“(In our culture), the medicine man is at the top of the social hierarchy,” says Gillson, who is of Navajo descent.

“When healers breech the trust placed in them (and) prey on others wearing the cloak of health and harmony, it increases my passion to personally prosecute the case.”

Last month, Francis Nez, a 62-year-old medicine man from Gallup NM, was charged with two counts of sexually assaulting two girls in his family.

What troubled Gillson was that Nez hadn’t been the first. At least two similar cases have occurred in the vast Navajo reservation spanning four states in the U.S. Southwest—the country’s largest autonomous reservation—over the past decade.

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