Mad Bear never started a smudging ceremony if children or pets were in the house. They were especially vulnerable to spiritual influences. But once a ceremony started, he could get so focused on the moment that he might overlook other details.
Whenever you cleanse a house, you’re supposed to leave a door or window open just a crack, preferably higher up. This gives the unwanted presences a way to get out. An open window or two doesn’t hurt, either. You want them to leave, don’t you? Once when Mad Bear was smudging a house in South Buffalo, he forgot to do this. His progress through the house—and the rising heat and smoke—drove the energy upstairs. As he completed his purifying tour of the second floor, everyone heard a crack above them. They followed the smoke to the attic and found a window blown out from the inside with the smoke wafting out through it. Whatever Mad Bear was driving out left with a frenzy that surprised even him.
Mad Bear’s time and energy were always stretched. When a problem seemed basic, he deputized another healer, usually someone he’d trained.
The Smoke Is Always Different
In the early 1980s, a family of Canadian Mohawks living in Buffalo asked Mad Bear for help with some trouble in their home. Their house was right across the street from the campus of D’Youville College of Nursing on the city’s west side. This section of the city near the Niagara River was the scene of fighting in the War of 1812 and an earlier Native American settlement.
Many sites in the region, including various college buildings, are haunted. White families could have lived in this same house, known the same troubles, failed to sense the cause, and either moved or stayed and suffered without knowing why. Native Americans tend to be very sensitive to psychic influences.
Mad Bear sent Mike Bastine to run the ceremony. “Just be sure you have them call you and tell you what they see when you leave,” he cautioned. “It’s one of the most important parts of the process.”
Mike went to the house in question and did a thorough smudging. It seemed a basic operation, and he left with the smoke still in the air of the house. The people called him a few hours later. “You’ll never guess what happened. After you left, the smoke hovered around for a while and took the shape of a funnel cloud, like a tornado or something. When we climbed the stairs, we could see it on the second floor. Then it went straight up through the ceiling and vanished.”
“Can’t say I can explain that for you,” said Mike. “Maybe the best question to ask is about your gut feeling. Were you scared or antsy or nervous?”
“Not at all,” said the woman. “It was beautiful.”
“Then I think your problem is solved,” said Mike.
Mad Bear was impressed when he heard the story. “That smoke is always different. This time it must have surrounded the spirits like a tornado and took them right up and out of the house. Boy, that’s the first time I ever heard of it doing that, though.”
The Test of a Healer
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were a lot of healers in the Niagara region, who, as Mike Bastine puts it, “were real good readers.” Mad Bear always claimed that his own tutor Peter Mitten was greater than he was. But too many others were in business.
“A lot of people tell you they can read,” says Mike Bastine. “But a lot of them aren’t very good. You can usually tell right away if you got one of those. But so many people can’t.”
As Mad Bear neared the end of his days, he started to wonder who might be left to carry on his tradition. On Six Nations Reservation in Brantford, Ontario, lived a medicine woman with a mighty reputation. Her name may have been Daisy Thomas. She seemed sure to last beyond him, and Mad Bear wanted to know how good she really was before recommending her to his patients. The trouble is that he couldn’t do the test himself. Like medieval wizard Michael Scot and the Witch of Fauldshope, they didn’t get along.
Also like the legendary Scot, Mad Bear sent a deputy to see if his rival was as good as advertised. He gave Mike Bastine a made-up ailment and told him how to talk about it. He cautioned Mike never to mention his own name or let on that the two were friends. “That just wouldn’t be good,” he said. “Not good at all.”
Mike went up to Brantford, told Daisy his problem, and listened. Then he relayed to Mad Bear what she’d recommended: the herbs, the gathering, the processing, the recipe.
“Well, she done ya right,” said Mad Bear. “The old girl’s still doing a good job. Good to think there’s a few people around here that’ll know what they’re doing when I’m gone.”
The Viking in the Sky
To some Native American civilizations like the Hopi and Maya, history was a process of repeating cycles. Prevalent in the oral tradition of the late twentieth century and thriving into the twenty-first is the notion of “earth changes,” as though some global cataclysm may be at hand, affecting the environment, the world economy, and social conditions. It may be purifying, it may be disastrous, it may be an upheaval, and it may be a coming together of consciousness. The only thing anyone agrees on is that it should be transformative.
One night in the early 1980s, Joe Anderson gazed up into the night sky and saw a formation he had never noticed before. He got the firm image of an outline in the stars, a craggy, bearded human profile and a horned helmet he described as a Viking. He found himself so impressed that he looked up his mystical uncle Mad Bear and told him about the experience.
At first nothing rang a bell, but Joe Anderson pressed on, even drawing something on a
