Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  DIVINERS OF MYSTERIES

  “Diviners of mysteries have always been prominent characters” among the Iroquois, according to Parker. The work of these spirit doctors could be as specific as finding lost children or possessions and solving crimes, or it could be as diffuse as telling fortunes and interpreting dreams. It could be as simple as deciding on the proper ceremony and medicine society for the patient’s complaint. It could be as dire as naming the supernatural assailant behind a spell causing a sickness.

  Handsome Lake Uncovers the Truth

  In the early 1800s, during the hunting season, a father and son from Cattaraugus came to Cornplanter village in Allegany while Prophet Handsome Lake was on hand. After a short stay, they took off into the woods.

  The young man came back alone with their horse and cart. “My dad is lost,” he said. “I spent a week looking for him. I walked and searched and signaled with gunshots hoping to find him.”

  Members of the community sensed that things were more than they seemed. They went to the local diviner, who said, “I think this guy killed his dad.” Handsome Lake was called in to the proceedings. The visionary told them to get a knife, a bullet, and a tomahawk and put them on a blanket before the suspect. “If there’s anything to this,” the prophet said, “one of them will move without being touched.”

  They set things up as Handsome Lake directed and brought the son in. Others talked, and the objects were still. The minute the suspect spoke, the bullet moved. This not only told the prophet that the father had been shot by the son but somehow revealed to him the hiding place of the body. He could even describe the spot.

  A Taint of the Supernatural

  One night in the early twentieth century, three men came to the home of a healer on the Cattaraugus Reservation. One carried a spade and another a lantern. The third was a Tonawanda Reservation witch doctor.

  A Cattaraugus family had been plagued with bad luck. Strange ailments had taken several children, and the affair had the taint of the supernatural. The Cattaraugus healer had been asked to do something about it, and he’d called on a specialist from Tonawanda.

  The four walked into the swampy woods. Now and then, the Tonawanda man stopped, took a forked stick out of his bag, and held it like a dowsing rod, one arm of the Y in each hand. He pointed it in various directions, studied it briefly, and then tucked it away. Once the rod took on a subtle gleam. They went the way it indicated, trying to keep it trained on its target as they negotiated the paths and obstacles. The forked stick glowed like it was red hot as they converged on an old stump. Its holder tapped the ground between two roots. “Here we dig.”

  The spade bearer set to. At the sound of metal hitting stone, the witch doctor took over. The lantern revealed a cubical box made of thick slabs from the creek bottom. “It’s there,” the witch doctor whispered. He put some white powder on top of the rough container and covered it with earth again.

  The party went back to the house of the suffering family and dug a hole at the corner of the woodshed. Into it the witch doctor put a five-gallon crock with a large piece of silk weighted at the corners, covering it like a drumhead. He made a small fire, threw medicine powder into it, and chanted, commanding the witch bundle to come from its box through the air into this container. In just a while, a ball of fire hurled itself across the night sky and arced down toward them. They dove for cover, all but the witch doctor, who saw it pass through the silk without burning it.

  Inside, they found a bundle of rags soaked with blood, and in them a sharp bone, bloody red: the otnäyont, the blood bone, the cursed totem that had been drinking the blood of children. The witch doctor made off with it, and there were no more mystery ailments. The last sick child got well.

  These witch bones can be laid in an area to curse it, and they’ll siphon the heart-blood of children until seen to in the traditional way. No wonder the Iroquois hated witches. At least it wasn’t a bomblet in the shape of a toy. Hell waits, too, for the deviser of that one.

  HERBS AND HEALINGS

  Prophet Handsome Lake had a lot to say about the occult practices of his people, including the healers. Herbal healers weren’t just magical gardeners who plucked what they wanted in the woods. They gathered herbs with the attitude of Iroquois hunters taking game: reverence. And the power of the plant was more than physical.

  “It’s wrong to take a plant without first talking to it,” said Handsome Lake in his code. “Offer tobacco, and tell the plant in gentle words what you want of it. Then pluck it from the roots.” This was probably a way of both empowering the herb and involving it in its intended function from the moment it left the earth.

  When the old Seneca healers came to a site to gather medicinal herbs, they often built small fires. Into the embers they cast tobacco at intervals, chanting prayers. They called on the spirits of the medicines, reminded them of the suffering people, and told them which of their powers were needed. The gatherer had a routine chant:

  They say that you are ready to heal. Now I claim you for medicine. Let me use your healing powers to purge and cleanse and cure. I won’t destroy you when I take you, but instead I’ll plant your seed so you can grow and thrive. Herb-spirits, I take you with purpose, to make you agents of healing. It was said that all the world might come to you. Here I am. I thank you for your powers. I thank the Creator for the gift of you.

  After the last puff of tobacco smoke, the herb gatherer dug the plant from the roots. He broke off the seed stalks, though, dropped the pods into the hole, and gently covered them over with fertile leaf mold. He never left this ceremony without announcing: “The plant will come again, and I have not destroyed life but helped increase it. So the plant is willing to lend me of its virtue.”

  For Handsome Lake, it wasn’t right to take payment for healing with an herb. The patient should offer only tobacco in the name of spirits greater than the healer.

  More to It Than That?

  Once a year around the anniversary of Appomattox, some Civil War veterans used to get together for a few days and rough it near the Evans farm off Blakeley Road in the Erie County town of Aurora. As long as they lived, they did this, camping and recalling old friends and historic battles. Doubtless another companion—Sir John Barleycorn—was with them in abundance. A small natural spring was nearby.

  The late historian Herb Evans (1905–2005) who hailed from the town of Wales, New York, spent time at these gatherings as a boy, and he got an earful. He also saw a few things that impressed him.

  One of these vets had a skin condition due to his stay in a prison camp, and it got worse as he aged. He grumbled about it within earshot of the others, one of whom was an old Seneca who knew something about that spring on Evans’s property. “Chief Carpenter,” as he was nicknamed, told the sufferer to get into it and bathe in the water. He also told him to drink a bit every few hours. It soon cured him. The spring had a lot of sulfur in it, but there must have been more to it than that.

  Turning a Spell Around

  Artist-author Jesse Cornplanter (1889–1957) was the last lineal descendant of the Revolutionary-era war chief Cornplanter. Soon after he came back from World War I, a family on another reservation developed some hard feelings for him. He got sick, lost weight, and couldn’t eat. White doctors hadn’t been much help. In recollection, he chuckled, “I could almost taste strawberries,” an Iroquois way to say, “pushing up daisies.” Strawberries line the road to the Iroquois heaven.

  One of the elders of the Tonawanda Reservation informed him that he had been witched. On four straight mornings, the old fellow gave him an emetic of touchwood fungus and twelve quarts of water to drink. Jesse Cornplanter threw up countless times into a hole the old man dug in the ground. The healer told him to stay out of sight of anyone before coming to see him on the fourth day. Sure enough, on that morning, up came a little sliver of wood. They built a fire, burned tobacco over it, and threw the thing in to turn the spell around. Jesse Cornplanter learned just a short time later that th
e woman he suspected of hexing him had died. He was sorry, but it was her life or his.

  THE SEVENTH SON

  In November 1926, the Batavia Daily News made an announcement: An eleven-year-old Mohawk mystic—the seventh son of a seventh son—had come to town. Abram George (c. 1916–1948?) of the St. Regis Reservation had moved with his family from Hogansburg and taken up residence at 104 Liberty Street.

  Father Mitchell George did the family talking. He declared that young Abram had been traveling the states as a part-time exorcist and full-time healer. He had chased spooks from a Memphis mansion, healed rheumatics and cripples, and found a drowning victim sixty-two feet under the surface of the St. Lawrence River. Young Abram had settled in upstate New York “ready to drive the voodoo man from the ill or solve any occult mystery.”

  This, though, was only the hype. Abram’s powers were those of touch—he was a psychic masseur. He rubbed the ailing parts of his patients’ bodies with his strong hands and didn’t speak during the process.

  Abram was a husky lad with a thatch of jet-black hair and big, commanding eyes. (“A bright-eyed boy of sturdy physique and shy manner,” the papers said of “the little red doctor.”) His demeanor was strangely unchildlike. More than one observer was reminded of the boy-sage Krishnamurti (1895–1986), likewise making a sensation, who had recently come to the United States from India. Both must have been old souls.

  Abram never set himself up as a guru. He gave no lectures, made no prophecies, and claimed no power but healing. There was no trance act or hocus-pocus about his practice, and no black art was the source of his gifts. Being the seventh son of a seventh son, said his father, he had inherited his powers because of his birth. Whatever their source, Abram’s gifts made believers.

  A Rochester boy paralyzed from infancy developed muscle and even started to walk under regular treatments from “Dr. George.” A blind Rochester man claimed to see light and shade for the first time in thirty-two years. A near-blind woman from London, England, was so improved when she left Batavia that she sent presents—toys—back across the Atlantic.

  Abram’s patients didn’t snap to suddenly as if a switch had been turned on. It took regular treatments from those healing hands. (Upstate reporters seemed most impressed by the color contrast, those hands of “the true bronze skin of his race” at work on his white patients.) And Abram couldn’t help everybody. A Rochester dame crippled in a fall reported little improvement. (She had seen Abram only twice, though, and said she still had hope.)

  Another thing was strange: Neither Abram nor his dad charged for the healing work. People would have been free to accept his treatment and pay nothing. In fact, Abram ministered to many who had no chance of paying. All this is consistent with a good healer.

  Abram also treated the affluent, but with an agreement: If he healed a patient, the family would give him what it could afford. He must have been good. Abram’s father was able to plunk down $2,500 cash for a new truck in 1927. His family seemed on the verge of wealth and fame. But there were chinks in the armor, and folks were starting to probe.

  The dad was clearly a showman, fully bent on capitalizing. The first stop of his Seneca country swing had been at the offices of the Batavia paper. Possibly hoping to keep an air of mystery about Abram, Mr. George let on that his son knew no English. (He spoke only “Indian,” according to an, alas, undereducated reporter, who spoke only “European.”) Abram endangered no detail of his dad’s ad campaign and could have been mute for all he said to whites. But his Batavia teachers were sure he knew what they were saying and that he could have spoken English had he cared to.

  That bit about the “seventh son of a seventh son . . .” is worth a look, too. At least the first half of it was true for young Abram, one of eleven born to the George family. As of 1926 his six brothers and a sister were alive. The business of associating the birth-order condition with Iroquois mojo is problematic.

  It was news to the Tonawanda Seneca, for instance. There is a Seneca tale predating young Abram’s life that does indeed concern a magical seventh son, but it doesn’t imply that his birth-order is the source of his powers. One Batavia reporter—possibly the one who implied that all Native Americans speak one language—conjectured that it was either a superstition specific to St. Regis or “the Iroquois tribe.” He obviously did not know that the Iroquois were a confederacy that included the local Seneca and that seven, though a sacred number to some world societies, is not known to be one to the old Iroquois. This “seventh son” stuff might even be some feature of American Southern tradition, making its way to St. Regis through contact with African Americans or even an exposure to blues music. This is quite logical. The Iroquois have always been ready adopters, of both people and supernatural customs.

  These may be minor points in judging a sacred gift, but any dissembling is a trouble sign. Still, Abram was a hit and seemed on the verge of stardom. The street outside the family’s Batavia home was busy enough in 1926. Such mobs came to Abram’s Rochester office that the police were called to South Avenue to keep order.

  But something was getting to young Dr. George. He had fainted at a healing in Geneva and cancelled his first big Rochester gig because of strain. This should have been foreseen. No healer finds the work easy. No mature medicine person would sign on for the assembly-line healing Abram had been doing.

  Trouble started in Rochester. The men who’d arranged one meeting for the Georges had charged admission fees at the door. The Georges may not even have known about it nor gotten a cent from it, but these no longer free healings fell under a different kind of scrutiny.

  Others were looking for trouble. Batavia neighbors complained about the traffic at the Georges’ home. The Batavia children’s court accused Mitchell George of being a poor guardian by keeping his son out of school. Medical organizations protested Abram’s “quackery.” His own lawyers broke it to the father that the state could indeed keep the son from working. The family went back to Hogansburg, where they had lived prior to Batavia.

  The move dodged some short-range trouble, but it was unfortunate for the prosperity of the George family. Batavia was halfway between population centers in Buffalo and Rochester. It was also in the core of the Burned-over District, where people had been used to prophets, healers, and would-be Christs for over a century.

  In 1929, the Georges came back to Batavia, proclaiming that Abram was now sixteen and could do as he chose. (How he had aged four years in the two they’d spent away was hard to explain.) His second stay was short and frustrating, and his career was derailed.

  In 2002, Batavia reporter Scot Desmit did some digging about Abram the healer. He tracked leads on the St. Regis/Akwesasne Reservation and found a woman of eighty-two who remembered Abram as a boy. He had asked her sister on a date.

  They still talked about him on the reservation, curing lameness and eye trouble. For waking someone out of a coma, a New York City family gave him the Cadillac he drove around Hogansburg. He was a shy fellow, they recalled, and he still worked with touch. They remembered him traveling often for healings. If someone on the St. Regis got hurt or sick, he came over and did his thing. He got into drinking, said the St. Regis woman, and died young, possibly in the 1940s. He was a great healer, though, whatever quirks he had, and he had respect on the reservation. It was natural for him to have gifts, the old gal said, even if they brought complications. He was, after all, a seventh son.

  MEDICINE BAGS

  We’ve seen witches use their rites, materials, and objects. Sometimes they put collections of things together to make power bundles called witches’ bags. For every medicine, there’s a countermedicine, and those who would battle malicious witchcraft make caches of their own. Around 1900, Seneca Edward Cornplanter (father of the aforementioned Jesse) itemized the contents of a typical charm holder’s bundle:

  The scales of the great horned serpent or a vial of its blood

  A round white stone given by the Little People

  Claws f
rom the death panther or the fire beast

  Feathers of the dewatyowais, the exploding bird

  Castor (a natural scent) of the white beaver

  An otnäyont, a sharp bone or blood bone

  A corn bug

  A small mummified hand

  Hair from a ferocious Great Flying Head

  Bones from the niagwahe, or the demon bear