Erica M. Elliott, MD chronicles her journey as a young Anglo woman whose life changed forever after living on the Navajo Reservation in her new book Medicine and Miracles in the High Desert.

For almost 50 years I carried within me a story about something that happened to me, an experience that I knew I must tell the world about. My demanding life as a medical doctor kept me from making time to write. Then came the election of 2016, and the national turmoil that ensued. I wanted to do something to offer healing in these divisive times. I realized that now was the time to get my story out so that it could serve a higher good.

“Medicine and Miracles in the High Desert: My Life Among the Navajo People,” is the name of my recently published memoir.

In 1971 I arrived at the BIA boarding school on the Navajo Reservation as a newly minted schoolteacher, fresh out of college, knowing nothing about my students or their culture. After several blunders and misunderstandings, and beset by loneliness and despair, I was ready to quit and admit that I had made a big mistake coming to the strange and foreign world of the reservation.

My Navajo teacher’s aide saw my despair and asked if I would like to learn about her people. She helped me to see how much I had misjudged and misinterpreted the behavior of the students. They didn’t make eye contact with me out of a sign of respect. They didn’t speak to me because they didn’t speak English, even though they were in the 4th grade. My teacher’s aide encouraged me to try to learn the Navajo language, arguably the most difficult language in the world, used by the Navajo Code Talkers in World War II.

That afternoon, my teacher’s aide taught me how to say in Navajo, “Good morning, my children. My name is Erica Elliott. And you? What is your name?” I spent hours that evening trying to say these impossible-to-pronounce words.

The following morning I walked into the classroom and said, “Yá’át’ééh sha’ ałchíní. Shí éí Erica Elliott yinishyé. Nisha? Haash yinilyé?” 

The children looked up at me in amazement. That was the first time our eyes met. They burst out laughing from sheer delight. That moment marked the beginning of the most wondrous experience of my life. I began to fall in love with the students and see life through their eyes. The more Navajo I learned, the more the children opened up to me about their lives and rich traditions. They invited me into their homes, their healing ceremonies, and into their hearts. What I experienced profoundly impacted me the rest of my life.

I witnessed many miracles during this time, and I experienced my own miracle when the elders prayed for my healing of a tumor in my neck. I survived a fearsome encounter with a mountain lion and a shape shifting “skin walker.” Some of the countless lessons I learned during my time with the Navajo people included weaving traditional Navajo rugs, herding and butchering sheep and goats, making fry bread, and singing healing songs. But most of all, I learned how to see the world through their eyes.

Years later, I returned to serve the Navajo people as a medical doctor in an underserved clinic, performing emergency procedures and delivering babies. When a medicine man offered to thank me with a ceremony, more miracles unfolded, including the biggest blessing of my life for which I am grateful everyday.

Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Grater Consciousness and Why it Matters said of my story, “Dr. Erica Elliott’s willingness to transcend her cultural conditioning and enter another complex society is an act of great courage—one that reveals her boundless empathy and compassion. This book is sorely needed at this moment in America, when divisive voices incessantly warn us of the other, the foreigner, those who ‘are not like us.’ Medicine and Miracles in the High Desert reveals how diversity and inclusiveness can enrich our own society—a lesson on which our future may depend.”

About Erica Elliott, M.D.

A risk taker and true adventurer, Dr. Elliott is a rock climber and mountaineer in addition to being a successful medical doctor with a busy private practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She led an all-woman’s expedition to the top of Denali in Alaska and has lived and worked around the world, serving as a teacher for Indigenous children on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and mountains of Ecuador. Medicine and Miracles in the High Desert is Dr. Elliott’s first book and she has two additional memoirs planned.