AIRED: January 17, 2022
SPECIAL GUEST: Erica Elliott
Author, adventurer, speaker, Dr. Erica Elliott, M.D. has released a first book that recounts the early years of her extraordinary life living among the Navajo people. As a young woman in the early 1970s, she arrived at a Navajo boarding school to teach and then becomes a student herself of a mystical, earth-centered wisdom that has been lost to most in today’s modern world.
In Dr. Elliott’s new book, Medicine and Miracles in the High Desert, she reaches across a wide cultural divide to learn the Navajo language, the people begin to trust her and invite her into their homes, their ceremonies, and into their hearts.
Years later, Dr. Elliott returns to serve the Navajo people as a medical doctor in an underserved clinic, performing emergency procedures and delivering babies. When a medicine man offers to thank her with a ceremony, more miracles unfold.
This true story of personal risk and high adventure paints a rare, contemporary picture of Navajo life that at once elicits inspiration, deep sadness and respect for the Native American people.
ERICA ELLIOTT
The seeds for becoming a medical doctor were first sown when she spent a summer in Switzerland learning from her uncle, an eccentric and brilliant medical doctor. Erica came to medicine later than most medical students, after pursuing other careers and interests, including teaching, herding sheep on the Navajo Reservation, mountain climbing in the Andes and serving as an instructor for Outward Bound students’ wilderness survival in the Rocky Mountains.
As a physician, Erica has worked in a number of settings including indigent care, emergency Rooms, a women’s clinic, a multispecialty clinic, and finally, in 1993, Dr. Elliott her own private practice. The years she spent living in foreign cultures has enabled her to bring a fresh perspective to her life’s work. Nicknamed the “Health Detective”, she finds deep meaning and purpose through helping her patients find relief from their suffering.
Over the years, Erica has given radio talks, interviews, webinars, workshops at Esalen and Omega Institutes. She is the co-author of Prescriptions for a Healthy House, and the author of to today’s interview, Medicine and Miracles in the High Desert: My Life among the Navajo People.
