Today, most of us think of sickness and healing in purely material terms. To us, our doctors are plumbers, carpenters, and chemists of the human body. Preindustrial societies had doctors, too, but they were regarded as much more than physical healers.
In fact, an aura of the spirit has always clung to indigenous medicine workers, and it’s no wonder that it would be that way. To people who believe that Spirit animates everything in the world—rocks, trees, grass, weather—the suffering of a body could quite well be an imbalance in the soul, if not an outright metaphysical attack. The customs and duties of preindustrial doctors, therefore—like, probably, all humanity’s arts and all other practices considered expressive or spiritual—evolved from the idols, drawings, rites, dances, and customs of the original spirit talker of humanity’s ice age societies: the shaman.
The shaman was the culture preserver for his or her community, combining the functions of priest, poet, historian, musician, wizard, teacher, doctor, and many others. You can see images of this figure, often half animal, on the walls of the caves in France, in the paintings of the ice age critters, many now extinct, which he hunted, consulted in spirit, or mystically became. The shaman might even have been the first artist.
Popular interest in shamanism and neoshamanism soared in the late twentieth century. A lot has been written about that journey, some of it personal, imaginative, and elaborate. Little is known about the most ancient shamanism, and only a few fundamentals can be taken to be true.
Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen (1879–1933) encountered societies whose lifestyles and outlooks must have changed little in ten thousand years. They were still led by shamans, one of whom summarized his duties for Rasmussen: He had to lead the tribe to the best hunting grounds and appease the spirits of the animals whose lives they had taken. He was qualified to do this because, in trance, he could leave his body and commune with the world of spirits. He could learn almost anything this way. Some of the spirits he pacified on behalf of the tribe, “explaining” to the souls of the animal victims why humanity had killed them and thus protecting his community from the potential vengeance of a spirit legion. While he was at it, he might take the opportunity to get in a few words about other things. He might even intervene with the spirits of disease and get them to back off of suffering individuals or his entire community.
By the time the first Europeans encountered the Iroquois, all these shaman duties were no longer embodied in one individual. The healer became one of the spin-offs. The medicine societies lasting to this day probably show some vestiges of their ancient shamanic roots, as do the private contractors, still called medicine people.
Iroquois healing societies like the False Faces (or Medicine Masks) are keepers of the ritual songs and chants. These are precious items of national personality, and they should be respected and preserved. During performances of these rites, the celebrants are believed to reach and even speak for otherworldly presences and beings. Even if you don’t believe in the powers of these healers, a look into their nature is valuable.
BEAR AND TED
Steady lives of selfless good aren’t “sexy.” The headlines of history favor drama: curses, murders, trials, and bad ends. We have less historical information about medicine people than we do about witches, but through Michael Bastine’s friendship with two important twentieth-century medicine men—Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson and Ted Williams—we have unparalleled access to contemporary Native medicine. Furthermore, a book has been written about Mad Bear, and Ted Williams wrote two books himself.
Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson (1927–1985) was Michael’s longtime tutor and the subject of Doug Boyd’s 1994 book Mad Bear. Mad Bear, always known by his family nickname, served in the U.S. Navy on Okinawa and worked for years in the Merchant Marine, where he was a spokesman for his fellows of all colors.
Author Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) met Mad Bear in his twenties. “A young man in a lumberjack shirt,” he wrote in 1957, “broad of build, with a round face and lively black eyes.” Envision Mad Bear as a less melanin-challenged version of baseball player Babe Ruth. Wilson was convinced that Mad Bear could be the leader the Iroquois needed. Several times he was asked to be Tuscarora tribal chief, but that would have kept him close to home and hopping to a council’s beat. Mad Bear’s goals were neither Tuscarora, Iroquoian, Native American, nor even simply human. They were global.
Mad Bear believed that the best way to help Native Americans and aboriginal people everywhere was to raise the spiritual consciousness of the world. He believed, as do we, that this was also a great way to help the world. His transcendence, his care for all life, brought in people from all quarters.
The breadth of Mad Bear’s friendships was indeed imposing. He conferred with Martin Luther King Jr. on some issues, and his wide-faced image appears like an orb in many photos of luminaries like Ted Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Bob Dylan, and the Dalai Lama, a friend he took Michael Bastine to visit. His late-1960s North American Indian Unity Caravan brought many far-flung Native nations together. At first this movement started as a rolling coalition of activists who toured reservations, gave speeches, led rallies, and inspired many indigenous American nations to work together on behalf of common causes. Before the end of its six-year run it drew the attention, sympathy, and involvement of well-wishers of all ancestries. It is hard to overestimate Mad Bear’s impact in bringing Native American issues to the awareness of the mainstream. It was certainly the seed
