The Girl without Eyes
One evening in the spring of 2006, I gave a lecture on Native American supernaturalism in a country library. One of the women attending left about halfway through. She was in the rainy parking lot when I came to my car. A forty-something woman, she had waited until the talk was over so that no one else might overhear our conversation. We talked across a car hood ten feet apart. As if afraid one of us had a contagious disease, she got no closer. She looked haunted. She started to talk, stopped, started, stopped. Then she started.
“Have you ever heard of something like the Feeding of the Dead?” I had, but I didn’t say much. I wanted to draw the story out. It was hard.
The woman looked and dressed upper-middle-class white. She said she had a bit of Native American blood. She had worked as a pharmacist on one of the New York reservations not far from the building of a former Indian school, a very haunted piece of ground. She had never felt comfortable in her building. She kept hearing strange, unexplained noises and soon saw apparitions. At first they were dark, shadowy, and small, like gremlins or little demons. Then they appeared in her home.
One night at closing time, she heard something unusual in the pharmacy she had thought was empty. It sounded like an agonized cough, as though someone straining to breathe had come in looking for help. She called out, then ran into the aisles. On a shelf out of sight of her counter sat a Native American girl. About thirteen, she was very dark-skinned, with a shock of unruly coal-black hair. She wore a high-collared, many-buttoned dress that could have been a Victorian-era school uniform. In place of eyes, though, she had only a viscous, slightly reflective darkness. It was as if her sockets were filled with oil. The apparition was so solid looking that the pharmacist thought the girl was real. It made no sound as the woman watched. After a firm second or two, the image blinked out of existence.
Almost every aspect of the pharmacist’s life took a downward turn after that. Even her sleep was haunted by nightmares. She would have been happy to believe her complaints were medical or psychological, but no doctors or counselors gave her the slightest help. This pharmacist was liked and respected by the reservation folk, and a sympathetic patient noticed her distress. Only then did she get the right form of medicine.
A couple of middle-aged male elders took an interest in her case. It took them months to get her right. They tried a number of remedies and cures she would not describe. What set the demons back for good was a ceremony she called the Feeding of the Dead. She wouldn’t talk about it, other than to say that it was “horrible.”
“I was told not to talk about this,” she said, looking ghostly herself in the mist. “They said that even talking about it might bring it back. I just wish I could understand.” I finished loading my books and lecture materials and gave her my card. I haven’t heard from her since.
The Buffalo Curse
By 1972, “the old Rockpile” on Buffalo’s east side had seen its last kickoff. War Memorial Stadium, stronghold of two-time AFL champs the Buffalo Bills, was to be abandoned in favor of a new stadium in a southern suburb. Work started on a broad country block three miles west of the village of Orchard Park. Not all was at peace.
It started in houses at the edge of the tract. Families became anxious, tense, and depressed. Pets got in on the act, shying away from spots in rooms and spaces in yards, even running away. Then there were outbreaks of poltergeist phenomena. Ghosts were sighted, inside and outside of homes. Families felt targeted, if not directly cursed. People blamed the budding stadium. They may have had reason.
Workers clearing the former farmland rediscovered the tiny 1820 graveyard of the Joseph Sheldon family. Abandoned in 1924, it was restored in the early 1970s. You can still see it—a fenced-in area in the north parking lot of the new stadium. Other graves were not so well treated.
One branch of Smokes Creek coils through the stadium plot. Along it had been much Native American habitation. Their burials were here, too. Some say the ground moaned when shovels pierced it. Word got out that this was the root of the psychic unrest.
Seneca Joyce Jamison concurred. “Things act up when our ancestors are disturbed.”
“That’s about what ought to start happening,’” said Michael when he heard the circumstances. “Little stuff going wrong around the house. People getting spooked, turning to drugs and stuff, families breaking up. A lot of people don’t realize that sometimes these things aren’t coincidental. Sometimes they do have causes.”
For whatever reason, peace returned. Graves may have been moved and offended spirits eased. To this day, we meet people who lived nearby during the construction phase, and more stories surface. (“Why did you wait so long to call me?” said a Buffalo priest upon entering a certain house.) Seneca storyteller DuWayne Bowen considered the stadium tunnels still very haunted.
It’s rumored in some quarters that Seneca elders from the Cattaraugus Reservation worked traditional rites of blessing. It’s been hard to verify. The Seneca we talked to remembered nothing about it. Neither did late Orchard Park historian John N. Printy (1919–2001). The Buffalo Bills’ historian Beverly McQuillan found no written records, nor did reporter Mike Vogel in decades of Buffalo News files.
There’s also talk that the curse just shifted and hangs now over all Buffalo sports, tantalizing teams and their supporters, keeping the word of promise to their ears, breaking it to their hopes, and snatching ultimate triumph when just within reach. It could go well beyond sports.
This region of sublime scenery, rich natural resources, and a treasury of classic architecture has seemed blighted for generations. Provided with a Masonic, symbolic street plan, Buffalo started out with visions of becoming a grand capital. Torched by the British in the War of 1812, its luck steadily improved after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825. Buffalo’s high-water mark could have been the 1901 Pan-American Exposition at which—shortly after a visit to the Devil’s Hole, a Seneca bad-medicine spot—President William McKinley was shot. The Great Depression was a short hop later, and the late-twentieth-century loss of manufacturing jobs was the coup de grace. Buffalo is due a break, and soon. But what launched the blight?
Some go back to the psychic fallout of the presidential assassination. Others turn to the steady progress of New York state into a tax-and-spend, government-centered economy. Some blame developer and power broker Robert Moses (1888–1981), who destroyed the Niagara by routing expressways like defensive barriers between the citizenry and their fixed assets, their waterfront, and their splendid Olmsted Parks. Others blame a downstate power base that sees New York harbor as a local resource but Niagara Falls power as a state one.
One explanation is persistent. At some time during the settler period, the story goes, the Seneca were challenged to a foot race by the whites of Buffalo. The Seneca were marvelous runners, but through subterfuge, the whites managed to win. The Seneca medicine people drew together as one, they say, and whistled up a mighty curse. According to the story, Buffalo would never win anything significant until this wrong was righted. Some say that the curse has expanded to include the fortunes of the whole region. Like its football team the Buffalo Bills and their four-in-a-row Super Bowl losses, Buffalo will be taunted like Tantalus: After long periods of humiliation, success will come near enough to smell and taste and ever be snatched away.
Maybe it’s not too late for a cure from the medicine people. We recommend Erie County folk give that a try. Then vote out of office every politician who does not work to lower taxes.
THE CURSE OF THE BONES
You can pick your own start date for this: either the ice ages, 2000 BCE, or 1997.
Western New York is the traditional home of the Seneca, largest nation of the Confederacy and the swinger of the biggest Native political bat. But many other Native nations once held the area, including Blackfoot, Eries, Neutrals, and the Iroquois’ rivals, the Algonquin. Even the truly ancient mound builders could have been here. All these people rest in western New York soil.
Since the 1990 passage of the NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), all land development in the United States has to stop when Native burials are discovered. Human remains and artifacts have to be identified and respectfully reinterred. No project is too big to be delayed, rerouted, or even blocked. Native American representatives have the final say dealing with the matter.
In the best cases, living descendants of the dead can be found to make decisions, and the process barely delays construction. When cultural affiliates can’t be found, substitutes have to step in, sometimes from nations whose ancestors were related to the ancient ones merely because they had shared the same continent. It can be a game of give and take in which every move is calculated. Sometimes it ends up offending everyone. Even the burials of ancient non–Native Americans, like Washington state’s theory-shattering Kennewick Man,*1 can be included in the repatriation process. In every case, though, the whites pick the Native Americans they listen to.
The Onondaga shelf, the east–west spine of Iroquois territory, can be porous or obsidian hard. The north–south Genesee cutting through it branches many a channel. All that running water and an ancient sea have left caves, tunnels, and minerals underground.
In 1885, some enterprising fellows sunk a shaft nine hundred feet down to a bed of rock salt. In just a century, the Retsof Salt Mine became the biggest in North America. Its ten square underground miles made it the size of Manhattan.
Then-operator Akzo-Nobel Salt gave up on it in 1994 when part of the mine collapsed and flooded. The state lost mining and trucking jobs, and Livingston County was short its second biggest taxpayer. In January 1997, American Rock Salt arrived to tap in from a different direction. It meant making a new three-mile spur connecting mine and railroad. The nation’s first new salt mine in forty years was a high profile, feel-good affair. Work commenced around the clock at Hampton Corners.
There were some environmental protests at first, largely ceremonial, but things changed when Native American burials were found. By 1997, the NAGPRA had so big a bite that even a bark was plenty to stop a salt mine.
Some burials were clearly those of Senecas during the time of the Europeans’ arrival. This is still Seneca country, and the state works with them all the time. But the ground also held folks from Blackfoot and other Algonquin-speaking nations who haven’t lived in the region since the time of the Crusades. They could have been sent to their graves in the first place by the Seneca. Finding representatives for them wasn’t going to be easy.
The new work area turned out to be a prehistoric power point: the site of at least one sacred earthwork, a village or two, the junction of ancient trails, and a multicultural burial ground dating back at least four thousand years. Trains, tracks, digging, and paving would destroy it all. This was an unwelcome new twist.
We know mound-building societies like the Hopewell and Adena only from burials, artifacts, and the massive earthworks that mystified the Senecas when they came to this valley. The Viper Mound, a Genesee riverside earthwork and possibly a Hopewellian style snake effigy, had already been paved over during the mid-1970s work on I-390. It is hard to identify the living ancestors of the Hopewell. Who rules on their remains? NAGPRA, we have a problem. The suits, of course, just wanted work to go on. Enter, according to the story, a certain prominent Seneca.
This gentleman has devoted his life to teaching the world about his ancestors. The government turns to him in many matters. Some of his decisions have been controversial. He looked the site over, did some of this and that, and gave the OK for work to resume.
The way some tell it, artifacts, remains, and even the GOK (God Only Knows) piles from the salt mines fell largely into his lap. With his OK, the bones, every last nub of them were, in theory, relocated to nearby portions of the property or elsewhere in the valley. The mine opened with only reasonable delays. Talk of backroom deals, political intrigue, and payola ran amok. White activists, alas, may have been shouting the loudest.
What happened to the bones and artifacts? Since a Native American handled them, it wasn’t of white concern. It was other Native Americans who asked the questions. There was grumbling about moving Algonquin remains to Seneca territory, even simply dumping them. Protests came in from many quarters after the reports of bulldozers piling up grave goods and even human bones.
Surely, some justice awaited this desecration. There was talk of curses and mine disasters. Suicide, death, substance abuse, madness, and ruin plagued local politicians who had been involved. Even passersby suffered. One local who took an artifact lost a leg in an accident. Another touched a piece of skull and found her mother dead at home. Mystery lights and altered animal forms were reported on nearby stretches of road. Auto accidents were common. It would be interesting to know what the late motorists saw before spinning out of control. The pattern sounded like an upstate King Tut’s curse.
One of our Native American friends is a woman of Blackfoot ancestry. An activist, she is also mystical, versed in traditional lore. She gets pretty riled when we come to the subject of someone who may have disposed of her ancestors’ remains. “He makes the deal, he takes the money, he does what with the pots and bones?” she said. “Do they go into his museum? Does he sell ’em? They aren’t his ancestors. They’re mine!”
After all we’ve heard about curses befalling whites who picked up bones or greased the skids for the political process, we’d expect far worse to befall a Native American who knew better. “How does he avoid the karma?” I asked.
“Oh, he has protection,” she said. “Every year he has a certain deal he has to make to keep himself out of the way.”
I was aware that I was getting only one side of the story. I called Ted Williams and caught him on one of his western New York forays. He met me at his beloved disc-golf course on another sunny afternoon. When I started in, he didn’t seem to have heard of the case. How could he not have? The matter of the mines had been making shock waves in local Native circles. Ted’s good friend Michael Bastine had been involved in some of the protests. I thought it might be another of his tests, drawing the student out to see what he thought he knew. But Ted had been down south most of the preceding year, so maybe the ignorance was sincere. I gave him a few of the outlines. “I hear there were curses,” I said, wrapping up. “I hear people got attacked because of their involvement.”
In what? he said with a bit of indignation. I gave him a few more details about the burials, the disposal, and the protests. I still felt like I was being tested.
Ted gave one of his checked laughs. “Seems like some of those protesters were from nations that don’t even have chiefs.” He said his last word with such exasperated stress that it rhymed with “sheaves.” “The mining people probably went to some reservations and couldn’t find anybody to talk to.” He had a point. The embassy of Austria is easier to find than that of the Olmec.
“You know, what everybody would like is that the chiefs decide, the representatives. But you can go out to some reservations, and there’s no government to be found. Or else there’s two of them, the spiritual authority and the political authority. Some reservations have representative government. Sometimes greed gets involved.”
He looked at me hard. “How would you get rid of those remains? Fella you’re talking about up in Rochester might have been the only person they could find willing to take it on. If he’s got a thick hide, he ought to just let the stuff rain off him. That’s what I’d do.”
He squinted off in the direction of the sun. “Doesn’t surprise me there might be some energy at those mines.”
I didn’t feel like I was at the bottom yet of this cycle of curse and countercurse. I went to Michael Bastine. At first he thought I was curious about the Seneca individual who had reburied the human remains. “He’s an OK guy,” he said. “I’ve been in the same sweat lodge with him a couple times. We don’t have any problems.”
“But people we know do have problems. What’s your take?
”
“He’s gotten himself the reputation as the type of Indian whites can do business with,” said Michael with a bit of a grin. “He’s made a few bad decisions.”
“Bad decisions?”
“There might have been a time or two that he got called in by his bosses, and they might have said to him, ‘You’re being a bit too Indian here to get this job done.’ I know what I’d have done if somebody had said that to me. I’d have said, ‘Well, that’s who you hired.’ But he didn’t say that, and he got himself caught between bad options.”
“Like some of those arrangements with the ancient remains?”
“Some of that. And so much more I can’t even talk about.”
“After all I’ve heard people say about curses,” I said, “I was wondering how this guy can escape them.”
“Well, there’s deals you can make,” said Mike with a knowing look.
After all the damage had been done, a prominent Onondaga elder visited the region. He gathered members of the Native community. “This is a battlefield as well as a burying ground,” he said of the area of the mines. “Ask permission if you have to pass through.”
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 21
