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 fromthe 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,
