Mike had to laugh. “That was Mad Bear. He never was one to let something go by like that. He’d pull people aside privately and talk to them, but if that didn’t do any good, he went right to the next step in a hurry. He must have done some kind of ceremony up there. I think he had help from Peter Mitten on that one.”
He speaks of it like he saw it. “When they touched that bulldozer with an eagle feather and in a prayerful way, it wouldn’t run again. [The whites] had to scrap it.”
CALLING THE ANCESTORS
The ancient inhabitants of Europe often built and sited their religious monuments and power sites to make them fall along straight lines, often across several miles of landscape. These imaginary connectors—straight lines linking sacred sites—were called “leys.” They may not have been used much as pathways.
Sometimes the leys themselves made patterns with each other. One equilateral triangle, six miles on a side, formed by leys was discovered by British astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer (1836–1920). One of the monuments on “The Great Triangle of England” is the famous Stonehenge.
The prehistoric Native North Americans had their leys, too. One of the most remarkable is a sixty-mile long trackway between two similar circle-and-octagon earthworks in Newark and Chillicothe, Ohio. Nicknamed after the moundbuilding cultures who produced it, “The Hopwell Highway” was almost surely a ceremonial path. We’ve been able to document very few leys in Iroquois country, but there must have been many. They were most likely used for ceremonies and vision quests, as well as marking sacred sites. They were made with vision and care, and the users altered the landscape with little but footprints.
The Iroquois were always suspicious of New York’s massive “point A to point B” projects: canals, railroads, highways. They never did anything intrusive without carefully considering the local ground. “Don’t you realize what you might be stirring up?” the elders would say to the state authorities. “It could be burial ground, battleground, sacred ground. You don’t do this stuff with a map and a ruler.”
Most of the oldest roads in New York followed Native American transportation trails. Spiritually speaking, those roads would have been all right for travel; their use disrupted nothing of sacred significance. The main streets of most of our towns were once these footpaths. They were simply widened into cart tracks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then paved for the use of cars in the twentieth. But countless new ones have been made, with no regard for local tradition. They include vastly intrusive interstate projects.
A couple of highways that go to and around Syracuse are only decades old. A lot of grading’s been going on in this heart of the Iroquois territory, and not all has gone according to plan.
Cutting In on the Rez
When Michael Bastine was a boy, some highway work was done near Syracuse. He remembers hearing that it was work on I-90, but it might have been the mid1960s expansion of Route 57 into 481, which crosses I-90 and arcs the city on the east from the south to the northwest. The eastern 481 certainly comes close to the sacred Green Lake.
“Whatever path they were taking was going to cause some kind of interference or damage,” says Michael. “And it wasn’t just because they were cutting in on the rez. The Onondagas knew something was under there, and it wasn’t going to be good for anybody to mess it up.”
The Onondaga tried talking to the state authorities. Road construction kept up in the meantime, with two crews a day. The potential pathway was already graded and covered with crushed stone when Cayuga medicine man Peter Mitten and his student Mad Bear answered the call. “And I mean, on the medicine level,” says Michael. They told the Onondaga that they were going to call upon the ancestors. This was one of the heaviest ceremonies they could do.
“This was done with a lot of forethought,” says Michael. “They went to the Onondaga elders and asked permission to call up the dead on their territory. They looked at the stages of the moon and whatever else. They did all the proper ceremonies beforehand, announcing their intent. They went around the day before and told everybody to stay inside after sundown and not come out until daybreak. They told people to keep a special eye on children and their animals, who could be much more sensitive to the medicine.” Then they asked the dead to walk.
People in their homes felt the effects. Some heard sounds, a horde of footsteps walking on the loose stone. Others opened their shutters after dark and saw a faint migration of pale shadows and trees rocking though no wind was blowing. It wasawe-inspiring—and terrible. “When Mad Bear told you this story, you got goose bumps,” says Michael. It lasted into the early dawn.
The first crews to show up early that morning caught an eyeful, we hear, and immediately left work. In the words of a witness who talked to Michael, “The workers messed their pants. Stones were rolling as if people were kicking them.”
“I knew Mad Bear could use the energy of other people,” says Michael. “I’d seen him do it a lot of times. What came clearer to me later in life was that Mad Bear had done it with the dead.” He shakes his head. “That’s never done lightly. You don’t go, oh, I think I’ll call the ancestors tonight.” The course of the Thruway had to change, with a bow in it that doesn’t show on the big state maps. It may have shifted its arc only a quarter mile.
“The old cultures hang on to that
