As with most visionaries, the burly Tuscarora was mighty fixed on his purpose, and that simple sense of human closeness was not always with him. Though Michael trained, tutored, and traveled with Mad Bear for years, he wonders sometimes even today how well he knew the man who taught him so much.
This was not the case with Ted Williams. If Mad Bear stands out as a medicine man willing to be profiled, Ted Williams may have been the first to profile himself, albeit indirectly. Ted’s two books, The Reservation (1985) and Big Medicine from Six Nations (2005), are as valuable for their characterizations of reservation life as their inside look at the magic that we describe as medicine.
Ted was raised around the traditional ways and witnessed many a miracle. Most of his life he lived off the reservation and worked at a number of “white” jobs. He was a paratrooper, a partier, a jazz player, and, word has it, a ladies’ man. One could see that. Even in his late sixties, when I first met him, he was a sturdy, active, handsome man, with a long aquiline nose and a profile that could have gone Hollywood. He was charismatically direct of expression.
Ted came to the medicine late in his life, but things moved fast for the son of Eleazar Williams, one of the most admired healers in living memory. Ted became a member of the False Faces Society, and through him I learned a lot about it.
Ted and Mike Bastine never made a big deal out of their friendship. They just hung out. But the only time I’ve ever heard a catch in Michael’s voice was when we talked at the end of Ted’s memorial service in 2005. Till then I’d had no idea how close the two were.
By now the image of the Native American medicine man or woman is a media icon. August, patient, transcendent, nearly omniscient—people this uncomplicated are only found in books and movies.
“These medicine people are still people,” says Michael. “They can have all the flaws of any of the rest of us.” There is also, we both think, a little something extra about them. We profile Ted, Mad Bear, and all other people and events in this chapter as representatives of the Iroquois medicine tradition, one meriting the deepest respect.
WITCH DOCTORS
We’ve all heard stories about apparently supernatural displays of power and awareness. In parapsychology they’re called “psychokinesis” (PK) and “extra sensory perception” (ESP). In the old days it might all have been called magic.
Some of us these days have too much faith in these subjects and others may have too little. Maybe we all should have some. Successful experiments with faith healing and the mind-bending feats of martial artists, Zen masters, and Indian yogis ought to confirm that “mind over matter” exists in people to some extent. Even animals seem to know things sometimes that they simply shouldn’t be expected to know. Who hasn’t seen a family dog frisking by the door minutes before its owner arrives home?
Preindustrial shamans could have had even greater special abilities, which might have spelled the difference in personal or cultural survival. The living preservers of their tradition may have them, too.
We hesitate to encourage wild assumptions about Iroquois power people, but we have to say that psychic healing and communication does seem to occur far more often on the reservation than in the society around it. Today, in the twenty-first century, the Western medical establishment shows more than a grudging realization that the world holds a lot we can’t explain. To its credit, the American Medical Association is beginning to consider the effectiveness of alternative treatments, ones that have been used in other parts of the world for thousands of years. Not everyone gets better with Western treatment. Sometimes traditional healing works—sometimes so miraculously that psychic or supernatural factors could be involved.
Western medical doctors themselves often use hunches in curing their patients. They get that funny feeling, prescribe an extra test, and end up lengthening a life. And let’s not forget that many famous discoveries have come to scientists suddenly as a psychic flash or an insightful dream, in which at least the unconscious mind was at work.
Until the advent of modern medicine, Iroquois traditional healers could set broken bones, treat wounds, and cure ailments at least as well as Europe’s physicians. They were also skilled herbalists who knew every plant in the Northeast Woodlands. Their potions and poultices would be valuable to us today. These were the body healers.
Other healers were teachers and culture-preservers whose religious and spiritual function was incalculable. They were the keepers of a body of age-old wisdom, memorialized in rituals, memorialized in song. Since the Iroquoian word root for power was the same as that for song, you can see the respect in which these incantations were held. They were thought at least as valuable for the healing of the patient as any physical remedy. Those who kept the tradition were also the first line of defense against the attacks of witches.
Early in the twentieth century, Arthur C. Parker acknowledged several forms of occult practice among the Iroquois, among which he included healing. Parker understood the spiritual discipline driving the gatherers of medicinal roots and plants. Still, he profiled most of his occultists in terms of witchcraft. The question could be one of terminology.
Even in the middle twentieth century witched was still used as a catchall word by reservation folk for a state that could be described with a variety of terms: cursed, enchanted, charmed, spellbound. Parker found among the Iroquois two styles of witch doctors, the metaphysical wing of the medicine people.
The first category is the anti-witch, someone who has made a special study of curses and countermeasures. An expert in diagnosis, he or she knows the signs of the varied curses and the exact means of combating them. A doctor of body and soul, this type of witch, says
