Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  The young father reported potentially psychic activity that included sounds, moving objects, and shadows. He described feelings that ranged from sudden, quick panics in the household’s residents to an atmospheric heaviness detected by visitors and guests. He was afraid things would escalate and that his children might be targeted.

  The situation was causing earthly conflicts, too. The reservation side of the young woman’s family was not convinced that she deserved the land. No one was persuaded by her explanations of how some of her grandfather’s belongings ended up with her. This sort of thing is not unique to reservation families.

  In his last conversation with the family, Reverend Shaw heard banging in the background loud enough to make him ask about it. The young father told him that the couple’s kids were talking to whatever was in the house, and that it was responding, as it often did, with clamor.

  Reverend Shaw knows plenty about Iroquois tradition. He visited the family and asked detailed questions. He focused on the False Faces. No one remembered when they had last been honored with ceremonies.

  Alarmingly, between his visits, one of the valuable masks had disappeared. Even to the uninitiated, this doesn’t sound like the work of an ordinary thief. Why take only one? A reservation healer told the couple that their problems would continue until the missing mask was found or the others returned.

  While deciding what to do, Reverend Shaw started to suffer himself, at first with flu-like symptoms then a depression that he attributed to the coming winter. He and his wife experienced psychic activity in their house: whispers, footsteps, and dragging sounds. Guests saw shadow people. It was as if the reservation matter had followed him home.

  The reverend had studied a lot of cases. This had never happened before. He called for help.

  Buffalo Bishop James Lagona is an expert on cross-cultural spirituality. Bishop Lagona felt that there was a human “sender” somewhere, possibly one of the medicine people, shooting energy at the house, which had in turn attached itself to Reverend Shaw. Michael Bastine agreed about the concept of the sender, undoubtedly a power person, but sensed that the False Faces were adding energy to the mix. They were acting on the people in the home. Michael brought in an Onondaga member of the False Face Society at about the time the family was willing to call a truce. Reverend Shaw closed the book on the matter. Presumably the masks are where they belong, with the culture-keepers of one of the Iroquois nations.

  Things were soon at peace in the reverend’s home, and he felt more like himself. He later learned through some back channels that a power person, “a specialist,” from the Allegany Reservation may have been recruited to send energy into this situation to ensure an outcome that would be favorable to the Cattaraugus Seneca. This force was going to be incrementally toxic to anyone who got in its way. He also reached the conclusion I did: If you are a non–Native American occultist called to help with a Native American case, feel as free as you like to be flattered. More than that, though, be on guard, especially when one of these masks may be involved.

  The Song of the Faces

  In the past, every Iroquois settlement of even moderate size would have had visits from a local group of False Faces. While moving to, from, and during a healing service, the False Faces would have made a number of distinctive sounds. Magnified and distorted through their masks, their snorts at the thresholds of sufferers’ homes sounded like the demon bear. Other trademarks—such as their distant, high-pitched, two-toned calls—were surreal like those of marsh birds. These cries could be signals to members of the Society, calling them to gather. Others might have alerted the village that the False Faces were on their way. They could have been warnings to the workers in black magic and to the bearers of pestilence.

  These healers had holy areas and vision sites to which they convened from far parts for their mysterious training. There are caves, springs, hollows, and valleys around the state where the calls of the False Faces have resounded for a thousand years. The names of other gathering places have been lost, but it’s believed that some influence of the Faces still shows itself in the areas that were special to them, sometimes with a living message.

  In 1995, Ted Williams was visiting his boyhood home on the Tuscarora Reservation. Nearby was a grove he remembered well. Every time he walked through this place as a boy, something had made him hear and envision the False Faces. The effect was strong when he came back as a grown man. As if there were an eternal procession taking place in some other realm, the Faces and their rites flickered into his awareness—sometimes close, sometimes dimly.

  Knowing as he did the imprint these mighty healers can leave on anything they touch, he thought this grove might have been one of their ancient sacred meeting spots. As a False Face healer himself and a deep sensitive, he ought to have known. He never told this to anyone.

  A party held at Ted’s former home included Native Americans who lived off the reservation and worked “white” jobs. The guests represented all attitudes toward the spiritual and traditional heritage of their people. A group of them had gone for a walk in the grove that had impressed Ted, and had heard such eerie calls that they ran back completely spooked. Ted was on the porch as they came in. He drew the story out of them when they caught their breath.

  Some imitated the cries they’d heard, and Ted recognized it as one of the traditional calls of the False Face healers. But not all had heard the same sounds. He asked each of them in more detail about their perceptions of the calls in the wood.

  Some identified one or two forceful voices, natural-sounding calls that may have been made by human jokers having a game with them. Others heard a variety of voices in various parts of the wood. To the rest, the scene was textured with similar sounds made at different volumes and pitches and coming from all around them.

  Not knowing how to make sense of the mystery, Ted next asked them about their levels of belief in Native American spiritual practice. He asked them to rank their faith on a scale and made careful note of who said what.

  He found that those with little belief were the ones who had heard only a pair of callers whose voices sounded natural. Those who believed at the middle level heard many tones, volumes, and sounds. To the last, the group with the greatest belief, the whole wood seemed alive with synesthetic mystery and hidden, ancestral calls. For them, the grove was as rich with invisible, supernatural chanters as an August evening is filled with the earthly chirps and clicks of squirrels or peepers.

  In seconds, the answer came to him. “This is good,” he told all his guests. “The Faces have just given you a lesson. That’s the way it will be with the teachings of your ancestors. That’s the way it will be with the good of the world. The more belief you have in it, the more of it you’ll see and receive. Don’t forget that the rest of your lives.”

  6

  Supernatural War

  When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful, disintegrative influence upon the white psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts. . . . One day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for . . . There are terrible spirits, ghosts, in the air of America.

  D. H. LAWRENCE, FROM STUDIES IN AMERICAN CLASSICAL LITERATURE

  DIRECTED CURSES

  As we’ve seen, the old-timers among the upstate Iroquois believed in the effect of curses. The curses and countercurses we have seen discussed in earlier chapters have generally been due to the actions of living power people, and directed against other living individuals with direct, specific, and usually short-term goals. There seem to be other types.

  In fact, it seems clear from the reports we hear that the collective orenda of a nation or a site could be involved in contemporary psychic complaints. It could be aimed at anyone on one side or another of a dispute. It could affect anyone living or anyone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Its energy could come home to roost with those who mishandled th
e sites, bones, or artifacts of even the ancient dead.

  This is a chapter that is not about supernatural duels, but supernatural war. It is about collective attacks, ones that can come with the force of whole nations, the dead, or even, seemingly, the land itself; they may not be exclusively things of the past. Why would the psychic force of an Iroquois clan or nation get agitated enough to lash out? The impulse might seem counterintuitive to many mainstream Americans: it often has to do with politics.

  Many Americans see things in black and white when it comes to politics. Those who share their viewpoints appear hip and sinless, while those who don’t look bumbling and ill spirited. To folk who see no gray areas and know the subjects of the last two chapters, it ought to be easy to predict what the Iroquois medicine people will do in any dispute: They should only mobilize around traditional and spiritual causes on behalf of all Native Americans; they would never dirty their hands with something as gritty as gas, gambling, or tobacco.

  In fact, for the Iroquois, it’s silly to think that politics could be separated from any other aspect of human life, including the traditional and the spiritual. Whenever there’s a dispute on the reservation big enough to involve group interests, the power people get into the act, often on both sides. Ted Williams told us this from personal experience. It isn’t always easy to decide which cause is the better.

  There are other kinds of supernatural attacks whose roots aren’t contemporary at all. Some Iroquois healers talk about a condition they call “bothered by the dead.” Though the effects might look the same as a garden-variety curse, this one doesn’t involve the stroke of a living witch, and it comes with a heavy spiritual depression. As Macbeth would say, your “genius is rebuked,” in this case by the generations of the dead.

  If you’re a Native American, the cause of this complaint might be as inadvertent as failing to observe enough of the major ceremonies of your nation, hence offending the ancestors. Native Americans, at least, ought to know better.

  But even non–Native Americans who mind their own business can take a hit from some ancient, indigenous power that seems beyond the natural. The offense might be as active and direct as offending a site of importance to those who had once revered it. It could be as innocent as living or working over such a site every day. This could happen easily all over New York state, and not many people would be aware that this was the case. The dead buried before the arrival of the Europeans are long gone from us, and most of the spots they treasured are invisible. Think of all the battlefields, burial grounds, and sacred sites in Iroquois country that have been unknowingly developed and built over.

  How could a piece of land rebel against anyone? Again, it might be by the collective power of the offended dead. If the dead lack awareness or self-protection, the source could be a psychic mechanism set in place by shamans in ages past, like a curse on a pharaoh’s tomb. When a community left a sacred site or burial ground, its power people often performed a closing ceremony to protect it.

  Ted Williams talked about an unusual and more specialized condition he called “skeletally entranced.” It was dangerous to mess with old human bones. He talked about young people raiding burial grounds and leaving with a couple of nuggets. If they fell asleep with these stolen bits in their pockets—“the dice of drowned men’s bones” as in Hart Crane’s poem—with no help near, they might not wake in this world.

  It may be hard for some readers to understand this belief that artifacts, human remains, the dead, and even sites can project a force that could be active today. But many people living in upstate New York—and not just Native Americans—have their reasons for leaving this an open question.

  The Two Ball Curse

  The Iroquois have always loved sports. They had a handful of games, apparently offshoots of hunting, that wouldn’t seem familiar to most Americans. One that would was the game of lacrosse, which the Iroquois probably invented. The basics of the old game—ball, sticks, teams, running—would be quite recognizable to anyone today. The rules were somewhere between those of the modern game and the Siege of Stalingrad.

  The Iroquois have adopted many of the sports of white society, though at some disadvantage due to the small numbers and typical poverty of their communities. One of their traditional favorites is baseball.

  The Oneida William Honyoust Rockwell (1870–1960) recalled an incident from around 1900 in which the baseball-crazed Oneidas had arranged a game against a well-practiced team of white guys from Cazenovia. The Oneidas’ numbers were so small, though, that between their two communities they could put together only nine able adult bodies. The Oneida figured they might need a little help. An old-timer told them what to do.

  “Go into the graveyard and pick an old grave. Make a hole in the earth and reach around with your hands until you come up with an old toe bone. Take it with you to the field you’re going to play on and bury it under the pitcher’s box. Take some of the black dirt with you, too, and let every man on your team rub his hands with it before the game. And, finally, just before the game, the whole team has to take a swig from the same bottle of whiskey, then cork it up and put it away. When you pitch to the white men, it will look to them like you are throwing them two balls to hit.”

  The team decided to try the formula, but objected to only one thing: the one bottle to be used and the single swig of it apiece. All was done as prescribed, though: bone, bottle, and burying dirt were in their places by game time. The Oneida lost 22–0.

  The incident had Rockwell scratching his head. When he met the great Native American Jim Thorpe (1888–1953) years later, he couldn’t help getting it off his chest. “How could we lose with so much national medicine behind us?” he asked. Thorpe—multisport athlete and Olympic champion—could only venture the guess that the white men were able to hit both balls.

  Power Line

  Just after he moved into Williamsville in the 1970s, Mike Bastine was approached by a neighbor as he got into his car. Perceiving that he was a Native American, the man asked, “What nation are you?”

  “I’m Algonquin,” said Mike.

  The man sighed with relief. “Thank God. I don’t need any more to do with them Tuscaroras.”

  Mike laughed and asked what he meant. “There’s one of them up there on the Tuscarora Reservation that’s been giving me and my whole crew the creeps. Name’s Mad Bear. I won’t go up there any more.”

  “Well, that’s who I’m going up to see,” said Mike. The man’s terror was so comical that Mike calmed him down and asked his story.

  Mike’s neighbor worked for the power company, which had run lines across reservation land. When some Native Americans felt that something in the original agreement wasn’t being met, Mad Bear showed up to do his medicine on behalf of the nation and the land.

  The project met snags, including baffling malfunctions with equipment. Fully functioning bulldozers fell utterly useless. A few had to be junked. When the lines were finally up, power wouldn’t flow between two of the towers, though no perceptible flaws in the system could be detected. And the crews were getting spooked. They saw apparitions around them in the trees, dashing between the open spaces. Many chose to quit the company rather than work at the troubled site.

  Mike had to laugh. “That was Mad Bear. He never was one to let something go by like that. He’d pull people aside privately and talk to them, but if that didn’t do any good, he went right to the next step in a hurry. He must have done some kind of ceremony up there. I think he had help from Peter Mitten on that one.”

  He speaks of it like he saw it. “When they touched that bulldozer with an eagle feather and in a prayerful way, it wouldn’t run again. [The whites] had to scrap it.”

  CALLING THE ANCESTORS

  The ancient inhabitants of Europe often built and sited their religious monuments and power sites to make them fall along straight lines, often across several miles of landscape. These imaginary connectors—straight lines linking sacred sites—were called “leys.” They
may not have been used much as pathways.

  Sometimes the leys themselves made patterns with each other. One equilateral triangle, six miles on a side, formed by leys was discovered by British astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer (1836–1920). One of the monuments on “The Great Triangle of England” is the famous Stonehenge.

  The prehistoric Native North Americans had their leys, too. One of the most remarkable is a sixty-mile long trackway between two similar circle-and-octagon earthworks in Newark and Chillicothe, Ohio. Nicknamed after the moundbuilding cultures who produced it, “The Hopwell Highway” was almost surely a ceremonial path. We’ve been able to document very few leys in Iroquois country, but there must have been many. They were most likely used for ceremonies and vision quests, as well as marking sacred sites. They were made with vision and care, and the users altered the landscape with little but footprints.

  The Iroquois were always suspicious of New York’s massive “point A to point B” projects: canals, railroads, highways. They never did anything intrusive without carefully considering the local ground. “Don’t you realize what you might be stirring up?” the elders would say to the state authorities. “It could be burial ground, battleground, sacred ground. You don’t do this stuff with a map and a ruler.”