There was something different about the tobacco Mad Bear used. People who knew him believed that no tobacco he touched was ordinary, that every time he held any he was talking to it, reminding it of its sacred function, investing it with a sense of mission.
Often he had things figured out in the middle of a client’s statement and broke off for a cure. Sometimes he didn’t, and it was another toss of the leaves.
If the ailment was psychic, a ceremony burning a certain type of wood or herb often did the trick. If the complaint was physical, Mad Bear often prescribed a treatment involving local plants and substances. The Tuscarora hailed from the Carolinas, so there was a southeastern element to some of Mad Bear’s recipes. He often wrapped things up in the same visit. Many cures came in a remarkably short period of time.
Though he proved his fabled powers occasionally, seemingly on a whim, Mad Bear resisted enacting them when asked or challenged, and he never did performances. (“If you want to see a show, get a ticket for the circus,” he used to say to those who pressed him. “What we’re about is the message.”) He never let a third party sit in on one of his readings, either. Still, people were constantly passing through his home and his life, and there are witnesses to some remarkable things.
Mad Bear sent some people to other healers, usually because he could see that they wouldn’t follow his directions. “I could prescribe some treatment,” he might say. “But I see that you really like wine. I don’t think you’d stop what you do long enough to get better.” Or, “You eat a lot of greasy food. That won’t mix with my medicine, and it could even be worse for you. Maybe another healer can give you something.”
It was important to Mad Bear to succeed. If people were running around saying that he was a bust, it would compromise his ability to heal anyone. Some of his prescriptions were irrational, and they had to be followed to the letter. That was his public reasoning. Mike Bastine conjectured that just a touch of pride may have been involved. Mad Bear didn’t want any public flops.
Mad Bear often forgot the details of even his most electrifying readings. It frustrated Mike, who had been raised off the reservation. When he first started meeting with Mad Bear, he searched for a Western-style understanding. Time and again he tried to ask Mad Bear about old cases, reminding him of particulars. “Do you remember that reading? You can’t forget that one?” It was hard bringing Mad Bear to admit that he remembered.
This amnesia may well have been sincere. The healing work had to be an exhausting art demanding total immersion, and Mad Bear did so much of it. Once he said that he deliberately put old cases out of thought because he didn’t want them clouding up his mind and getting in the way of new ones. But one of the things about Mad Bear that Mike never really got was how he could let such marvelous experiences completely slip from his consciousness. Maybe they weren’t marvels to Mad Bear, to the medicine people.
Mad Bear’s home region of western New York is known as a cultural melting pot, and he had become a great favorite of its ethnic and immigrant communities. He had come into contact this way with many world traditions and had learned to be respectful of them all. He had also picked up a number of keepsakes, and his cabin had become a den of crazy objects and artifacts. One day when Mike Bastine was helping Mad Bear move, a ragged doll caught his attention. His mentor told him its strange history.
The Devil Doll
Sometime in the late 1970s, a family from a Caribbean island was having some difficulties that they sensed might have a supernatural root. The mother and father came to Mad Bear for a reading, which he commenced in his usual way. He looked in his glass of water and tobacco and studied it hard. “Somebody’s jealous of you,” he told the couple. “And I bet it’s got something to do with where you came from. Have you had any visitors recently?”
They had: people they knew back in the islands.
“Well, they brought a little surprise for you,” said Mad Bear. “Knowing what I do about those islands and the way people from there operate, I might guess they left a doll for you. It’s most likely somewhere where it’ll be close, probably somewhere in your house. These are the early stages, where nothing much is happening, but pretty soon it’s going to start interfering in your daily life. You have to go home and see if you can find it. Let me see if I can help you.”
Mad Bear looked harder into his glass and tried to visualize the doll’s location. As if looking off through his own walls, he spoke out loud about the images that were coming to him. He talked about walls, paintings, and furniture and seemed to be describing a room in a house.
“The object those people left behind will resonate,” Mad Bear explained to the couple. “It contains basically the same energy as a good thing. But it’s powerful, and people will put their own twist on it in order to interfere with people’s lives.”
Within days, they found the doll behind a dresser in a bedroom and brought it to Mad Bear. “Those people had it in their luggage,” he told the couple. “I’m not sure they were determined to hurt you, and they may have been in the process of deciding whether or not to leave it when something else happened. Or maybe it came out of the luggage by itself. These things have a tendency to work on their own.”
Mad Bear conducted a ceremony to reroute the force of the devil doll, and he held on to it after the ceremony was over.
The doll was a rough thing, a human effigy made mostly of the leaves of a plant or tree that was not native to the Great Lakes region. It was likely that its leaves were from a palm tree. The doll had been dyed in some places to make it look more like a person. Ribbons had been tied onto it to simulate clothes, and it had a bit of a headdress. Eyes and features had been drawn onto it, and symbols burned in. Mad Bear recognized the marks designed to make people suffer.
The doll didn’t, however, have needles stuck in it. This was no surprise to Mad Bear. “They don’t need the needles,” he told Mike. “That’s for tourists. This doll was designed to hold an energy, and that energy would drain people and create a discomfort that would just get worse. When they make the charms, they put the person’s name right into it. It knows who it’s supposed to act on.
“We all have days when we’re just not feeling up to things. If that lasts too long, you always have to get suspicious. It could be something other than just having a down day. If something lingers a while, you need to go talk to somebody. Geez, there’s not too many people left you can go to anymore.”
Medicated Goo
One afternoon in the 1950s, our late confidant Bill Bowen was helping two young friends work on a car in a garage along Buffalo Creek in Elma. One boy had an accident with the blowtorch that dealt a sickly wound to the back of his hand. The nearest adult was an old Seneca who lived within walking distance. The three of them rushed over, hoping he would call the hospital.
The old man came out, looked at the hand, then rummaged around his cabin and emerged with a small tin holding a homemade potion—a strange pale green goo. He spread a bit of this fibrous ointment all over the wound. It took the pain away instantly.
“Put some of that on there tomorrow,” said the old Seneca. “And the next day, and the next. Then bring back whatever’s left. You won’t need it after that.”
All of them were puzzled. A wound like that should have taken weeks to heal. But the old Seneca had the reputation of a healer. Overnight, the burn scabbed over and stopped oozing. By the second morning, the wound was closing at the edges. By the third, only a fine line remained.
When they brought the rest of the potion back, they tried to find out what was in it. The healer chuckled and said it was “just something I put together.” They tried a few more times to get it out of him, but he never said any more than that it was bits of things he’d found along the creek.
This green goo is a common form for herbal medicines to take. An Iroquois healer brought a tub of something like it to the hospital where the father of a confidant lay, suffering with cancer and given his last rites. The patient was told
to drink it in hourly doses until all of it was gone. His health took a quick turn for the better, and soon he was cancer-free. His doctors were astonished.
Mitten’s Mysterious Mixture
The remarkable Mohawk Richard Oakes was born in 1942 on the Akwesasne St. Regis Reservation way upstate in New York. Work on the St. Lawrence Seaway disrupted reservation life, and he hit the road at sixteen. He did stints as a skyscraper ironworker and ended up in college in San Francisco. One sunny afternoon in 1969, he dove into Frisco Bay, swam out to Alcatraz Island, and led a student-Native occupation that brought a lot of attention to Native American causes.
Charismatic and telegenic, Oakes was the spokesman at many high-profile events. He was also a scrapper. In 1970, he and some Native Americans had a bar brawl with a group of Samoans, one wielding a pool cue. A shot to the head sent Oakes into a month-long coma in which every muscle went into spasm. As his mind slept, his body labored against itself, endlessly. He was dying.
A Native American power trio came to the hospital demanding to treat Oakes: Mad Bear, Peter Mitten, and the influential Hopi Thomas Banyacya (1910–1999). The idea seemed crazy to the hospital doctors, but they gave in, probably because they thought Oakes was dead already. They watched, though, as Mitten prepared his potion in the hospital room, all the time chanting in Cayuga. They asked about everything he did. Mad Bear answered for him. “He won’t speak English during the medicine ceremony. You wouldn’t understand it, anyway.”
At the end, Mitten’s mixture looked like pond water or green Gatorade. The doctors gasped to see it wind up in Oakes’s IV tube and enter his ashen body. Soon, though, they noticed color return around his heart and spread slowly over his whole frame. Oakes relaxed so much that he sank into his mattress. Mitten spoke to the doctors, and Mad Bear translated. “He’s very tired. He will rest for two days and then come back to us.”
This was so. It’s only too bad Mitten’s mix couldn’t temper that Mohawk backbone and keep Oakes out of confrontations with armed men. He was shot dead in 1972.
Mitten’s Breath of Life
One day in the 1970s, a reservation boy was knocked from his bike by a car and apparently killed. He lay on the road until the white paramedics arrived. Mad Bear came out just as they were loading him into the ambulance. The mother pulled on him and cried, telling them to leave him, but the blanket was over his head. A voice rang out.
“Put him down!” It was Peter Mitten, coming unsteadily down the steps of his house. He was ill, weak, and in bed most of the time by then, but there was something in that voice of his. They set the cyclist back down.
The Cayuga healer bent over the boy, nose to nose, and put something in his mouth, something he must have had in his hand. Then he blew breath onto the boy’s face. “Open your eyes. Come back to us!” Nothing happened. “Come back, I told you! You come back here and open up those eyes.” The tender lids fluttered. “Open your eyes. Open them all the way, but don’t move until I tell you.”
The boy jerked awake and looked around him. His mother ran to him, but he didn’t know her, and Mad Bear kept her back. Wild and terrified, the boy tried to get up, but the two healers kept him down, talking to him calmly, making sure all the parts of his spiritual self were back in place for good. Only when he could talk and show sense in his eyes did they give him to the medics. The stunned whites had stood and watched. They told it all to the emergency room doctors.
Years later, Mad Bear talked about it to Doug Boyd. “Everybody knew those medics had found that kid dead. But nobody ever put that in writing. See, those things, they’re never reported, they’re just denied. And even when they’re observed and admitted, they just can’t be officially acknowledged. But I’ll tell you one thing we never discussed with anybody. One of those doctors needed help with his own personal situation and came to Peter Mitten and me confidentially. I’m still in touch with that doctor, although his problem is over.”
I give a lot of talks and tours in western New York. I’ve met several nurses who remember a Native American healer called to various Niagara Frontier hospitals for strange or hopeless cases. None remembered his name or nation, but it had to be Mad Bear.
The Cattail Cure
In his early twenties, Michael Bastine worked in a restaurant whose young waiters delivered their tickets to the cooks by sticking them onto an old-fashioned spikeand-wood device by the kitchen door. Often called a ticket spindle, this was basically a knitting needle sticking up like a flagpole out of a blocky base. It got to be a dramatic little game with them to see how many tickets they could slam at one time onto the giant thumbtack. The record may have been thirteen. As the stack of orders thickened, though, more and more torque was needed. In an attempt to break his own record, Michael reared up for a fearful slam. He made it, but the papers slid just a bit, and the big needle dug into the bone between the top joints of his thumb. It was a nasty, agonizing wound. Though this was early on in Michael’s acquaintance with Mad Bear, he decided to give the prominent healer a try.
The second he walked in the door, Mad Bear proposed a bout of chess, a game he was always mad to play. He wouldn’t listen to a word Michael said. They got through a diffident game or two, with Mike, in agony, barely moving the pieces. “Boy, you’re not yourself today,” said Mad Bear. “You’re lucky we don’t have money on this.”
Mike stormed for the door, bent on heading to the emergency room. “Oh, about that hand of yours. . . .” Mad Bear said. He gave careful directions about finding the right cattail, tracking its root under the muck, pulling it up just right, and peeling and cutting a few small pieces. Only an inch or so was needed. He told Michael how to prepare the root as a poultice and apply it to the injured digit.
Not more than a day or so later, the thumb was supple, painless, and infection-free. Mike was sure that conventional medicine would have had him splinted and stitched for weeks, with no certainty the wound would heal better.
The Okra Potion
Simple readings taught Mad Bear quite a bit about other people. Sitting by someone and looking into his cup with its tobacco gave him a window into private moments. Western New York has many long-settled ethnic communities, and through his readings Mad Bear came to know and appreciate their rich and varied folk cultures.
A German-American woman in her nineties came to see Mad Bear for a consultation that turned into a quick friendship. Mike Bastine was working around the house at the time and could hear the two of them laughing. At one point, Mad Bear looked up from his cup and confided to the woman a little secret about herself.
“When you make meatloaf, you always grab a bit of raw meat and eat a little before you bake it, don’t you?” Their eyes met. She nodded.
“You do that with everything else you bake, too, don’t you? Whether it’s batter, cookie dough. . . . It’s a little custom with you. No one sees you, you’ve done it all your life, but it’s your little private ritual between you and the things you make for the people you love. You really like that, too, don’t you—getting in a little bite before everyone else?” The two of them shared another laugh.
The woman had come for a simple reading with Mad Bear, but he spotted something else. She admitted that she had a bowel obstruction and was scheduled for surgery in two weeks.
Mad Bear gave her a recipe for something that might make her feel better. It was a spicy vegetarian stew whose main ingredients were okra and tomatoes. He told her to have a bit of it three times a day and to be sure to finish the pot. “Mike, you know the recipe,” he called to his student in the doorway. “Write it down for her on the way out.”
In a week or so, she felt completely better. At the insistence of her family, she went in for the operation, but the doctors scanned her beforehand and couldn’t find the obstruction. They sent her home without opening her up.
A Gift with a Return
Things have a way of “happening” for medicine people. In the 1990s, the Tuscarora healer Ted Williams spoke at a conference in Aus
tralia. Some VIPs—conspicuous latecomers to the event—were on hand, seemingly just to make the scene. After a couple of days, the social climate was getting to Ted. “I was afraid I might have to meet a bigwig,” he said.
He was also starting to worry that he would spend all his time in a city building and be back on the plane before he had gifts for his kids. He snuck outside the venue and visited with some Native Australians selling their wares. One of them displayed an expensive, beautiful boomerang to which Ted came back again and again, debating whether or not to buy it. A little while after he bought it, he saw Red Earth Woman, a fellow conference speaker, look at it so admiringly that he knew he had to give it to her. This was the Iroquois custom. The spirits told him to, anyway.
A few days later, Ted made a break and traveled to the countryside, where he got to know a family of Native Australians. They fell to comparing ancient songs and rituals, and one night after dinner, they showed each other a couple of dances by a big fire in the open bush. Ted’s hosts were fascinated by his Tuscarora moves, and they kept him at it a long time. When he left, they gave him a gift: a box with ten lovely boomerangs, each as wondrous as the one he’d given away. Surely, Spirit had a hand in this.
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 14
