By Arne Vainio MD
The whole getting into medical school thing was not something I was aiming for. My parents owned the Good Luck Tavern in Sturgeon, Minnesota and my dad wasn’t a good businessman. He committed suicide with a gun when I was four years old. My mom kept the tavern going for a while and the guys behind the bar were the ones who knew and took an interest in me.
In those days it was nothing for a trucker to come in and down five beers before heading out again. I remember one of them having a big wallet sticking out of his pocket with a chain attached to it. I got to sit on his lap and drive his big long truck through puddles and from then on, as a little kid, all I wanted to do was be a truck driver. But things happen and there were a double handful of people who made me feel that I could look at things differently.
When you are born you have a clear path that you are supposed to follow. Many things can pull you off that path, such as shiny things or someone you love falling off their own path. When I was young I liked Jack Daniels and fast cars as much as anyone. But I had people in my life who were teachers, both formally and informally, and I acknowledge them.
They are people who don’t complete their own paths for a long time because they stop and help other people. I think I arrived at the point I am at in my life somewhat like a pinball. There were plenty of times I was headed in the wrong direction but there were people who believed in me when I needed it the most and acted like bumpers to push me back to the middle. Sometimes it was just small things but they made a big, big difference. What people do and say to each other matters.
When I applied to medical school I had short hair because I had been a paramedic/firefighter. I decided at that time to be who I was and let my hair grow in the Native tradition. My Native beliefs had always been there but that was a turning point for me as I wanted to claim who I was.
After medical school I thought I would probably apply to Hennepin for an emergency medicine residency in keeping with my paramedic training, or the family practice residency here in Duluth so I could work on a reservation somewhere. At that time the Seattle Indian Health Board had just started a residency program. They invited me to come out there and look around.
It was a bit of a scam on my part to go because I had no intention of attending their program but they had offered to fly me out there. Being from a small town in Minnesota I hadn’t flown much and I wanted to have that. Also, when you are a medical student you get the farthest parking lot from the hospital and no locker to put a jacket in so you leave it in the car and put on the white coat, then run. It was 30 degrees below at the time and I had been doing that for three days when the invitation came in. It was 40 degrees above in Seattle. I talked to my attending surgeon about this opportunity and he said to go. (Attending Surgeon is a surgeon who teaches physician residents in their residency training programs.)
When I got out there a small elder who everyone referred to as Grandma Helen greeted me with a warm smile and said, “We’ve been waiting for you.” As soon as she said that I realized the importance of what she was saying and I knew the whole scam thing was in jeopardy. I loved their mission. I stayed and toured for three days. Dr. Peter Talbot asked on the day before we were to leave what we would like to do. I was a total hick from a small town but I always liked to read and the only thing I could think of was a book about a little girl who had breakfast in the Space Needle so I said I wanted to do that too.
There were a table full of us who met there in the morning and one of them was Karl Anquoe who was the traditional healer at the Seattle Indian Health Board. Before we even reached the elevator he took my hand softly and said, “My people say that if you say something three times it has to come true. We need you out here.” When I reached for the salt shaker Karl reached out and again touched my hand and said, “We need you out here.” And when we got done with breakfast we stood around taking pictures and saying goodbye and Karl came up and touched my hand again, “We need you out here.”
That wasn’t my plan. I planned on staying in Minnesota and fixing my mom’s septic system and well when it went bad. I called her and told her about this. She said we would figure something out and that I should do what I had to do. At the last minute I told them I would go there and so I ended up doing my residency in Seattle.
My graduation was a big deal because it was the first class that had ever graduated from the residency program. They had salmon cooking on cedar planks and Grandma Helen hung a carved orca around my neck which was a powerful symbol to her people. My mom, who had diabetes, couldn’t make it to my graduation because she was in the Hibbing hospital. I spoke and talked about how important it was to me to take care of people who were homeless and destitute, who had illnesses that were difficult to control, and who didn’t have the insurance necessary to take care of them.
In the middle of my talking about all that stuff my mother was dying and I didn’t know it. I came home from the highest high to a message from my brother that she had died. There were many people who came together to help my wife and I get home and arrange an Ojibwe funeral for her, including a friend attending my graduation who hauled out his credit card to pay for plane tickets, to the doctors at the Seattle Indian Health Board pooling their money to send Karl the traditional healer to help us walk through the steps in creating that ceremony. It took a community to make that happen.
I don’t do traditional medicine because the people who do are called to do that, and they do it well. Medicine the way I practice it is also a calling. There is too much paperwork and too much of a whole bunch of stuff like explaining x-rays and MRI’s. But the true core of medicine is still what it’s always been.
I worked with one of the traditional healers who recently died. I went to his house every Monday for the better part of the winter to learn the healing songs I wanted to know. I was always the guy who when “happy birthday” was being sung would be lip syncing in the back of the room because I’m not a singer. But I was told by this healer that these were not my songs unless I sang them.
I just sang one of them in front of 100 doctors at a meeting, unannounced, because I thought it was important for them to know that we are linked together and we are doing something bigger than we think about when we’re buried in paperwork and technology. The longer I am in medicine the more I realize how much spirituality is important. I’m not talking about religion or about Ojibway spirituality. We don’t have to be the same, but we do have to respect each other’s beliefs.
If I had to send a message out into the world I think it would be that our ancestors and our elders and our Creator don’t want to see us fighting the way we are now. I’m not talking about fighting among Native people but the fighting that is going on worldwide. We get divided up and made to fear each other. That benefits someone but it doesn’t benefit us.
There are many people who care about what happens to the planet but it’s getting to be more of a crisis. Native people have always been tied to the earth and taught to respect all of nature. As people, in just a few hundred years, we have wiped out thousands and thousands of other organisms. We extract things instead of just taking what we need and we go after everything that is considered valuable.
I love living in this area. I love moving snow and I love seeing the stars at night. I also get to be a physician, being traditional. There are kind and good people all over and many of them live here in Duluth. I live a dream I never even knew I had.
Arne Vainio, M.D. (Mille Lacs Ojibwe) and is a family practice physician on the Fond du Lac Ojibwe reservation in Cloquet, MN. Contacted him at: a-vainio@hotmail.com
