“Put some of that on there tomorrow,” said the old Seneca. “And the next day, and the next. Then bring back whatever’s left. You won’t need it after that.”
All of them were puzzled. A wound like that should have taken weeks to heal. But the old Seneca had the reputation of a healer. Overnight, the burn scabbed over and stopped oozing. By the second morning, the wound was closing at the edges. By the third, only a fine line remained.
When they brought the rest of the potion back, they tried to find out what wasin it. The healer chuckled and said it was “just something I put together.” They tried a few more times to get it out of him, but he never said any more than that it was bits of things he’d found along the creek.
This green goo is a common form for herbal medicines to take. An Iroquois healer brought a tub of something like it to the hospital where the father of a confidant lay, suffering with cancer and given his last rites. The patient was told to drink it in hourly doses until all of it was gone. His health took a quick turn for the better, and soon he was cancer-free. His doctors were astonished.
Mitten’s Mysterious Mixture
The remarkable Mohawk Richard Oakes was born in 1942 on the Akwesasne St. Regis Reservation way upstate in New York. Work on the St. Lawrence Seaway disrupted reservation life, and he hit the road at sixteen. He did stints as a skyscraper ironworker and ended up in college in San Francisco. One sunny afternoon in 1969, he dove into Frisco Bay, swam out to Alcatraz Island, and led a student-Native occupation that brought a lot of attention to Native American causes.
Charismatic and telegenic, Oakes was the spokesman at many high-profile events. He was also a scrapper. In 1970, he and some Native Americans had a bar brawl with a group of Samoans, one wielding a pool cue. A shot to the head sent Oakes into a month-long coma in which every muscle went into spasm. As his mind slept, his body labored against itself, endlessly. He was dying.
A Native American power trio came to the hospital demanding to treat Oakes: Mad Bear, Peter Mitten, and the influential Hopi Thomas Banyacya (1910–1999). The idea seemed crazy to the hospital doctors, but they gave in, probably because they thought Oakes was dead already. They watched, though, as Mitten prepared his potion in the hospital room, all the time chanting in Cayuga. They asked about everything he did. Mad Bear answered for him. “He won’t speak English during the medicine ceremony. You wouldn’t understand it, anyway.”
At the end, Mitten’s mixture looked like pond water or green Gatorade. The doctors gasped to see it wind up in Oakes’s IV tube and enter his ashen body. Soon, though, they noticed color return around his heart and spread slowly over his whole frame. Oakes relaxed so much that he sank into his mattress. Mitten spoke to thedoctors, and Mad Bear translated. “He’s very tired. He will rest for two days and then come back to us.”
This was so. It’s only too bad Mitten’s mix couldn’t temper that Mohawk backbone and keep Oakes out of confrontations with armed men. He was shot dead in 1972.
Mitten’s Breath of Life
One day in the 1970s, a reservation boy was knocked from his bike by a car and apparently killed. He lay on the road until the white paramedics arrived. Mad Bear came out just as they were loading him into the ambulance. The mother pulled on him and cried, telling them to leave him, but the blanket was over his head. A voice rang out.
“Put him down!” It was Peter Mitten, coming unsteadily down the steps of his house. He was ill, weak, and in bed most of the time by then, but there was something in that voice of his. They set the cyclist back down.
The Cayuga healer bent over the boy, nose to nose, and put something in his mouth, something he must have had in his hand. Then he blew breath onto the boy’s face. “Open your eyes. Come back to us!” Nothing happened. “Come back, I told you! You come back here and open up those eyes.” The tender lids fluttered. “Open your eyes. Open them all the way, but don’t move until I tell you.”
The boy jerked awake and looked around him. His mother ran to him, but he didn’t know her, and Mad Bear kept her back. Wild and terrified, the boy tried to get up, but the two healers kept him down, talking to him calmly, making sure all the parts of his spiritual self were back in place for good. Only when he could talk and show sense in his eyes did they give him to the medics. The stunned whites had stood and watched. They told it all to the emergency room doctors.
Years later, Mad Bear talked about it to Doug Boyd. “Everybody knew those medics had found that kid dead. But nobody ever put that in writing. See, those things, they’re never reported, they’re just denied. And even when they’re observed and admitted, they just can’t be officially acknowledged. But I’ll tell you one thing we never discussed with anybody. One of those doctors needed help with his own personal situation and came to Peter Mitten and me confidentially. I’m still in touch with that doctor, although his problem is over.”
I give a lot of talks and tours in western New York. I’ve met several nurses who remember a Native American healer called to various Niagara Frontier hospitals for strange or hopeless cases. None remembered his name or nation, but it had to be Mad Bear.
The Cattail Cure
In his early twenties, Michael Bastine worked in a restaurant whose young waiters delivered their tickets to the cooks by sticking them onto an old-fashioned spikeand-wood device by the kitchen door. Often called a ticket spindle,
