Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  Tricks . . .

  Joe Anderson—the tobacco tycoon—may not think of himself as a medicine person, but enough of them run in his family. He may have a natural aptitude for the work.

  When Joe was a boy, he used to talk about wanting power and success. He dreamed of no less than the financial empire he has achieved. No one encouraged him, and there was no reason to think it was more than a kid mouthing off.

  When Joe and his friends were long-haired troublemakers in their early teens, Joe’s uncle Mad Bear invited a handful of them to his house where he was hosting medicine people from all over the Americas. Mad Bear introduced one scrawny, crippled, poncho-clad Mesoamerican as the most powerful of the bunch. Mad Bear insisted on each of the Tuscarora boys meeting each of these medicine men personally, shaking hands in the Western fashion. Maybe this was a form of reading.

  Toward the end of the meeting, the small shaman announced to them all that one of the boys would become great. He walked over and fingered Joe’s long hair. Everyone—including Joe—was astonished. Some even laughed.

  . . . and Trouble

  There was turmoil on several of the reservations in the 1970s. A number of stories from the period feature medicine people or their tricks coming between the Tuscarora and the state troopers. Joe Anderson recalls a night from his boyhood during a period when twenty troopers camped in a trailer park on the Tuscarora Reservation.

  The elders had been around that afternoon talking to all the families. “Tonight is one of those nights when all the children have to stay home and be quiet. Ceremonies will be held, asking for help.”

  At one point in the evening, the troopers pulled out in a virtual frenzy, cruisers tearing out, one after another. It was as if war had been declared somewhere not far off, and they had all been called back to base. Or as if something had spooked them.

  When things calmed down, the two sides started talking again as individuals, and word got out about how things had looked to the troopers. They had experienced such vivid phenomena—sourceless voices, ghostly pounding on the hoods of their vehicles—that they had fled en masse.

  A Bit of Ritual Magic

  There have been a couple of bouts of tension between the New York state troopers and the Tuscarora. By Joe Anderson’s own admission, in the mid-1970s he was a punk kid, getting into the booze too young and too hard. Walking home one night well into his cups, he decided to improvise a bit of ritual magic. Snatching up a stick, he jumped out into a dirt road in front of an approaching patrol car and pointed it at the driver like Harry Potter’s wand. He could well have been killed, but the vehicle sputtered to a halt as if the engine had died and the wheels had locked. The state trooper got out and pointed at him with an empty hand.

  “Cut it out!” he yelled. “I know what you’re doing! It’s not called for! We’re not your enemies. This is just what we have to do. And it’s not fair, do you hear? So cut it out!”

  Joe took off and watched from the house. Before long another state trooper showed up, got behind the stalled car, and pushed it out of sight.

  Maybe Joe has a bit more clout than he knows.

  One Girl’s Mojo

  Ted Williams remembers another time when troopers in riot gear were lined up outside a construction site, keeping a mass of Tuscarora folk away from a building to which they objected. A little girl came out of the throng, ran up to the troopers, and tossed a rock at them. A handful of them took off after her. She ran behind the lines of the Tuscarora into a small replica stockade: a bunch of tall poles stuck in the ground in a circle with only one entrance. The inside of it was open space, but invisible from outside.

  The troopers ran into this palisade and almost immediately came running back out. They ended up back in line with their buddies, talking animatedly. The girl came nonchalantly out a moment later and wandered back to the village.

  “I found out later what they saw,” Ted told us. “It was a bunch of braves, warriors, with their guns drawn, surrounding that girl. And that’s why they took off running.”

  Ted Williams chuckled when he recalled it. “That girl was alone in there. And everybody knows it.”

  WEAPONS OF FRIENDSHIP

  Over the years, Mad Bear Anderson had gotten himself a reputation as somebody nobody should mess with. It was as if a sense of fate or karma worked on those who tried to attack him.

  There was the night a fellow Native American tried to shoot him, firing drive-by volleys at the famous fortified cabin. Those in the know have the feeling that no bullets would have hit Mad Bear, even if the structure was not so materially sturdy. It was as if Mad Bear’s own orenda was too much to overcome. The gunman ended up in a ditch, badly hurt.

  Mad Bear’s style of personal defense seems so advanced and Zen-like that it’s off the chart. Whereas the most refined Asian techniques defend against forceful violence with some echo of the same violence, Mad Bear seemed simply to defuse the aggression. “He doesn’t put anything back on anyone. He just doesn’t receive it,” someone told Mike Bastine about his techniques.

  There was the council at which an enraged Native American came at Mad Bear with a knife, drawing and charging too fast for any to intercede. Mad Bear opened his arms wide as if welcoming a long-lost friend. The would-be assassin walked into Mad Bear’s embrace like a mother surprised in her kitchen by a returning college kid. The knife edge slapped absently along Mad Bear’s back, and the attacker returned to his seat, blinking and dumbfounded.

  “Don’t try that on your own,” said Mad Bear to his friends out of the side of his mouth. “Took me years to work that one out.”

  HOUSE CLEARINGS

  The Druids of Europe made a code language out of plants and animals. Every tree in the forest had a medical or ceremonial function, as well as a symbolic meaning. It was like that with the Native Americans of the Northeast Woodlands.

  People were always calling Mad Bear to quell restless influences in their homes. He often used cedar for this, heating cast-iron frying pans, burning the shavings, and touring room to room with the fragrant smoke.

  Mad Bear never started a smudging ceremony if children or pets were in the house. They were especially vulnerable to spiritual influences. But once a ceremony started, he could get so focused on the moment that he might overlook other details.

  Whenever you cleanse a house, you’re supposed to leave a door or window open just a crack, preferably higher up. This gives the unwanted presences a way to get out. An open window or two doesn’t hurt, either. You want them to leave, don’t you? Once when Mad Bear was smudging a house in South Buffalo, he forgot to do this. His progress through the house—and the rising heat and smoke—drove the energy upstairs. As he completed his purifying tour of the second floor, everyone heard a crack above them. They followed the smoke to the attic and found a window blown out from the inside with the smoke wafting out through it. Whatever Mad Bear was driving out left with a frenzy that surprised even him.

  Mad Bear’s time and energy were always stretched. When a problem seemed basic, he deputized another healer, usually someone he’d trained.

  The Smoke Is Always Different

  In the early 1980s, a family of Canadian Mohawks living in Buffalo asked Mad Bear for help with some trouble in their home. Their house was right across the street from the campus of D’Youville College of Nursing on the city’s west side. This section of the city near the Niagara River was the scene of fighting in the War of 1812 and an earlier Native American settlement.

  Many sites in the region, including various college buildings, are haunted. White families could have lived in this same house, known the same troubles, failed to sense the cause, and either moved or stayed and suffered without knowing why. Native Americans tend to be very sensitive to psychic influences.

  Mad Bear sent Mike Bastine to run the ceremony. “Just be sure you have them call you and tell you what they see when you leave,” he cautioned. “It’s one of the most important parts of the process.”

&
nbsp; Mike went to the house in question and did a thorough smudging. It seemed a basic operation, and he left with the smoke still in the air of the house. The people called him a few hours later. “You’ll never guess what happened. After you left, the smoke hovered around for a while and took the shape of a funnel cloud, like a tornado or something. When we climbed the stairs, we could see it on the second floor. Then it went straight up through the ceiling and vanished.”

  “Can’t say I can explain that for you,” said Mike. “Maybe the best question to ask is about your gut feeling. Were you scared or antsy or nervous?”

  “Not at all,” said the woman. “It was beautiful.”

  “Then I think your problem is solved,” said Mike.

  Mad Bear was impressed when he heard the story. “That smoke is always different. This time it must have surrounded the spirits like a tornado and took them right up and out of the house. Boy, that’s the first time I ever heard of it doing that, though.”

  The Test of a Healer

  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were a lot of healers in the Niagara region, who, as Mike Bastine puts it, “were real good readers.” Mad Bear always claimed that his own tutor Peter Mitten was greater than he was. But too many others were in business.

  “A lot of people tell you they can read,” says Mike Bastine. “But a lot of them aren’t very good. You can usually tell right away if you got one of those. But so many people can’t.”

  As Mad Bear neared the end of his days, he started to wonder who might be left to carry on his tradition. On Six Nations Reservation in Brantford, Ontario, lived a medicine woman with a mighty reputation. Her name may have been Daisy Thomas. She seemed sure to last beyond him, and Mad Bear wanted to know how good she really was before recommending her to his patients. The trouble is that he couldn’t do the test himself. Like medieval wizard Michael Scot and the Witch of Fauldshope, they didn’t get along.

  Also like the legendary Scot, Mad Bear sent a deputy to see if his rival was as good as advertised. He gave Mike Bastine a made-up ailment and told him how to talk about it. He cautioned Mike never to mention his own name or let on that the two were friends. “That just wouldn’t be good,” he said. “Not good at all.”

  Mike went up to Brantford, told Daisy his problem, and listened. Then he relayed to Mad Bear what she’d recommended: the herbs, the gathering, the processing, the recipe.

  “Well, she done ya right,” said Mad Bear. “The old girl’s still doing a good job. Good to think there’s a few people around here that’ll know what they’re doing when I’m gone.”

  The Viking in the Sky

  To some Native American civilizations like the Hopi and Maya, history was a process of repeating cycles. Prevalent in the oral tradition of the late twentieth century and thriving into the twenty-first is the notion of “earth changes,” as though some global cataclysm may be at hand, affecting the environment, the world economy, and social conditions. It may be purifying, it may be disastrous, it may be an upheaval, and it may be a coming together of consciousness. The only thing anyone agrees on is that it should be transformative.

  One night in the early 1980s, Joe Anderson gazed up into the night sky and saw a formation he had never noticed before. He got the firm image of an outline in the stars, a craggy, bearded human profile and a horned helmet he described as a Viking. He found himself so impressed that he looked up his mystical uncle Mad Bear and told him about the experience.

  At first nothing rang a bell, but Joe Anderson pressed on, even drawing something on a whiteboard that could have been such an outline. “Bear, what does that mean?”

  Mad Bear looked at the drawing for a minute and asked about the part of the sky in which Joe had seen the star cluster. In a few seconds, something registered. “Wow, it’s farther along now than I thought,” he said. “When that figure’s done, it’s the next purification for the world.”

  Swiftie at Yaddo

  In some circles it’s thought that most medicine people have psychic powers that they never use for show. A display of prophecy and spirit-talking like those of today’s TV mediums is presumed child’s play to many of them.

  Abenaki author Joe Bruchac’s late 1990s circle of friends included Swift Eagle, a seventy-year-old southwestern Native American everybody just called Swiftie. To some, he seemed a lighthearted soul. Others sensed that Swiftie was an elder who may have been trained in Pueblo and Apache spirituality. Most Native North Americans tip their hats to the Southwest as the source of the continent’s oldest traditions.

  One afternoon, Joe, Swift Eagle, and other friends were visiting Linda Hogan and Lewis Elder, Native authors in residence at Yaddo, the writers’ retreat just east of the village of Saratoga Springs, New York. It was Swiftie’s first visit to the former Trask estate. He marveled at the mansion, the grounds, the setup, and the people. As others talked, the bemused Swiftie went on his own little tour.

  After an hour had passed, someone wondered about him, and the group set out in search of him. They found Swiftie by one of the lakes in rapt conversation with a woman, pointing to spots in the trees, the creeks, the lakes, and the mansion itself. The guest, a newcomer to Yaddo, had mistaken him for one of the old-timers and asked him about the spirits of the place. As naturally as discussing the weather of the past week, Swiftie started walking her around, telling her the history of certain spots according to the spirit personalities he encountered. As his friends came up, he was just finishing a tale about the pair of invisible women he detected.

  Joe Bruchac recalled author David Pitkin’s accounts of Yaddo and suspected that Swiftie had discovered two of its most commonly reported haunters, both twentieth-century women. Joe has learned to expect the miraculous among Native elders, but this was still remarkable. Everyone looked at Swiftie with a new regard.

  Ted’s Dream Healing

  Twice a year in April and October, Native elders lead a conference at a camp in Jackson, Ohio. Ted Williams and Mike Bastine were the speakers in April 2005. My then domestic partner and I had spent a couple weeks in the Carolinas. We timed our return trip to western New York to catch Mike and Ted in action. We drove all one Friday from North Carolina and arrived in early evening. While she took our scrappy, forty-pound polar bear of a dog for a long walk on the grounds, I sought out the two stars and found them tucking into a potluck buffet.

  Mike and Ted sat opposite each other at the end of a cafeteria table. Nearby diners craned their necks to catch their conversation. A seat next to Ted had been respectfully left vacant. He motioned to it when I greeted him, and I took it.

  I was surprised at how much private talk I was able to have with them both in this public setting. Ted told me some wonderful stories, such as the one about Bluedog, and he told me tales about the False Faces and the Fairy Tree. But this visit was just a greeting. My friend and I had to get to nearby Chillicothe and find an inn that would take us and our quirky cub.

  That night I had a terrible dream. My mother had fallen out of her hospital bed, and I had to drive over and help the nurses pick her up. As I was starting to lift her the nurses suddenly disappeared. Her rag-doll body and the rails of the bed made the task impossible. I lifted limb and torso, but her core weight shifted like sand in a sack. A shoulder went over, a hip came back down. I was so busy trying to do it all so gently that I failed to notice, at first, that she had taken on the hide and tawny hair of a big cat, a lion or puma. She was still limp and vulnerable in her new shape, though, and trapped within her declining mind. She chuckled impishly at everything as though it were all funny. Shocked, repelled, terrified, I kept to my task with exquisite care. It was endless.

  I woke with a start and sat straight up in the bed.

  Like everyone, I’ve had the occasional nightmare. Most often I conjure a weapon and strike back at whatever the menace is, or I shape-shift and become the bigger predator. My dream mind is good at that. Once I took on a werewolf by becoming one. Another time I launched bolts from my eyes at
a T-Rex like Cyclops the X-man.

  I’ve never had a dream whose affect on me was as creepy as that one. It touched every nerve in my body. I had no idea why I had had it then. I couldn’t track its occurrence to anything that had happened that day.

  My mother’s decline had affected me. I was at her side as she passed over. But many people go through much worse, and she had been gone for two years.

  Where do these dreams come from? I think some of them are backdated flowerings of old incidents, eruptions of things that have been brewing in the mind for years. Maybe these turmoils seethe in us every night, and only once in a while project themselves into dreams that we remember. The effect of this one was awful. I said nothing about it to my companion.