KINGMAN, Ariz. – Robert LaRochelle Crying Red Bear, a Woodland Cree medicine man, is a true polymath in medicine, art, language, and history. He earned a degree from Johns Hopkins University, yet still has time to create the most beautiful and unique pieces of art you can find anywhere.
“I was going to be a doctor,” Robert Crying Red Bear said, “and take it back to my tribe, but I learned a new trade and when I did go back, I did something different.”
That something different was that he became a medicine man instead.
Robert Crying Red Bear is 76 years old and can trace his roots back 32 generations. He remembers what life was like growing up on the reservation.
“As a young boy, the only thing modern was cars and pickups,” Robert Crying Red Bear said. “Everything else was the same as it was hundreds of years ago. We had no electricity, no running water, no TV, no telephones.”
He has lived on the Hopi Reservation at Old Oriabi for the past 30 years and they’re still the same today – no modern conveniences.
Crying Red Bear got his name the same way everyone in the Woodland Cree receive their name.
“We are called by what we are,” he said. “When I came out, I was screaming and bright red. I was born under the constellation of a bear, literally, about midnightish.” Thus, Crying Red Bear.
“In our culture, the mother never chooses a name,” he said.
According to LaRochelle, a family of fur trappers gave his family their French name; they later found out that same man founded LaRochelle, France.
Crying Red Bear’s father was a Mohawk and his mother a Mohegan. Since he was a medicine man, the medicine men of his tribe had to tattoo his face so his tribe could recognize him.
“The number of dots on both cheeks,” he said, “represent my birth under the Great Bear Constellation. The dots on my chin, are how many gifts and abilities I was born with.”
The tattoo took six hours of hand-tapping on his face, but he put himself in a trance the entire time and felt no pain.
Robert Crying Red Bear LaRochelle speaks three languages – English, French and his tribe’s language, Wood Cree.
His talent doesn’t stop at being a Medicine Man, he also makes beautiful jewelry, spirit masks, coup sticks and a myriad of other things that he sells at local craft fairs. He draws, he paints, and he also plays the guitar and mandolin – a vastly, gifted individual indeed.
