Among the Athapaskan Hupa of northwestern California, most of the shamans, or healers, were older women. Because illness was said to result from the misalignment of a person's spiritual and natural worlds, the shaman used potions, poultices, incantations, fasting, chanting, and secret rituals to drive out evil spirits and restore a person's inner balance. This photograph—a reminder of women's important cultural, spiritual, and leadership roles in many American Indian tribes—is one of approximately twenty-four hundred first-generation photographic prints deposited for copyright by Edward Curtis during his thirty-year career photographing Native Americans west of the Mississippi and collecting their legends, languages, traditions, and music for his twenty-volume work The North American Indian. (See the Edward Curtis Collection location in chapter six, Prints and Photographs Division.)