"North American Navajo medicine men, known as Hatalii, use several methods to diagnose a patient's ailments, including the use of special tools such as crystal rocks, and abilities such as hand-trembling and trances, sometimes accompanied by chanting.
Training as a Hatalii is arduous and takes many years, the apprentice learning everything by watching his teacher and memorizes the words to all the chants.
The famous Navajo shape-shifters, the Skinwalkers or Yea-Naa-gloo-shee, are witches who assume animal forms to travel surreptitiously and to deliver their curses in secret.
The most common type of Navajo witchcraft is known as Witchery Way. On method is the use of “corpse poison”, or powdered corpses, especially from the corpses of children, particularly twins, the best body parts being the fingerprints and the bones of the back of the skull. A sub-branch of Witchery Way is based on the power of names, body material like fingernails and possessions to affect their owners by sympathetic magic and curses.
Spearfinger was a legendary Cherokee witch who had a finger that looked like a spear. She was said to have worn an impenetrable stone dress and to have eaten the liver of her victims. She supposedly haunted areas in the Appalachian Mountains, where she is believed to still inhabit today.
Appalachian Granny Magic is a form of witchcraft that dates back to the first European settlers of the Appalachian Mountains, who arrived in the late 1700s from Ireland and Scotland. Practitioners, also known as “Water Witches” (specialists in dowsing for water or energy vortexes) or “Witch Doctors” (specialists in healing and midwifery), believe in, and give daily offerings to, the fairy folk and leprechauns they believe followed them to the new country. They also believe in the spirits of the dead and seek out the guidance of ancestral spirits. Many of the older Granny Magic spells are sung and danced, and home-made cauldrons, brooms, pottery, candles, mirrors and baskets are all utilized."
Source
http://www.witchcraftandwitches.com/world_americas.html
