The Medicine Wheel

Native American Medicine Wheel

History of the Medicine Wheel:

To understand the significance of the Medicine Wheel, we need to go back to a time when most Indian nations were constantly at war with each other. Tribes were obsessed with wiping out their “enemies.” Then a dramatic shift in perception occurred, and a peace was realized, which lasted for a period of 150 to 200 years.

This long truce was the result of a great Iroquois chief, Hiawatha, who urged the tribes to cease the madness of brother killing brother, and formed an alliance, which came to be known as the Confederation of Nations. The Confederation recognized that Indian peoples were more alike than different. They had the same basic belief systems and followed similar traditions.

An important part of this transformation was the medicine wheel, which was placed in front of every tepee, and decorated in special symbols, colors, and stones, to let people entering the tribe know about its inhabitants.

The wheel was a reflection of an individual’s strengths and weaknesses, and it gave people guidelines to follow for personal growth. It told people what they needed to learn and what they needed to teach. Everyone was ordered to work on themselves, or else leave the tribe. After several generations of this work, people lost the concept of blame and anger.

Peace between the Tribes became a Reality

This, in turn, resulted in the longest peace in modern history. Brother Eagle Soaring, from Arizona, explains the powerful impact of the healing wheel: “If I said to you, ‘Does anyone ever make you angry?’ you would say yes. But in reality, this is totally impossible. You choose to be angry by the way you process the event. This is something you were taught to do as a child. If you could imagine not one person in all of New York City having the concept of anger, that’s what it was like during that time period of no wars before the white man came.”

The wheel is a circle divided by a cross to create four directions–the north, east, south, and west. A forerunner to astrology, each person is represented somewhere within that circle, depending upon their birth date. That placement is associated with a special moon, power animal, healing plant, color and mineral.

Purchase a Medicine Wheel