I looked up and across the open fields and reflected on family, on the family each of us chooses to create, creates without thoughtful choosing, or never creates. It seemed a loss to me that I have had no children, and that I have no plans to. Even nieces and nephews are no likelihood. I have no siblings.
Most of us are born into the embrace of families. Through children and partners many of us re-create it around us as the elders fall. That’s what we think our duty is. Some with those responsibilities envy those who seem free. There’s another side.
For those none will ever look to as ancestor, that community is gone when the elders leave the world. I realized that the true honoring of ancestors may well be children, gifts of continuity and love coming back to them from the world. I wondered if I had wasted the preceding twelve years in an indirect cycle of stress and grief, and if by then the true remedy was too far away. Leaning on my poles, I looked to the sky, then looked down for a good long while. I saw that my books may be the gifts I give to the elders and started to ski again.
These Little People are quirky. Like children, their gifts and shortcomings are not those of adults. Their size and whimsy make them childlike; their powers and understanding are supernatural. This contrast may be a testimony to the archetype of the child.
The child mind has immeasurable inspiration and creativity. Its limits are those only of its species, but it lacks experience. It needs help to do simple things, but its talents—its imagination, its play, its gifts of seeing past boundaries—can only be recaught by the greatest artists. This could be the model for these forever children.
As if powered by the boundlessness of every child mind, these Little People are forces of nature—of growth and fertility—to every culture that holds them in tradition. They drive the seasons’ turn. They are also with the ancestors, as if either the spirits of the human dead can, after some transformation, join the Little People, or the Little People as they are know other otherworld realms.
Messengers from both the worlds, of nature and of spirit, these Little People may be closer to you than you think. See them, hear them, when they come to you.
11
The Land of the Elders
At night when the streets of your cities and villages will be silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. “Dead” did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.
CHIEF SEATTLE, IN HIS 1854 ORATION
THE OLD SPIRITS
The paranormal is a broad field (UFOs, cryptozoology, earth energies, ancient mysteries). The division of it presumed to originate with the human mind or spirit is called psychic phenomena: ESP, poltergeists, mind over matter, and, yes, apparitions. Ghosts. This chapter is about haunted places and psychic experiences related to the New York Iroquois.
Today’s Iroquois don’t tell a lot of ghost stories, at least not in any writer’s hearing. They talk about seeing the occasional curt supernatural image and give it the name of a once-living person if they can. They talk about their own psychic experiences. They talk about buildings and sites that host spectrums of paranormal effects, including these apparitions we call ghosts. They talk about dreams, visions, and psychic experiences, many of which seem related to the spirits of humans who have passed over. In this, they are the equal of any people known to history. Ghost stories of the popular type, though, are told about the Iroquois by others.
The great folklorist Louis C. Jones (1908–1990) was well aware that not all of New York’s Native American ghost stories originated with the Native Americans. “These are neither the tales the Indians tell of themselves nor tales that have taproots in the white man’s past.” It makes sense that it would be this way, from several perspectives.
While we know of no treatise developing the Iroquois concept of the soul, the Iroquois seem to believe that the human organism had several levels of spirit-self. They aren’t the first world society to have thought that. The classical world, for instance, thought there might have been layers to the immaterial part of the human being. The fine contemporary paranormal scholar Colin Wilson gets quite close to this with his “ladder of selves” theory.
As Arthur C. Parker concluded from the classic stories and his interviews, the Iroquois didn’t consider all ghosts to be sentient, self-actuated beings. For the Iroquois, the ghost is, like the Roman manes, the body-spirit. The full psychic personality is long gone into the spirit world when the material body dies.
In our mix are some stories the Native Americans do tell. Our tales fall into four categories:
Traditional Iroquois ghost tales
Profiles of cross-cultural haunted sites that feature folklore of Native ghosts
White folktales and reports about Native American ghosts
Contemporary Native psychic experiences, including dreams, messages, and sightings
Native American ghosts are
