In 1995, Ted Williams was visiting his boyhood home on the Tuscarora Reservation. Nearby was a grove he remembered well. Every time he walked through this place as a boy, something had made him hear and envision the False Faces. The effect was strong when he came back as a grown man. As if there were an eternal procession taking place in some other realm, the Faces and their rites flickered into his awareness—sometimes close, sometimes dimly.
Knowing as he did the imprint these mighty healers can leave on anything they touch, he thought this grove might have been one of their ancient sacred meeting spots. As a False Face healer himself and a deep sensitive, he ought to have known. He never told this to anyone.
A party held at Ted’s former home included Native Americans who lived off the reservation and worked “white” jobs. The guests represented all attitudes toward the spiritual and traditional heritage of their people. A group of them had gone for a walk in the grove that had impressed Ted, and had heard such eerie calls that they ran back completely spooked. Ted was on the porch as they came in. He drew the story out of them when they caught their breath.
Some imitated the cries they’d heard, and Ted recognized it as one of the traditional calls of the False Face healers. But not all had heard the same sounds. He asked each of them in more detail about their perceptions of the calls in the wood.
Some identified one or two forceful voices, natural-sounding calls that may have been made by human jokers having a game with them. Others heard a variety of voices in various parts of the wood. To the rest, the scene was textured with similar sounds made at different volumes and pitches and coming from all around them.
Not knowing how to make sense of the mystery, Ted next asked them about their levels of belief in Native American spiritual practice. He asked them to rank their faith on a scale and made careful note of who said what.
He found that those with little belief were the ones who had heard only a pair of callers whose voices sounded natural. Those who believed at the middle level heard many tones, volumes, and sounds. To the last, the group with the greatest belief, the whole wood seemed alive with synesthetic mystery and hidden, ancestral calls. For them, the grove was as rich with invisible, supernatural chanters as an August evening is filled with the earthly chirps and clicks of squirrels or peepers.
In seconds, the answer came to him. “This is good,” he told all his guests. “The Faces have just given you a lesson. That’s the way it will be with the teachings of your ancestors. That’s the way it will be with the good of the world. The more belief you have in it, the more of it you’ll see and receive. Don’t forget that the rest of your lives.”
6
Supernatural War
When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful, disintegrative influence upon the white psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts. . . . One day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for . . . There are terrible spirits, ghosts, in the air of America.
D. H. LAWRENCE, FROMSTUDIES IN AMERICAN CLASSICAL LITERATURE
DIRECTED CURSES
As we’ve seen, the old-timers among the upstate Iroquois believed in the effect of curses. The curses and countercurses we have seen discussed in earlier chapters have generally been due to the actions of living power people, and directed against other living individuals with direct, specific, and usually short-term goals. There seem to be other types.
In fact, it seems clear from the reports we hear that the collective orenda of a nation or a site could be involved in contemporary psychic complaints. It could be aimed at anyone on one side or another of a dispute. It could affect anyone living or anyone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Its energy could come home to roost with those who mishandled the sites, bones, or artifacts of even the ancient dead.
This is a chapter that is not about supernatural duels, but supernatural war. It is about collective attacks, ones that can come with the force of whole nations, the dead, or even, seemingly, the land itself; they may not be exclusively things of the past. Why would the psychic force of an Iroquois clan or nation get agitated enough to lash out? The impulse might seem counterintuitive to many mainstream Americans: it often has to do with politics.
Many Americans see things in black and white when it comes to politics. Those who share their viewpoints appear hip and sinless, while those who don’t look bumbling and ill spirited. To folk who see no gray areas and know the subjects of the last two chapters, it ought to be easy to predict what the Iroquois medicine people will do in any dispute: They should only mobilize around traditional and spiritual causes on behalf of all Native Americans; they would never dirty their hands with something as gritty as gas, gambling, or tobacco.
In fact, for the Iroquois, it’s silly to think that politics could be separated from any other aspect of human life, including the traditional and the spiritual. Whenever there’s a dispute on the reservation big enough to involve group interests, the power people get into the act, often on both sides. Ted Williams told us this from personal experience. It
