The car is crushed.

It challenged a semi-truck and lost. The driver barely survived.

"I woke up in neurological intensive care with a closed brain injury and lower spinal cord injury," Ryan Spencer said. "Doctors told me I may never walk again, let alone perform again."

Spencer is a magician. The accident happened as he was beginning his career.

"I spent the next year in physical and occupational therapy," Spencer said.

Spencer went through hardships.

The Cherokee Nation suffered hardships as well.

In 1838, close to 15,000 Cherokee Indians set off on the Trail of Tears. Men, women and children walked 1,000 miles in the middle of winter.

"How did they survive?" Freeman Owle asked. "What kind of medicine is necessary to survive something like that?"

ETSU's College of Public Health hosted its second annual event, "An evening of health, wellness and the arts," on Jan. 26. Mary B. Martin School of the Arts co-sponsored this year's event.

Spencer along with Owle, a Cherokee elder and historian, were the featured speakers.

"This is something that is so important for us to see where healthcare, science, the arts and wellness can come together," Anita DeAngelis, director of the Mary B. Martin School of the Arts, said.

Owle started the evening speaking of balance in one's life. Balance means being at peace with the earth and with yourself. Something he thinks the younger generation of Cherokee is losing.

"The younger generations are no longer learning the cures," Owle said. "They are no longer learning the ways."

The lack of balance is demonstrated in the way the different generations use medicine. Those Cherokee 60 or older use mostly natural medicines, the same medicines their ancestors used. People under 30 use modern medicine.

Owle sees this problem facing his people. He worries that balance is slowly disappearing.

"I think probably, within not too many years, the total amount of the culture will be lost," Owle said. "It's a sad thing."

The younger Cherokee struggle with the same problem other young people face — drugs. "We have a lot of kids that are OD'ing all the time," Owle said.

When a Cherokee teenager turns 18 they receive a check for about $4,000 a year. Drug dealers know this, so they give the users credit throughout the year. When the tribal payment is received, they usually sign it straight over to the drug dealer.

This causes great financial stress, especially for those with children.

"A lot of time these teenagers have babies already, and they have no money there for the child," Owle said. "So you find them hanging on a rope with a chair they've kicked out from under themselves."

Owle is distressed. The elders of the Cherokee nation are taking steps to keep their tradition alive. The future is bleak.

"It doesn't look good," Owle said. "We are going to try to teach them the language, but we cannot fight against that social need to become part of a gang or to become the TV image of a teenager. Sad. Pitiful."

Owle is followed by a short intermission. The crowd files out of the auditorium to view photographs taken by the Gold Humanism Honor Society. Dr. Randy Wykoff, dean of the College of Public Health, believes the arts are essential to wellness.

"We put the arts aside, thinking oh that's not important," Wykoff said. "What we have found is that the arts are a part of a person and it is essential to wellness."

The voice of students was also listened too.

"It was a collaborative effort," Jeremy Pickell, president of the GHHS, said. "Dr. Wykoff and I talked for six or seven months, tossing ideas back and forth."

After intermission, everyone heads back to their seats. As the lights dim, Spencer walks out onto the stage.

While rehabbing from his car wreck, Spencer realized something. Rehab was boring.

"When you're a long-term patient and they're having you do traditional therapeutic exercises that really have no point to them that you see, it's very hard to stay motivated to do those things," Spencer said. "So when I made it through my therapy I went to my director of rehab and said, ‘There's got to be a better way to do this. There's nothing about this that's fun.'"

So Spencer had an idea. He wanted to use magic as a way to help the therapeutic process.

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Spencer talks benefits of magic on therapy

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