Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

by Michael Bastine

  “There’s the blue heron. It used to be that as soon as you saw one, he’d fly away to a point so far off that he couldn’t see you. Pam and Bailey and I were by this farm pond, and five feet behind them there was a blue heron standing in the water. I don’t believe this, I said to Pam. I had to get our camera out and take a picture.

  “One time we were on our way to Springville. There was this pasture behind a little fence with thirty turkey vultures on it. We pulled over and turned the car off. Pam said, ‘What were those?’

  “I said, ‘Turkey vultures.’

  “She said, ‘What are they doing?’

  “‘Waiting.’

  “‘What for?’

  “‘Dinner.’”

  He turned to his audience. “What do seagulls eat? Coyotes? Vultures? What do they eat? They’re scavengers. Their assignment in life is to clean nature up. Nature isn’t preparing—making their presence so well known—for no reason. If things don’t start to change, I’m kind of thinking there’s going to be a major die-off. That’s what they’re saying to us. That’s what they’re here for. They’re going to clean up all the stuff.

  “If I repeated to you what Mad Bear said to me toward the end of his life, some of you wouldn’t be feeling so comfortable. He wrote a poem, A Warning to White-eyes.

  “There are too many levels, too many indicators. . . . What they’re all saying is that we humans better pay attention. We better start watching. The stuff we’re doing to the world, it’s not going to be sustainable for very much longer.”

  The Altered Beasts

  It could be that all the mythology of the psychic zoo is based on fleeting paranormal encounters, seasoned richly by storytelling. But I think these critters exist. I am pretty sure I saw one.

  It was a gaudy dusk in September 1995. I was driving from the bike trails at Allegany State Park down into Salamanca. I was where the road curves downhill and to the right, just before the hill falls away, throws open the river valley, and lays Salamanca across it. On the right twilights at this point, the lights spread out and shine the whole city up. On that one, the sky arched before me with a low red-gold gleam like a segmental pediment, etched and burnished over the entrance to a temple. As if the shield of Achilles lay behind the horizon and tossed its rim behind the sun’s corona, I might have visualized creation and prophecy had I stayed long enough to catch the moment. By the road I saw a strange animal.

  On my left between the road and tree line was a critter about the size of an adult groundhog. I gave it a hard look in the clear twilight. It had the features of many other animals, and its eyes were drilled at some spot on my side of the road.

  It stood comfortably on its hind legs like a bear, and its ears, eyes, and snout were bearlike. It was too small, though, for even a cub. Its dangling, shriveled front paws were those of a dog or rabbit. Its chest and skull were flat like a badger’s. My best guess was that it was a morphed woodchuck, with pert bearlike ears. Its stare was the giveaway, trained with human focus across the road and right through the mountain. I’d never seen a look like that, and I drove through its laser gaze as if I didn’t exist to it. I even looked into the trees on my right to see what it could be watching.

  I considered turning back for another look but saw in my mirrors that it was already gone. I filed it as a simple curiosity. Any natural animal could disappear quickly. It was only when I considered where I was—a haunted region in Seneca country—and thought of the legends that it occurred to me that I might have seen one of the alter-beasts.

  I’m not a naturalist, but I know the animals of the Northeast and have an excellent visual memory. This image is in my mind. I don’t know what it was. I’ve never seen an animal like it.

  The Choirs of the Shape-Shifters

  An East Aurora woman spent childhood time on the Tonawanda Reservation in the 1980s. Her mother worked up there in some capacity that called for her to be “adopted” into one of the Seneca clans, which put her into a position of special trust. When the woman I interviewed was a young girl, she and her family spent a lot of social time up there, too, not all to her liking.

  “Why do I have to come up here and spend the whole day at a festival?” she always used to ask. “I want to stay home with my friends. I don’t even like corn soup.” But she saw and learned a lot.

  One evening a clan mother drew a number of her guests together outside her house, including the young woman’s family. “It’s time for you all to go,” she said.

  The East Aurora woman, then a girl, remembers asking why. “The shapeshifters are out tonight,” she was told.

  Their hostess cautioned them to walk only in the light between the buildings and their cars, and not for any reason to walk into the woods or off any road. From there they were to drive safely and not to stop or get out for any reason until they were off the reservation.

  This was so different from anything she was taught in school. The girl was ready to laugh. “How do you know they’re out?”

  “We can hear them. Listen.” Everyone fell silent and strained their ears into the wooded land around them. To this day, the woman swears she remembers the sound of the shape-shifters howling, the eeriest thing she has ever heard.

  I’m always fascinated to talk to nonpsychic people about paranormal experiences they’ve had. I take them down to the last details. “What did it sound like?” I asked her.

  “It was like . . . a choir. Choirs. In the night.”

  “Choirs?” I said, I’m sure with a wrinkle of the brow.

  “Yeah. Choirs of people, all howling together like wolves. Like fifteen human voices. Mostly human voices.”

  THE SONGS OF THE DOGS

  Some readers might find it silly to think that human speech could reach any animal. They did not see Michael Bastine set our newly rescued West Highland terrier onto his lap and talk to her, an hour after my companion and I had adopted her. Michael had dropped in on us by surprise. He tends to show up when he’s most needed or can do the most good.

  After years as a breeder, this dog had been discarded after dropping her last litter. Her belly was still distended. She was also undernourished and had no trust for human beings. “You’re going to have a nice home here,” Michael finished up. She had kept up eye contact with him as if every syllable registered. It may have been the first tenderness she had received in her life.

  The dog was the only animal domesticated by the old Iroquois. They lived with dogs and had mixed attitudes to them. The dog was an animal that would work with humans to hunt other animals, a little bit of a traitor in that sense. It was also dependent on people. Bears, deer, and other forest animals needed nothing from people. To some Iroquois, it seemed shameful to see the village dogs snarl and worry among themselves over bones and body parts, the remains of noble animals who gave their lives after struggle so that people might live. There was no dog clan.

  But no other animal was this kind of messenger between the worlds of men and of animals, between village and forest. It would be natural to think of dogs as intermediaries of worlds in other senses, between the earthly and the spiritual. It may also be natural to think of them as human companions, after the life of the world.

  The Iroquois sensed, as do we, that the bond between a human and a dog can be something marvelous. It’s thought that for most of the Iroquois, dogs were regarded as psychopomps, guides for human spirits to the afterworld. Other Iroquoians like the Huron may have believed that, when dogs died, their souls’ course was alongside that of the human souls, the Milky Way.

  The Onondaga, oldest of the Iroquois, have a tradition about their dogs. If it’s true, we may see our own again after they have passed.

  For the Onondaga, at least in one traditional tale, the human soul after death undergoes a period of wandering in a stormy night world. After passing through a hazardous forest, he or she comes to a vast abyss, the last barrier to the grounds of the Happy Hunting, the land of the ever blessed. For the soul fortunate enough to get t
his far, the only passage is across a massive log, which two gigantic doglike beings hold steady at each end in their teeth and claws. The bridge is easy footing if they keep their hold, but their focus is wobbly. It’s then that the voices start to chime and call. They are the souls of the dogs the humans knew in their lives.

  If these souls say things like, “He loved us, he fed us, he sheltered us,” the mighty beings grip the log hard, holding it steady for the passage to the Land of Souls.

  But if the voices say, “He starved us, he beat us, he drove us away,” the mighty beings lose their attention. The log teeters, and the human soul tumbles into confusion.

  If you cannot find it in you for the sake of the world to be kind to all life, be kind for your own sake to your animals. You never know when they will be speaking for you.

  10

  The Little People

  He used one argument which was sound, and I have never forgotten it. It is the fact that it is not abnormal men like artists but normal men like peasants, who have born witness a thousand times to such things; “ it is the farmers who see the fairies.”

  G. K. CHESTERTON, CONCERNING AN INTERVIEW WITH W. B. YEATS

  THE WEE FOLK

  Traditions of diminutive, magically powerful human beings are found in many parts of the world. The wee folk that come first to the mind of the average American are certainly the fairies of Celtic tradition, but many Native American societies had ancient, elaborate, and apparently indigenous traditions about their own Little People—as did the Iroquois.

  In the colonial period, the Iroquois Little People were thought to be powerful and real. Culture keepers—elders, storytellers, historians, and medicine people—revered them as forces of the natural world. They were envisioned as humanlike devas somewhere between the status of human beings and that of the spirits or the gods.

  Today’s Six Nations folk regard the world with twenty-first-century minds, but not all of them believe that the Little People are completely folkloric. For a contemporary Iroquois, the experience of seeing them or their work is rare and awesome. It’s like what witnessing a UFO or a mystery monster would be for a typical white. The reason so few whites know the power of this tradition today is because so few Iroquois will talk about it in their presence.

  In the 1950s, Edmund Wilson remarked upon the reluctance of the Iroquois to talk about their ancient mysticism. That goes double for the Little People, still among the most sacred and private traditions of the Six Nations. Do not ever press any Iroquoian about this subject. Some take it far more seriously than you could believe.

  Late Allegany storyteller Duce Bowen was a friend of mine, and he wouldn’t say a word about the Little People with me. Even Michael Bastine won’t say everything he knows, especially about the Little People.

  “I don’t own this knowledge,” he said years ago—before I got it—when I pushed him too hard on a certain point. “Even though I happen to have it, it’s not my property to give away.” Maybe this was the reason the Celtic Druids didn’t set their wisdom to writing: It was meant to be kept for those to whom it was sacred and shared with only those who were ready. Or maybe the Little People could be listening. We aren’t publishing anything that wasn’t published before, or anything even remotely off-limits that wasn’t told to us by whites.

  I started my publishing career writing about the supernatural history of western New York. As a ghost-story collector, I have interviewed thousands of people about their sightings. One of the most interesting patterns that comes up across New York state is how often the whites see the Little People, reporting them first as ghosts.

  White Little People reports come in a few styles:

  Site-specific encounters. New York’s ancient site tradition has been lost. There are probably sites and regions all over the state once associated with the Native American fairies. Most of the Little People places anyone remembers are on reservations. Whites who visit these areas sometimes report seeing them.

  The imaginary friend. Many American children report conversations and encounters with beings no one else can see. The syndrome of this “imaginary friend” is well known to psychology. (Sometimes the classification is expansive enough to include personified toys, but this seems to be pushing it.) Some of these encounters are mere sightings, but sustaining relationships do develop. Typically the phantom pals these children see are their own size or smaller. Some of them in upstate New York sound just like the Little People of Iroquois folklore.

  Ghosts. When I interview an eyewitness about an apparition, I ask a lot of questions, including specifics of the visual qualities. When I come to the size, a very few witnesses do a double take to remember that the apparition was unnaturally small. Sounds like they had been seeing Little People. Little wonder in Iroquois territory.

  Everywhere they exist in world tradition, the Little People have three general traits:

  They have a connection to nature. They are of the woods, lakes, and hills. They move easily among the animals and speak to them in their languages. They guard and honor special places in the world. They help the seasonal cycles and other processes of nature.

  They are associated with the human dead. It’s not as if they are the ancestors in any world tradition, or that the spirits of our dead go to join them. It’s more as if the fairies and the dead share the same indefinite realm where they occasionally cross paths. The otherworld, apparently, is big and indistinct enough for both of them.

  They have a special interest in human children. They come to children, they protect children, and sometimes they take children away.

  THREE NATIONS

  The invisible Little People, called the Jo-ga-oh by the Seneca, are nicknamed the Jungies today on many reservations. They were thought to live in three tribes, whose names in Seneca were the Ohdowas, the Gahonga, and the Gandayah. Each tribe has its own role in the world, so distinct that the attempt has even been made to place them into European categories such as gnomes, elves, and fairies (which are not absolute and settled terms even in the world that gave them birth). Each Iroquois language has different names for the tribes, but other essentials seem to hold. We know them best from the Seneca tales preserved by Harriet Maxwell Converse (1836–1903) and Arthur C. Parker.

  The Hunters

  We don’t see them much anymore, “The People of the Underground Shadows,” “The Hunters,” or “The Little Folk of the Darkness.” These Ohdowas (in Seneca) are mighty, kindly sprites who carry out the will of the Good-Minded Spirit. Their territories are the sunless realms under the earth. They are the doorkeepers of hell.

  Were the underworld a concentration camp, these Hunters would be its guards, watching the passages to the upper world and keeping down the monsters penned there by the Good-Minded Spirit. They are especially on guard against the Great White Buffalo. Not much would be left of the upper world if these chaos beasts were running loose.

  When the stampede is on, the shadow hunters thin the herd. When one of the creatures breaks into the daylight, the sunlight elves send up a red cloud as an alarm, and the Hunters take up the chase above ground. To the old Iroquois, such an inspiring, discordant sky was a sign of the Little People on the job.

  The underworld has once-earthly prisoners, too, ones who transgressed against the natural order: stinging, slithering, and venomous critters; cats who kill more than they can eat; witches or wizards in animal forms—all rounded up by the Hunters. It’s their role to know that their proper places are here, but many still hope to break out. There they would poison springs, blight trees, and cause plagues.

  While the Ohdowas are skilled at almost anything, it’s hard for them to hunt most natural animals who have gotten used to their scent. This is why the members of the Iroquois Pygmy Society save their nail clippings, sew them into bags for hunting medicine, and leave them outside or toss them over cliffs for the Little People. The hunter fairies make a broth out of these human parts and bathe in it to disguise their scent. In gratitude for favors like
these, the Ohdowas often warn human communities of trouble. Sometimes they join their elfin kin above ground at nightly festivals in the deep woods. We know this by the rings left behind in the grass.

  The Stone Throwers

  The Gahonga, the Seneca “stone throwers,” live in caves beside lakes and streams. They care for the natural balance, freeing fish from traps and leading them to deep caves if people take too many. They’re as mighty as they are small. They can uproot trees and pitch big rocks, and they often challenge human warriors to tests of strength. Sometimes they visit people in dreams or visions and take them back to their dwellings. Associated with water, they are particularly common in the Mohawk territory by the Hudson, the Mohawk, and the Champlain.

  Iroquois elders and medicine people appeal to these spirits in times of drought. They head far from the villages and look in mountain streams until they find signs of the Gahonga: little cup-shaped hollows in the soft earth at the edge of the stream. They scoop these out whole, dry them in the sun, and take them back to the lodge. These are the “dew-cup charms” that kick-start other fairies to work in the ground or garden.