In George Blondin’s short story “What is medicine power?” he approaches medicine power from his ancestral Dene perspective and while doing so alludes the reader from knowing exactly what medicine power is. He instead used a simple yet elegant approach to give the reader a basic understanding of medicine power’s potential, but not a true definition. He explains how Medicine Power is transferred and learned, however, without giving away too much information. Blondin does this for a reason “one of the most common rules accompanying Medicine Power is that the owner does not talk about his abilities.” (Blondin, 2013, p. 99). The reason medicine power is not talked about is because if a person who has medicine power capabilities speaks on it, there …show more content…
Keeping the rules in mind Blondin shows his utmost respect for medicine power by not defining exactly what it is but what it meant as a means of basic needs to the Dene people of the past. He did this by only saying what can be said about it, nothing more and nothing less. Blondin states that even he himself had a hard time learning about medicine power from Elders because they were told that it was taboo to speak on the subject, he stated “it’s difficult to define this subject” (p. 99) because the power is always changing and morphing, moving with energy between the spirit world and our perceived view of reality. Therefore, little is known about it, and Blondin could only stress the importance of medicine power, not what medicine power is all about, “medicine power is a spirit, with a mind of its own, and it attaches to us or, to see it in another way, we borrow it.” (p.99). He is making of point of telling the public that medicine power existed, however the ways that medicine power changes makes it even harder to set down a concrete definition of what exactly medicine power