Just as we were asking Michael to give our good-byes to Ted, I felt a light, cool touch on the nape of my neck, just lifting a bit of my hair. Instantly, my preoccupation with the dream vanished. I turned. It was Ted, who had come up behind me and, with a brush up of a hand, lifted a lock so gently that it could have been done by apuff of air. It was an odd gesture, one no American white would think of. There had to be something cultural or even ceremonial about it. Light as a breeze, it would have taken practice to copy.
An hour later on the rural roads of central Ohio, I spilled everything out to my partner: the dream, the turmoil I could barely remember, the curiosity of it all, and that strange touch. It was as if all the grief and trauma of the past ten years were at rest.
My partner was a massage therapist, a Reiki healer, and a deeply intuitive woman. “He healed you,” she said. She could have said: He knew the dream. It’s too much to think he could have seen all that. But he was of the medicine people.
Later the same year—September 28, 2005—Michael Bastine called to tell me that Ted Williams had passed away in Asheville, North Carolina. It was a shock, since Ted had seemed in such good health. Michael was leaving early in the morning to be with Ted’s southern family and friends. Memorials closer to home on the Tuscarora Reservation hadn’t even been scheduled. We talked just a few minutes about Ted and all the elders leaving the world. The closeness—and the loss—was far greater for Michael than for me.
We closed, though, with him consoling me. “Ted’s working his medicine all over, now,” he said.
On the Rez
In August 2004, I went to the Tuscarora Reservation fair to meet Mike and Pam Bastine. I never found them. It would have been easy to miss someone. The grounds around the fair were ample, and a string of trees, if not a clump of woods, seemed to frame every area of the event—school, parking lot, fairgrounds, baseball diamond.
I walked among the displays and activities. I listened to music, looked at art, and threw tomahawks. I didn’t mind being with my thoughts. As I strolled along a line of trees at the edge of the fairgrounds, two small parties crossed paths.
The first was a tiny wagon train, headed by a bandaged, older white guy in a motorized, off-road wheelchair. He was smoking a cigarette through a mouthpiece, hooked by fluid-filled tubes to a big contraption in back. I presumed the device was a filter for the cigarettes, and that the man was dying from cancer caused by the smoking he couldn’t quit. Another little cart trailed him, linked to his wheelchairwith chains and cables. It had to be oxygen. Two female companions, probably wife and daughter, pushed and steered the procession.
Three Native American men cut across the path of this unwieldy group. Hidden by the trees as they’d approached, they made their entrance laughing at the punch line of a joke and hurled themselves into visibility like an assault team. One of them tripped on a tree root, tumbled on all fours like a bear, and laughed the louder.
An old Native American man I hadn’t noticed before was standing beside me. “Ah,” he said contentedly to the air, “the white man shouldn’t do tobacco, and the red man shouldn’t do alcohol.”
I walked and looked around a bit more and gave up on finding my friends. As I headed for my car, two young Native Americans came toward me out of the parking lot from the east. They looked about fourteen. One was probably five-three and 120 pounds, but the other was bigger and of a very distinctive body type. So much of the boy’s mass pushed up under his straight shoulders and thick upper arms that he was surely destined to become one of the bear bodies I had seen among the Tuscarora men. The lad had on a black T-shirt with a bit of orange on the collar. Tipping up a bottle of a colored drink, he was grinning at something his friend had said.
Five minutes later and two miles away, I drove past two young Native Americans on the north side of the broad, sunny road, coming back toward the fair I had left. The smaller of them I didn’t notice as I drove by, but to his left was the big boy I had just seen at the fair. The same black, orange-collared T-shirt, even the same gesture: smiling, raising a drink. It was him, or an identically dressed twin.
Only a helicopter could have gotten that kid where he was so quickly. I stared as long as I could, even craning to look back when I passed him. I couldn’t have been mistaken. I was reminded again of the aura of the surreal that surrounds every one of my visits to a reservation.
When Michael asked Mad Bear how much of his success was due to the ingredients of his remedies and how much to psychic and psychological factors, he said that just about all of it was in the mind. He chose to use things that helped him focus his own healing powers or that of his patients. Maybe it’s all in the mind.
Maybe there’s no difference, anyway, between the witch and the medicine person. Maybe it’s all how they do their stuff. But make no mistake about it: There are power people now and “doing work” as you read. Many of them are mature, humble-looking Native Americans. Almost none are out to impress. They aren’t all saints, and they have their troubles. Some of them struggle with their
