Still était-t-il Chaman?

Abstract

Editor's Note:  Ron Ellis is a French Osteopath who grew up in San Diego and still remembers his first snowfall. He practices in Lyon, France. In this article (which Google Translate will readily convert into English or your preferred reading language). Ron marvels at how closely the philosophy of Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of Osteopathy, resembles that of the Indigenous people of Missouri and Kansas (the Cherokee, the Shawnee, the Pawnee, and the Potawatomi). Ron tells how Still lived among these Indigenous people and spoke Shawnee fluently. Still was a curious observer of human nature. Ron creates a marvelous argument that Still must have been influenced by the Indigenous people with whom he lived and worked. He builds a convincing argument for how Still was influenced and why Still couldn't, in his time, give credit to Indigenous people for their contributions to his ideas. He mentions that Indigenous people were considered to be on the level of animals and mentions that the Massacre at Wounded Knee happened around the same time that Still was establishing his schools and trying to make Osteopathy respectable (which was already difficult), so he had no choice but to conceal the influences Indigenous people had on him.