A small flute or whistle made from an eagle wing bone
Anti-witch powder
A bag of sacred tobacco
Claws or teeth from various wild animals
A small mortar and pestle
A small war club
A small bow and arrow
Miniature wooden bowls and spoons
A small wooden doll
Clairvoyant eye oil (a potion giving the second sight)
This is just a generic list; master wizards would have had their own tricks and ingredients. No bundle was broken in, anyway, unless it was “sung for” in the charm holder’s ceremony. Great power, though, could be the reward. The holder of a charm bag could overcome a sorcerer’s blight or determine which offended spirits were behind a problem. The magic bundle could heal, work a blessing, or turn a curse.
Even in magic, the downhill path is easier. The main test in assembling the witch’s bag is one of the stomach. Just acquiring the ingredients of the charm holder’s bundle would be a quest, sometimes outright life-threatening. No Great Horned Snake would seem eager to part with blood or hide. Others, such as Great Flying Head hair, sound chimerical, like the kennings (girl beards, cat footfalls, fish breath) that leashed the Scandinavian demon-wolf Fenrir. There may be some truth, though, to the exploding bird. One of these was caught on film in a baseball stadium in March 2001, colliding with a heater from former pitcher Randy “The Big Unit” Johnson.
Twentieth-century shaman Mad Bear Anderson had his own medicine bundles, used for healing, divination, medicine, and, yes, personal defense. We never get a look at what might have been in any of these bags, but he seems to have had three kinds of them.
One was a middle-sized medicine case that he took on important trips. This was a leather satchel he used for quick-developing problems. It probably held herbs, powders, and implements that he used to work cures and blunt curses. A thing of fascination to many supporters, it would have been coveted by some fans and all opponents. It and most people had to be kept away from each other. Once it was stolen.
The Fifth Spiritual Summit in New York City was a 1975 conference of world religious traditions sponsored by the United Nations. During one of Mad Bear’s appearances, the fabled case disappeared from his hotel room. The young Native American appointed to watch it got suddenly sick. He had no idea what had become of the case and displayed all the signs of being magically bamboozled—“overshadowed,” as Mad Bear put it. Mad Bear gave him a bit of doctoring and went to find the culprit somewhere in the vast city.
The next time anyone saw Mad Bear, he had his bag back. “I had to use some medicine to find it,” was all he would say.
The bag thief was a white man who had been around the conference all week and had drawn attention by his appearance. He had the Johnny Cash “cowboy in black” look. He’d had his hands on the bag, and he needed some “doctoring,” too. It was clear that somebody was using him.
Mad Bear also wore a tiny sack on a cord about his neck. This was the immediate line of personal defense. He never took it off in public, and the one time he did so for a dip in a swimming hole, he was struck almost immediately by the bite of a strange-looking insect, one that sent him to a hospital and seriously weakened him thereafter.
From the fact that there was a daypack and a tweener, we deduce that Mad Bear had a master collection, possibly even a cauldron-sized power cache that would have been kept somewhere quite safe, possibly even buried. The concatenation of it all in one place probably made it an orenda-emanator that could work medicine long-range.
We’ve heard of these medicine kettles being unearthed around New York state. We’ve mentioned the one in Buffalo at the center of a ring of bodies, and it may not have been a holy one. One wonders if someday someone will find the major storehouse of Mad Bear’s medicine under equally cryptic circumstances.
SABAEL AND THE MEDICINE BEADS
The variously named Sabael (Sabile, Sebele) Benedict was probably an Abenaki born in western Maine. At twelve, he ended up fighting at the Battle of Quebec and ever after figured his age based on that 1759 clash. He needed to have some benchmark because he lived a good long life in Mohawk country in the undeveloped Adirondacks.
In his late teens, he’d had enough of white men’s wars and ducked out of it all to be the first settler of Indian Lake, seventy miles northwest of Saratoga Springs. He was a legend around Hamilton County, liked and trusted by the whites who came in later. Not all was due to the good in white hearts. Sabael sold the rights to a valuable iron mine at Keesville for a bushel of corn and a dollar. Other decisions went his way. So well regarded was Sabael Benedict that a settler offered his own red-haired daughter as a bride. From what we hear, this was a fine long marriage.
Sabael was a medicine man. Where he got his training is anyone’s guess. Maybe he was one of those naturals. Maybe it was all in the medicine necklace he wore. This string of beads was good against many a complaint.
If he was in a canoe when a storm rolled in, all he had to do was drop a bead in the water and the lake would stay at peace. On land, just hanging this necklace on a tree would guarantee that no lightning would strike anyone under it. When the heebie-jeebies came on him in the woods, he took the necklace out of his pouch and held it before him like a torch. The chepi—“hostile spirits” in an Algonquin tongue—cleared before him like schools of fish before a skin diver. Something kept him alive over a century.
One night at the end of his very long life, Sabael went on his last ramble, trudging into the trees and elements he had lived among. Maybe the Great Spirit was calling. His body was never found. His worried wife went looking for him, and she was found, frozen and buried in snow, on a small island in Indian Lake. Her apparition has been reported on this island, as well as the sound of his voice calling her.
FOR THE UNBORN CHILDREN
Early in July 1998, I called Mike Bastine to go over a certain story I had heard him tell a couple times. “Heck, there’s a guy in town that tells the story a lot better,” he said. “Ted Williams. He’s who I heard it from. I’m going up to Lewiston to see him tomorrow. Why don’t you come on up and meet him?”
Nobody was around when I got to the meeting spot. I set up with my laptop under a tree. In half an hour, a car pulled up and parked beside mine. Pam Bastine, Mike’s wife, got out with a long-haired gentleman built like many Tuscaroras—big chested and middle sized. The pair had just returned from lunch, and Michael had gone back to work.
Ted was then in his late sixties. He was a handsome, photogenic man with a still mostly black mane. Pam told him about my work, which didn’t knock him over. He was the most naturally short-spoken author I’d ever met. Even his syllables were clipped. He kept his teeth close together when he talked, as if he were determined to hold on to a piece of hide in his molars and someone were tugging on it as he spoke. I wasn’t sure he liked me. I was planning the next move of my day when the old healer came up with a small, dense plastic disc. “How about a little game?” he said with a gleam in his eyes.
“Ultimate Frisbee?” I had played that active sport in my teacher days. It also took a team.
“Disc golf,” said the healer with a huff.
“Ted’s the national champion,” said Pam.
“That’s really something,” I said. “National champion.”
“The sixty-fives,” said Ted. “Couple years ago. Course I won’t win again till I’m seventy and this one guy gets out of the age group. He’s one year younger. Then I won’t win till I’m seventy-five.”
“National champion at anything,” I said. “That’s something.”
“The guys in the fifties are a throw a hole better,” he said.
“Just think if they were sixty-five,” I said. “You’d get ’em.”
“It’d be the same,” he said. “I’d be eighty then.”
We played nine holes on the state park course, firing the long-soaring discs to the distant, metal-chained baskets on poles. The green was
so thick that I could hardly see what we were aiming at. Ted was way ahead at the end.
We sat again back at the start. Ted was curious how the research that became this book was going to go. I started in on the subjects: medicine people, wars, curses, witchcraft.
Ted looked into the tree line as if his vision could soar through it and take his spirit on a romp down the Niagara, into the sparse clouds, and out over the Ontario. Then he turned back and looked at me. “You know, it’s an interesting thing about witches. Some of them get pulled in by money, and they get started on the wrong road. Then they can’t give up. They get too far in and can’t do it any other way. It’s just like other people can’t get out of the Mafia.”
“Fifty years ago most whites thought medicine people were all bad,” I said. “Now they think they’re all good. I would have thought the medicine people would have been all about the preservation of traditional society and values. Keeping the culture and the teaching. But they come in on both sides of some disputes. Gas. Gambling. Tobacco.”
He smirked. “Some of the chiefs thought a casino would be good because the Oneida were doing well with it and everybody had money. Some of the chiefs said, ‘No, that won’t make a better world for the unborn children.’”
He shifted to face me. “You know, I do some medicine,” he said, like it was quite an understatement. “Part of where the trouble comes in . . . people on both sides of a matter come to me and ask me if I can do some work for them. It disappoints them when I tell them I can’t. I make my mind up based on what will be the best for the unborn children. It’s just a different opinion of what that will be. What will be best for the unborn children.”
He gave a little cough of a laugh. “Course it’s not something hidden for me to tell you that. That’s pretty much the job description of a chief.”
He looked at me intently. “You know, it’s not like there’s evil people on either side of these disputes. You might think of it like the enneagram. You heard of that?”
“Little rusty.”
“It’s that nine-sided problem you can look at so many ways. There ought to be many insights into the truth. It’s not always easy to tell what will be best for the unborn children.”
Bluedog
When he was a boy, Ted Williams’s family took in a pup to which he was much attached. Sunlight brought azure flecks out of its vinyl-black coat, and while people were figuring out a name they called it Bluedog, which stuck. Every day for weeks, Ted ran home from school to play with it. He was fascinated by its animal manners, its open nature toward all life, and the simple love it felt for him. One day, though, he came home to find its body still and cold on the front step. He ran in crying. His father, the healer Eleazar Williams, was waiting.
“Ted, my son,” he said. “You know that all beings have free will. We can choose what might be right for us and others, or we can choose what might be wrong. Just the way we tell you what’s good for you, we told that little dog again and again not to go down the driveway and play in the road. But he didn’t listen to us, and he ran out with the cars. Now he’s learned a lesson that’s sad for all of us. But it’s the Creator’s way. We have free will.”
“Daddy, can’t you do something for Bluedog?” Ted cried.
“Now, Ted,” the father said. “There might be something I can do for him. But this isn’t an easy decision. We shouldn’t turn back the pattern of the Creator just because we want to. We can only do what’s allowed. And some of what’s allowed isn’t the best thing.”
“Daddy, bring Bluedog back to us,” said Ted. “Daddy, I know you can.”
“I want to be sure you have thought about this,” his father said. “It’s a lesson for you, too. In the balance of things, there’s a cost for everything we do. Someday you may want to change something else the Creator has allowed, and He may already have spoken for you. I just ask you to think about it.”
“I won’t ask for anything again,” said Ted. “Just do it now.”
“If you’ve decided, I’ll give it a try,” said the father. “You have free will, too. The Creator won’t let us do anything that would tip the balance of things. Come watch with me and let’s see if that little dog has a job to do that we don’t understand right now.”
By then the whole family had gathered. Eleazar Williams went to the body of the pup, opened its jaws, tucked something small between them, and closed them gently again. He chanted over the dog’s body in Tuscarora. Now and then he looked up through the trees as if asking the sky for guidance. He stroked the soft fur under the dog’s chin and called to it as if to wake it gently. He may have done all this for half an hour.
“Now, Ted, let’s put him down real easy into that warm grass over there right where the sunlight falls. You just sit here on this step and make sure nothing bothers him while the Creator’s deciding.”
The tears had dried on Ted’s cheeks by the time the grass started to shake, and he heard a tiny cough. The green parted, and Bluedog stood, shivering. A couple of times he stopped and hacked up bits of organ and bone. Once he’d stopped coughing for good, he trembled and looked around as if he didn’t know where he was, as if he were about to run into the woods. Then he saw Ted and wagged his tail.
Though he always walked with a shimmy, Bluedog went on to a long and happy life. He had a bit of that quality the Europeans call fey, that was all. Maybe because of his short stay in the other world, Bluedog was always seeing spirits in this one. It was hard getting him to keep a pace sometimes on those late night walks, and some nights he wouldn’t leave the yard. But he was the best animal friend any boy ever had. In his seventy-fifth year, Ted’s eyes welled whenever he told the story.
Ted became a healer himself. But tragedy came to him later in life, as a father—one he would have given his life to undo. It was an accident that caused the death of a child, an event he thought he had a hand in. He always wondered if he might not have used the Creator’s special dispensation when he was a boy.
Mad Bear’s Medicine Hat
An old treaty with the British Empire granted the Iroquois hassle-free passage between the United States and Canada forever. Political firebrands are occasionally blocked at the border with the idea of keeping them out of trouble, but sometimes it separates them from councils and family gatherings. Leave it to Mad Bear to make a point: When the authorities tried to block him at one of the Niagara River bridges, he crashed his Jeep through a wooden gate and was on his way. He offered to make up for any damage caused by his exercise of his political rights, but the authorities were not amused. Mad Bear was told that he would be arrested if he tried to attend an early 1970s rally in Toronto.
Mad Bear announced that he would attend, not to disturb the peace, but to carry out his duties to his nation. The problem was following through—the guards at the border were on the lookout, and Mad Bear’s photo was in every booth. Native American caravans were sure to get the once-over.
Mad Bear’s standoff had made news, and reporters were stalking him. Under his black, wide-brimmed magic hat, he crossed the border in a backseat between two friends. The customs agent peered into the car holding Mad Bear and waved them on. “Hey! That’s Mad Bear in that car up there!” yelled a Buffalo reporter hanging out the window of the car behind them.
The agent looked again, studying faces more closely, then waved them all on a second time. As they pulled away from the Peace Bridge, Mad Bear grinned faintly. He was later to say, “Every time that guard looked at me, it felt like sand was sprinkling all down over my face. What he saw was someone else.”
White writer Doug Boyd (1935–2006) had heard a lot about the “doctored” hat. Once Mad Bear even let him try it on. It was a bit too big for him, and he felt something different under it, if not cascading sand. Mad Bear looked at him curiously as if he himself was surprised by its effect. Boyd turned for the mirror, but Mad Bear snatched the hat back before he could see himself under it. Next time he visited, it was not on its usual hook.
&
nbsp; MAD BEAR’S METHOD OF READING
Mad Bear’s curative powers were famous even off the reservation. People came to him with all sorts of problems, including ones they suspected were magical. Mad Bear did his healing only on weekends. Most Saturday and Sunday mornings, a line of cars was parked outside his Tuscarora Reservation home, filled with people waiting for him to start. He had two strictures: He wouldn’t start before sunrise, and he never worked past sunset.
The healing itself was as likely to be physical or emotional as occult. Though Mad Bear’s remedies were traditional and Native American, he reached his diagnoses through a mix of occult customs. There were three or four distinct stages to his reading.
Mad Bear always started by letting his guest talk a while, maybe asking a few questions. He tossed a bit of loose tobacco into a glass of water and peered into it. (His favorite cups were mass-produced clear ones that the local Tops supermarket used to package frozen shrimp, sauce included. Mad Bear scarfed down the shrimp and kept the cups, just the right shape, size, and depth for observing the movements of the tobacco.)
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 13
