She did. “It looked like a little old man.”
They turned and came back. Their headlights showed it to be a great blue heron, as calm as a mailbox and standing perilously at the edge of the road. These rare, inspiring birds dominate the scene where they appear. You feel them when you peer down those long, wide creeks. You are drawn to look at them no matter how still they are. They keep quietness about them; they hate the commotion of machines and highways. Michael had never seen a heron do as this. It would be killed if it stood where it was.
He got out and came close to the graceful bird. He stepped into its animal gaze and spoke. “You can’t stay here,” he said. “You have to go somewhere else.”
The bird was unaffected. Michael appealed to it. “You can’t stay that close to the highway. The cars don’t care about you. They’ll run over you, they’ll kill you.” The bird just stared. Only when he tried to shoo it, coming a bit closer and making sweeping gestures with his arms, did it react. It flew up and landed, assuming an identical position on the other side of the road.
Michael crossed the road. “This is no time for fun and games,” he said. “I got whatever message you have to give me. I may not understand it till later, but now you have to let us help you. You don’t belong here any more. You have to go to a place you do belong.” The bird processed this in its own way, then flapped its wings and took off above the man-made glow of the street. The two humans followed it with their eyes into the deep turquoise of the summer twilight. Within their sight was a farm with a spotlight over a pond. The bird landed by the sheeny waterside, and Michael smiled. “Better fishing there, anyway,” he thought.
When Mike and Pam reached their home, an hour-old message was on the machine. Leon Shenandoah, chief of chiefs of the Longhouse folk, had crossed over. He wore the feather of the heron in the next world.
The Powerful Dream
In 2001, Michael had another of his power dreams, and this one involved Leon Shenandoah. The visual effect reminded him of a 1960s TV show.
Some of us may recall The Wild, Wild West, sort of a cowboy James Bond show. One of its trademark effects was the way each ten-minute segment ended. Live images of interacting characters froze—with appropriate music—into cartoonish stills, always at climactic moments and just before commercial breaks. The scenes did so in Mike’s dream. But this dream was about ancient Iroquois ceremonies, and the antique freeze-frames fell at the close of iconic rites. They were clearly meant to be teachable moments.
In his dream, Michael looked into darkness as if through an old-time theater or viewing device. He saw lit scenes of Native American people at dances and chants. During the live parts of the dream, a voice narrated, explaining what Michael was supposed to learn from what he was watching. It was a familiar voice, clearly iconic. It was Leon Shenandoah, majestic and mighty from his seasoning in the other world.
At the end of each scene, the active image froze into stillness like the commercial breaks of the old-time TV show, and Leon’s voice said urgently, “You got that? You got that?” Before Michael could answer, the next teaching scene started, and the voice went formal again. His dream mind tried so hard to take it all in. He knew what an honor this dream was and how precious these ceremonies were. He marveled; he cried in his sleep.
At the last, Leon’s voice came in, addressing Michael alone. “Don’t ever forget those ceremonies. There’s a time to come when you won’t have to see them done anymore, when others can take over for you. But you have to work until then. Don’t ever forget them.”
The feeling hit him deeply. When Michael woke up, this dream was as powerful as any he had ever had. It was one more confirmation of the course he had taken in the world, possibly why he would consent to help this book be written.
THE LAND OF THE ELDERS
Many Native American societies believe that some dreams are messages from the spirit realm. Often when an old-time Iroquois or Algonquin had a dream that felt exceptional, he or she consulted the medicine people in search of an explanation. Some dreams were so strong and direct that they had to be obeyed. Some were so impactful that the whole community had to be enlisted in a ceremony made to re-enact them and “close them out.”
A Dream Story
In 2005, Michael had a dream that he calls “really interesting.” It opened with him walking in a natural environment that became a redwood forest like those of California. He looked up and realized with a sense of awe that he couldn’t see the tops of the trees.
He started to explore the forest. Before long, he sensed that things other than trees were above him. He reached overhead, felt something soft and furry, and looked up to find the belly of a deer, big enough to loom like an arch. Reaching up to its snowy underside was like touching the lintel of a doorframe.
There were other animals, tame and trusting as the trees, and proportionally as big. There were turkeys whose bellies he could barely touch. They walked over him like he was a low bush. He had been among them for minutes. Why had he not noticed them before? It was as though the awareness of them faded in, as if they were only visible from well within the forest. They had been blurry forms at first. It was as if the ability to see them was something that had to be learned.
And they were talking! They were all conversing in a language some part of his mind understood. They savored the play of light through the leaves; they joked about the silly squirrels, the forest children. The squirrels joked back and scampered off to their endless play. The animals’ language was basic and effortless to understand. The meanings of their calls was like a childhood memory so commonplace that he had never bothered to bring it into focus. Why did he have to come to a dream to learn that he should not just hear the animals but listen to them? This was the most comforting place he had ever been. He wanted to be sure to find it again. A thought came to his dream mind: “Get the name of this place.” He kept walking, hoping to find someone to talk to.
Soon he sensed a little fire. He heard the crackle and saw a bit of smoke. He came to a clearing and found a little old Native American man tending a fire with a stick. He gave it a prod just as Michael’s dream self entered. They made eye contact, and the fire keeper nodded. As if already sensing that he was in the dream and fearing that he might wake, Michael said to himself, “I have to ask him the name of this place.”
He watched awhile, admiring the man’s contentment with his trust, sensing that he knew the question in Michael’s mind. At last, he said, “What do you call this place?”
“You know,” the little man said, with a little smile.
I hate dreams like this, Mike said to himself even as the dream went on. “I did know it, but I couldn’t come up with the words,” he concedes. “It was like that language of the animals.” But the effort of bringing it into focus would wake him up. He had to be told. He had to hear it.
“Look, I want to come back here someday,” he told the fire keeper. “If I don’t know the name of it, I can’t ask directions.”
The little man just smiled as if this was some formality in a game he was used to. “This is the Land of the Elders,” he said, giving the fire another poke.
Of course, Michael started to think. That would figure. It was all so big, and the animals were talking. They had all crossed over and become elders. Elder trees, elder deer, elder turkeys. Then it was over.
For years, Michael couldn’t tell anyone about that dream, because he choked up trying to get the words out. It was that powerful. It’s only been in the last year or two that he can make it through the story.
“You have no idea what it’s like on the other side,” he said to me. I wish I could write that look in his eyes. “You have no idea what’s coming.”
Your Buddy Was Here
When Mad Bear was in the hospital, Mike got a call from one of the other guys who helped look after him. “You better go see Mad Bear. He’s in pretty bad shape.”
When Michael reached his side, the old shaman was about to have surgery for
a bleeding ulcer. He had something urgent on his mind that he kept trying to say through the sedation. He could only get a word out: “Call!”
“Call who, Bear?” said Mike. “Who?” He had to shout in Mad Bear’s ear to get anything through. The answer was never different, a mumble and a trailing off after, “Call. . . .”
Mad Bear made it through the surgery, and the operation seemed to be a success. His heart, though, wasn’t strong enough to pull him out of the sedation. It was the anesthesia that killed him. He passed on December 20, 1985.
Michael went in to pick up Mad Bear’s clothing, and Mad Bear’s brother made the funeral arrangements. It was a difficult couple of days, pondering the last word Michael heard from his famous tutor. It’s never been clear to him what this might have been about.
Some time in the depth of the night of December 23, Michael woke out of a sound sleep. Something was in the room with him. He sat up, looked toward the door, and saw in the ambience of a streetlight a full-size, lifelike image of Mad Bear at the doorway. His arms were folded, and he leaned on the frame wearing a jaunty smile. It seemed a younger form, like the fifty-something Mad Bear he had first met. It lasted a good long time for a ghost, five or ten seconds. “I sat straight up in bed,” Michael said. “It was incredible.” He fell back to sleep, pondering it.
About ten the next morning, a call came in from the Cherokee John Pope (1920?–1997), a friend and colleague better known as Bob Dylan’s crony, the famous Rolling Thunder. “Your buddy was here last night,” was how he started.
“He was here, too,” said Mike. “I could see him standing right there. I guess he was making the rounds.”
RT, as they called him, got a real big kick out of that.
The Clipboard Dream
When Michael first visited Mad Bear, he heard so much of value spilling out that he started bringing a little pad with him and writing in it every few minutes. Mad Bear couldn’t have failed to notice, but it was the fourth or fifth such visit before he leaned over and looked at Mike. “What do you keep writing in those pads?”
“I’m hearing a lot of great stuff,” said Mike. “I like to write down what’s really important.”
“Is there something wrong with your brain?” said Mad Bear.
“I don’t think so,” said Mike.
“Then why don’t you use it? What do you think is going to happen if you lose that pad?” After that, Michael learned to rely on his mind and his memory. He has such a strong recollection of so much that his old tutor said to him that it would take a dozen books to get it all out. It’s also a little disorganized. More comes out every time I talk to him. So fixed in him was this concept of focused listening that it might have affected his unconscious. Maybe it’s time to let the lesson go.
One night in the spring of 1995, Mike had a series of strong dreams. Every hour, the presence of Mad Bear came to him, a ghost in a dream. Every time Mad Bear held a clipboard out to him and urged him to take it. He remembered the old lesson, even in his dream mind, and, as if this was a test, kept putting it off. All night the sequence went on.
“I keep kicking myself over that,” he says today. “He was trying to tell me something. I might have just had that one chance, and I think I let him down.”
He blinked with real feeling. “He won’t keep coming to me like that. As there’s constraints to being in the physical world, there’s constraints to being in the spirit. He’ll have to find somebody else to give it to. I just wish I could figure out what that meant.”
“He told you to put away the writing pad before,” I said to him one night as we conferred about this book. “Now he’s trying to get you to take one up. Maybe that’s what we’re doing here. Looks to me like you heard him.”
THE SPIRIT CHOIRS
We judge from their stories that the psyche had several components for the Iroquois. A ghost would be only one of them. Some form might even journey the earth in animal shape, undoubtedly the clan totem of the recently deceased. Then there’s the everlasting presence, the seat of reason and personality, that, after some process or another, dwells with the higher spirits. Whatever reaches back to loved ones now and again with a message and maybe even an appearance would probably be a manifestation of this.
Could there even have been another aspect of the being, a nature soul, one that, at times, comes back to the places it knew in life? If so, it’s most often on one of those shy twilights, when people relax in their yards or stroll the tree line. If so, this part of the soul tenants a twilight state in which it thinks and feels as an essence and responds to the rhythms and scenes of nature, in which it chimes with the chants of the ancestors, like Yeats’ “lasting, unwearied Voices” from some realm in which nature and human poetry are one.
The Allegany Seneca may think so. On those special eves, the elders among them, so often the grandmothers, notice them and guide others to listen, maybe even to hear.
“As a child,” recalled Duce Bowen, “it was a most impressive thing to sit down on those old porches. A grandmother would say, ‘Be quiet, because so-and-so is singing.’ And off in the dark, you’d hear a person who had been dead for ten years.”
You may not get a look at them. They may not be ghosts. They may not be full spirits. They may be only feelings, expressed as sounds that at first you mistake for natural dusk noises—breeze, leaves, birds—conspiring with light, congealing like liquid to make a rhythm that at first seems nothing. Listen long enough, and then you hear. Some nights they come clearer—faint, half-melodic tones, even voices, chanting the ancient songs. You may spot the voice of someone you knew. To those reservation communities where their ancestors lived, where descendants dwell, they come back.
These voices we ought to be hearing, everywhere in New York. How many of us do?
Think about life and consciousness today. How many Americans live where their elders lived or near any place they might return? How many live anywhere quiet enough to hear deeper than the sounds of the living? The highway roar, the static hum. How far into the woods do we have to go? When we do, how many sit still enough? How many would listen, if they did? What have we traded for the ability to hear? What songs would your ancestors be singing?
“Every night when I burn tobacco,” says Michael Bastine, “I listen for the elders. I give thanks that I have spent time with these elements, these living people, these ancestors who bring such fullness and understanding to this life. There’s no time for fighting about so many of the things we fight about in this world.”
Even after they have left the world, we have our debts to the elders. One of them is to preserve their teachings. This is also part of our debt to those who will come after us, to hold those teachings so they will not be lost for them.
The Iroquois have not lost their elders’ songs, but for too long they have not been heard outside their figurative Longhouse. Maybe the gift of them is greatest to those who can no longer hear their own ancestors, who may not even think to listen for them. The teachings of these People of the Longhouse, of all indigenous elders, can lead everyone to see the richness of the world, if not look into the world beyond it—even those whose elders’ songs are lost. This is something Michael and I will always believe.
Footnote
*1. So named for his discovery near Kennewick, Washington, “Kennewick Man” may be a ten-thousand-year-old native Japanese.
Bibliography
Historic information about the regions of this book came from just about every old county history available in our target area of New York state. Insights and information more specific to our stories and subjects came from the following books and periodicals.
Abrams, George H. The Seneca People. Phoenix, Ariz.: Indian Tribal Series, 1976.
Anderson, Mildred Lee Hills. Genesee Echoes, the Upper Gorge and Falls Area from the Days of the Pioneers. Castile, N.Y.: F. A. Owen Publishing Co., 1956.
Beahan, Larry. Allegany Hellbender Tales. Snyder, N.Y.: Coyote Publishing of Western New York
, 2003.
Beauchamp, William Martin. Iroquois Folklore: Gathered from the Six Nations of New York. Syracuse, N.Y.: Dehler Press, 1922.
______. A History of the New York Iroquois, Now Commonly Called the Six Nations. New York State Museum Bulletin 78, Archeology 9. University of the State of New York, State Education Department, 1905.
Bergland, Renee. The National Uncanny. Hanover, N.H.: The University Press of New England, 2000.
Birdsall, Ralph. The Story of Cooperstown. Cooperstown, N. Y.: Arthur H. Crist, 1917.
Blackman, W. Haden. The Field Guide to North American Hauntings. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 1998.
Blanchard, David. “Who or What’s a Witch? Iroquois Persons of Power.” American Indian Quarterly. University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
Bolton, Jonathan, and Claire Wilson. Joseph Brant, Mohawk Chief. New York: Chelsea House, 1992.
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