The Dance of the Two Orbs
The flu swept the Northeast in the Great Depression, and the family of Abenaki author Joe Bruchac (b. 1942) lost several members. One of the stricken was Joe’s grandfather, Grandpa Bowman, a revered elder taking his last breaths in the family home near Cole Hill in the Saratoga County town of Greenfield.
Early on the evening that would be Grandpa Bowman’s last, someone looked out the window and called everyone’s attention. There on the open ground outside the home was a small, white, luminous orb, clearly one of the spirit lights. It moved timidly, as if confused. No one could account for its movements. It neared the house as if it wanted to enter, then backed off as if afraid.
Grandpa Bowman came to for the last time and asked about Eddie, his youngest grandson. No one had the heart to tell him that, only hours before, Eddie had been taken by the same plague.
Soon after Grandpa Bowman passed, someone looked out and spotted a much larger, more brilliant orb, as abnormally large as the other had been atypically small. The little one drew up and circled the bigger and danced like a water bug on the surface of a pond. Then the little light’s movements slowed and became more like those of the big. The pair moved smoothly together into the trees and up Cole Hill.
It was interpreted that the confused, earlier passing soul of the grandson met the more solid form of its elder. Grandpa Bowman’s soul would know its way to the Great Spirit. One like his could have led a herd of others with him.
Whatever they are, these witch lights, bless yourself and all creation when you see them, that the world still has wonder.
4
Medicine People
The shaman . . . not only dies in and of himself, but serves as a sacrament to the spiritual forces of the universe. In this way he mystically unites himself with a sacred order of being, beyond the dimension of this or that person in this particular body.
STEPHEN LARSEN, THE SHAMAN’S DOORWAY
AN AURA OF THE SPIRIT
You’ve had a serious run of bad luck. You know the drill: bounced checks, fender benders, lost jobs, runaway pets. If it can go wrong, it has. The string of disasters is so unlikely that you can almost laugh about it. What next? You might turn to a shrink or a life coach, but he or she can’t do much about what appears to be fate.
Or maybe you’re sick with a malady so lingering and draining that it’s starting to affect your outlook on life. The doctors keep trying new remedies with the same old result. The feeling grows on you that something more than coincidence is behind the picture, and you start looking for new ideas. You need the medicine people.
Today, most of us think of sickness and healing in purely material terms. To us, our doctors are plumbers, carpenters, and chemists of the human body. Preindustrial societies had doctors, too, but they were regarded as much more than physical healers.
In fact, an aura of the spirit has always clung to indigenous medicine workers, and it’s no wonder that it would be that way. To people who believe that Spirit animates everything in the world—rocks, trees, grass, weather—the suffering of a body could quite well be an imbalance in the soul, if not an outright metaphysical attack. The customs and duties of preindustrial doctors, therefore—like, probably, all humanity’s arts and all other practices considered expressive or spiritual—evolved from the idols, drawings, rites, dances, and customs of the original spirit talker of humanity’s ice age societies: the shaman.
The shaman was the culture preserver for his or her community, combining the functions of priest, poet, historian, musician, wizard, teacher, doctor, and many others. You can see images of this figure, often half animal, on the walls of the caves in France, in the paintings of the ice age critters, many now extinct, which he hunted, consulted in spirit, or mystically became. The shaman might even have been the first artist.
Popular interest in shamanism and neoshamanism soared in the late twentieth century. A lot has been written about that journey, some of it personal, imaginative, and elaborate. Little is known about the most ancient shamanism, and only a few fundamentals can be taken to be true.
Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen (1879–1933) encountered societies whose lifestyles and outlooks must have changed little in ten thousand years. They were still led by shamans, one of whom summarized his duties for Rasmussen: He had to lead the tribe to the best hunting grounds and appease the spirits of the animals whose lives they had taken. He was qualified to do this because, in trance, he could leave his body and commune with the world of spirits. He could learn almost anything this way. Some of the spirits he pacified on behalf of the tribe, “explaining” to the souls of the animal victims why humanity had killed them and thus protecting his community from the potential vengeance of a spirit legion. While he was at it, he might take the opportunity to get in a few words about other things. He might even intervene with the spirits of disease and get them to back off of suffering individuals or his entire community.
By the time the first Europeans encountered the Iroquois, all these shaman duties were no longer embodied in one individual. The healer became one of the spin-offs. The medicine societies lasting to this day probably show some vestiges of their ancient shamanic roots, as do the private contractors, still called medicine people.
Iroquois healing societies like the False Faces (or Medicine Masks) are keepers of the ritual songs and chants. These are precious items of national personality, and they should be respected and preserved. During performances of these rites, the celebrants are believed to reach and even speak for otherworldly presences and beings. Even if you don’t believe in the powers of these healers, a look into their nature is valuable.
BEAR AND TED
Steady lives of selfless good aren’t “sexy.” The headlines of history favor drama: curses, murders, trials, and bad ends. We have less historical information about medicine people than we do about witches, but through Michael Bastine’s friendship with two important twentieth-century medicine men—Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson and Ted Williams—we have unparalleled access to contemporary Native medicine. Furthermore, a book has been written about Mad Bear, and Ted Williams wrote two books himself.
Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson (1927–1985) was Michael’s longtime tutor and the subject of Doug Boyd’s 1994 book Mad Bear. Mad Bear, always known by his family nickname, served in the U.S. Navy on Okinawa and worked for years in the Merchant Marine, where he was a spokesman for his fellows of all colors.
Author Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) met Mad Bear in his twenties. “A young man in a lumberjack shirt,” he wrote in 1957, “broad of build, with a round face and lively black eyes.” Envision Mad Bear as a less melanin-challenged version of baseball player Babe Ruth. Wilson was convinced that Mad Bear could be the leader the Iroquois needed. Several times he was asked to be Tuscarora tribal chief, but that would have kept him close to home and hopping to a council’s beat. Mad Bear’s goals were neither Tuscarora, Iroquoian, Native American, nor even simply human. They were global.
Mad Bear believed that the best way to help Native Americans and aboriginal people everywhere was to raise the spiritual consciousness of the world. He believed, as do we, that this was also a great way to help the world. His transcendence, his care for all life, brought in people from all quarters.
The breadth of Mad Bear’s friendships was indeed imposing. He conferred with Martin Luther King Jr. on some issues, and his wide-faced image appears like an orb in many photos of luminaries like Ted Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Bob Dylan, and the Dalai Lama, a friend he took Michael Bastine to visit. His late-1960s North American Indian Unity Caravan brought many far-flung Native nations together. At first this movement started as a rolling coalition of activists who toured reservations, gave speeches, led rallies, and inspired many indigenous American nations to work together on behalf of common causes. Before the end of its six-year run it drew the attention, sympathy, and involvement of well-wishers of all ancestries. It is hard to overestimate Mad Bear’s impact in bringing
Native American issues to the awareness of the mainstream. It was certainly the seed of much of our admiration today for Native American character and wisdom.
As with most visionaries, the burly Tuscarora was mighty fixed on his purpose, and that simple sense of human closeness was not always with him. Though Michael trained, tutored, and traveled with Mad Bear for years, he wonders sometimes even today how well he knew the man who taught him so much.
This was not the case with Ted Williams. If Mad Bear stands out as a medicine man willing to be profiled, Ted Williams may have been the first to profile himself, albeit indirectly. Ted’s two books, The Reservation (1985) and Big Medicine from Six Nations (2005), are as valuable for their characterizations of reservation life as their inside look at the magic that we describe as medicine.
Ted was raised around the traditional ways and witnessed many a miracle. Most of his life he lived off the reservation and worked at a number of “white” jobs. He was a paratrooper, a partier, a jazz player, and, word has it, a ladies’ man. One could see that. Even in his late sixties, when I first met him, he was a sturdy, active, handsome man, with a long aquiline nose and a profile that could have gone Hollywood. He was charismatically direct of expression.
Ted came to the medicine late in his life, but things moved fast for the son of Eleazar Williams, one of the most admired healers in living memory. Ted became a member of the False Faces Society, and through him I learned a lot about it.
Ted and Mike Bastine never made a big deal out of their friendship. They just hung out. But the only time I’ve ever heard a catch in Michael’s voice was when we talked at the end of Ted’s memorial service in 2005. Till then I’d had no idea how close the two were.
By now the image of the Native American medicine man or woman is a media icon. August, patient, transcendent, nearly omniscient—people this uncomplicated are only found in books and movies.
“These medicine people are still people,” says Michael. “They can have all the flaws of any of the rest of us.” There is also, we both think, a little something extra about them. We profile Ted, Mad Bear, and all other people and events in this chapter as representatives of the Iroquois medicine tradition, one meriting the deepest respect.
WITCH DOCTORS
We’ve all heard stories about apparently supernatural displays of power and awareness. In parapsychology they’re called “psychokinesis” (PK) and “extra sensory perception” (ESP). In the old days it might all have been called magic.
Some of us these days have too much faith in these subjects and others may have too little. Maybe we all should have some. Successful experiments with faith healing and the mind-bending feats of martial artists, Zen masters, and Indian yogis ought to confirm that “mind over matter” exists in people to some extent. Even animals seem to know things sometimes that they simply shouldn’t be expected to know. Who hasn’t seen a family dog frisking by the door minutes before its owner arrives home?
Preindustrial shamans could have had even greater special abilities, which might have spelled the difference in personal or cultural survival. The living preservers of their tradition may have them, too.
We hesitate to encourage wild assumptions about Iroquois power people, but we have to say that psychic healing and communication does seem to occur far more often on the reservation than in the society around it. Today, in the twenty-first century, the Western medical establishment shows more than a grudging realization that the world holds a lot we can’t explain. To its credit, the American Medical Association is beginning to consider the effectiveness of alternative treatments, ones that have been used in other parts of the world for thousands of years. Not everyone gets better with Western treatment. Sometimes traditional healing works—sometimes so miraculously that psychic or supernatural factors could be involved.
Western medical doctors themselves often use hunches in curing their patients. They get that funny feeling, prescribe an extra test, and end up lengthening a life. And let’s not forget that many famous discoveries have come to scientists suddenly as a psychic flash or an insightful dream, in which at least the unconscious mind was at work.
Until the advent of modern medicine, Iroquois traditional healers could set broken bones, treat wounds, and cure ailments at least as well as Europe’s physicians. They were also skilled herbalists who knew every plant in the Northeast Woodlands. Their potions and poultices would be valuable to us today. These were the body healers.
Other healers were teachers and culture-preservers whose religious and spiritual function was incalculable. They were the keepers of a body of age-old wisdom, memorialized in rituals, memorialized in song. Since the Iroquoian word root for power was the same as that for song, you can see the respect in which these incantations were held. They were thought at least as valuable for the healing of the patient as any physical remedy. Those who kept the tradition were also the first line of defense against the attacks of witches.
Early in the twentieth century, Arthur C. Parker acknowledged several forms of occult practice among the Iroquois, among which he included healing. Parker understood the spiritual discipline driving the gatherers of medicinal roots and plants. Still, he profiled most of his occultists in terms of witchcraft. The question could be one of terminology.
Even in the middle twentieth century witched was still used as a catchall word by reservation folk for a state that could be described with a variety of terms: cursed, enchanted, charmed, spellbound. Parker found among the Iroquois two styles of witch doctors, the metaphysical wing of the medicine people.
The first category is the anti-witch, someone who has made a special study of curses and countermeasures. An expert in diagnosis, he or she knows the signs of the varied curses and the exact means of combating them. A doctor of body and soul, this type of witch, says Parker, usually works free of charge.
The other type of witch doctor—or at least someone who will occasionally work as one—is simple: This is your witch, an occult practitioner you recruit against other witches who may have attacked you. In a metaphysical sense, you “find a dog who’ll eat a dog.” He or she cures you by outcursing the curse, usually turning it on its senders.
A bit has changed since Parker’s time. Our late contemporary Ted Williams acknowledged three categories of healing medicine:
Simple medicines that are purely physical cures. Good examples are herbs such as wild cherry bark for calming a sore throat or slippery elm for drawing out boils, slivers, or infections.
Medicines that take preparation. These medicines are often concoctions of herbs and other ingredients, which have to be carefully gathered and measured, sometimes according to cycles of the year or moon. They are aimed at curing chronic conditions and diseases, such as gallstones, pleurisy, and arthritis, not just sicknesses and wounds.
Medicines “that hide.” These are spiritual and anti-witch. This, Ted tells us, is the type of medicine that brought people to the east door of his family’s house, the sheltered side, to see his father, Eleazar the healer.
Mount Holyoke and Wellesley professor Annemarie Anrod Shimony made a penetrating study of twentieth-century Iroquois witchcraft. She found two categories of spiritual healers: those who diagnose ailments and those who diagnose and cure. Because many of today’s spirit healers take on some of the techniques of Western psychics, a lot of them give the appearance of fortune-tellers or tea-leaf readers. In fact, the term readers, a word Mad Bear used himself, is sometimes applied to all of them.
The English words used to describe the effects of magic have changed, too. Not many people talk anymore about witches, though they may surely think in terms of witchery. By the late twentieth century medicine had become so common a term for most redirections of the omnipresent psychic force orenda that reservation folk use it almost the way Spiritualists use the word spirit. In 2005, some healers/medicine people might say they “did some work” on behalf of this or that result. There seems to be the understanding that the force they use is
one. “Good” or “bad” depends on its uses or its interpretation.
The healers we have today are usually solo operators, made, we figure, by some blend of natural talent—most likely psychic—and a period of training with at least one great healer. People with the potential to be healers often give some sign of it at an early age. Some have a natural gift, and some are made. The greatest, like athletes, are doubtless both.
Your first encounter with a healer can be a surprise. The rites may not seem elaborate. “Work” almost always begins with generic ceremonies and gifts of tobacco—a common offering to the spirits and the four quarters as a commencement to any worthy undertaking. Smudges of sage and cedar are customary for healing and purifying, following which might be moments of meditation and praying or chanting in one of the Iroquois languages. Other things these healers use may seem unlikely. Humble items, even ones made of plastic and mass-produced, could have their uses. The point seems to be to focus the intent of the practitioner and invoke the energy of generations of tradition behind it.
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 11
