, a red wolf heard songs in the prairie and brought them to the Kiowa people to use for their ceremony.
Dancers shake gourd rattles as they slowly move closer to a drum circle in the center of the mall. The men and women in the drum circle sing and bang the drum, while dancers bless the ground.
The dance’s purpose is to “honor the people who have served, who have stayed with us and who have participated in things that very few of us have seen,” Holm says.
About 15 dancers and singers participated in Friday’s ninth annual dance. Dancers wear long blue and red vests - red to symbolize the humanity inherent in every person - and bandoliers intertwined with red beans - to symbolize bloodshed. They hold feathers in one hand, often eagle feathers.
“We believe they’re dancing here with us,” Victor Chavez, a Persian Gulf War veteran, says of the deceased veterans the dance is meant to honor.
The dance doesn’t just honor veterans. Holm says that participation in this kind of activity can help Native American veterans suffering from PTSD.
“It helps overcome problems that you’ve seen, and it’s also a way of cleansing and helping you through these problems," he says.
Almost anything can trigger PTSD, Holm says, from the backfiring of a car, to the smell of a rice paddy, to the nearly ever-present sound of helicopter wings beating over the UA campus.
Although PTSD is very common in veterans, what’s not common is for them to talk about it. Veterans are sometimes scared to talk about their experiences, Holm says, because they don’t think their family or friends will be able to understand. It’s often easier to talk to fellow veterans than to their own parents or spouses.
“Talking about it is extraordinarily difficult for just about everybody,” Holm says. “Because you don’t want to expose your own family to those kinds of horrors.”
For many, the gourd dance is a way of working through the traumatic experiences of war and for remembering the people one has lost.
For more Native American Heritage Month coverage, read about A Healthy Celebration, or the Native American Student Affairs.
Written by Madelaine Archie You are reading Gourd Dance Honors Veterans, Eases PTSD articles
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