Some reservation folk tell us that Jemison herself was suspected of being a witch and that several times she ran from her home and hid out in the woods till things subsided. This she never mentioned in her book. We asked a pair of our Seneca friends what they thought about the odds that the White Woman of the Genesee was into the otkon.
“Maybe she just had some of the wrong friends,” Jean Taradena suggested.
Pam Bowen shrugged. “She might have been trying a little too hard to be Indian.”
THE HEART OF A BLACK BIRD
There’s another way to deal with being witched: fight back with the same medicine. But even in small communities, it can be hard to identify an occult tormentor. Arthur C. Parker in his book The Code of Handsome Lake describes a deliciously sinister ceremony for finding a witch.
Get a living bird, black in color. A crow might be best, but a black hen will do. Take it into the woods at midnight and make a small, slow fire. Split the bird’s body, take out its heart, and hang it by its arteries over the fire. Roast it slowly and wait. Whoever did the witching to you will know about your ceremony soon enough and get to the spot immediately. The witch will have no power over you and will tell you why he or she is witching you, or anything else you want to know.
But suppose whoever’s witching you is too far away to get there in person? This is when things get really interesting. Your witch will put in an appearance in an astral form and roost in the leaves of a tree above you. At other times you may not even see this apparition of your witch; all you’ll hear will be a voice from somewhere overhead. You’ll find out who it is, though, and why he or she is witching you. The answers may surprise you. The questioning is especially critical here because so much of the time you may not be the true target. You may not even know the witch. He or she may really be targeting someone who loves you and will be hurt by any pain you suffer.
Once you have your witch, there’s nothing but dawn between you and the answers you want. There shouldn’t be any need to kill the witch, either. Come to think of it, you have a pretty powerful enforcer in your back pocket, and a time may come when you will need one. Just hang on to that scorched heart, keep it safe somewhere, and this character will do your bidding. If you really mean business, though, let the heart burn all the way through. The witch will be found dead in the morning of a malady the Iroquois call burnt heart.
There has to be more to this than Parker described. No doubt there’s a conference with an elder, probably a medicine person, who will prescribe the exact steps, even the ideal night for the ceremony. There might be other moves and ingredients. But based on the way the Church of Rome rations its exorcisms, you don’t want to overuse this powerful ritual. Keep it for that rainy day.
WITCH BONES
Many of the old Iroquois witches worked their spells through a little object called a witch bone that they placed in the body of the victim. It was often a tiny, double-pointed, needlelike splinter with a hole in the middle. Sometimes a single hair from the head of the witch would be threaded through and around. This magic trinket could be bone or wood, and other objects, even living ones like tiny worms, have been reported. Stories about objects like these being drawn from witched people are common.
There’s not much agreement on how a witch bone gets into the body of a sufferer. Most of these witch totems sound small enough to be planted in food or drink. But customarily, witches “blow” these things wherever they want at the end of a ceremony. From the sounds of it, once the job is done right, the object just ends up where it’s supposed to. From there—usually in the guts of the victim—it does its damage, ruining happiness, health, even life.
If you get hit by this kind of traditional curse, burning the hidden, charmed object will heal you. The difficulty is finding it and hauling it out. For that, you need the help of a traditional healer. The ceremonies are often uncomfortable and take a lot of time. Once you find one of these witch bones, though, you’re in a position of power. Burning it can hurt the witch, killing him or her within hours. You can also throw it in almost any direction, even from inside a building, with a word of guidance, such as “Now go, and fly into her heart!” The fiendish object will become a guided missile, finding the witch the same way it found you.
But as with the bird heart ceremony, the medicine people don’t always burn these things. Why bother? You don’t need revenge, do you, if the curse failed? You have a weapon against whoever sent it. You can get whatever you want out of the witch from then on. Twentieth-century Tuscarora medicine man Mad Bear, we hear, had quite a collection of these charms.
A WITCH’S BAG
As we mentioned earlier, witchcraft may be no more than a diversion of orenda for selfish and hurtful purposes. It changes its name
