THE LIVER TREE CURSE
Twentieth-century shaman Mad Bear Anderson was a spiritual crusader. He felt, as do Michael and I, that one of the best ways to improve the conditions of the Native Americans was to raise the consciousness of the world. As a way of accomplishing this, Mad Bear believed in uniting Native American nations in shared goals and in involving people of all origins in Native American causes. His inclusiveness helped him make his point, but it didn’t work for all parties. Some Native American purists may have thought it just divided and watered down the message. Some who opposed his message surely worked against him. Many of his confidants openly believed that Mad Bear was involved in an occult cold war that now and then heated up. He was the occasional target of group attacks.
Mad Bear had lived in a couple of different houses on the Tuscarora Reservation, and at all of them he did a lot of medicine work. People who knew him wryly called each of his homes Fort Knox because of the reinforcement of the walls and the points of entry. It was widely presumed that any place Mad Bear lived needed to be fortified: When he went on his astral journeys in the form of a bear, his material body lay inert and vulnerable. Those who wanted to hurt him would never get a better chance.
It was also presumed that his homes were protected in another way, too—with medicine. His enemies were not only going to strike in material ways. In fact, the material attacks were probably only signs that the metaphysical ones had failed.
Mad Bear took special precautions, especially against what couldn’t be seen. He had a couple of False Faces looking out for him, but from all we hear, he left nothing to chance. All the unusual artifacts that came with them were potential avenues for spells and curses directed against him, thus he took special ceremonial care of his place, particularly the doorway. He put medicine at the symbolic entrances, too, the windows, keyholes, and hearth, by which supernatural influences might also make their entry. He redid the work a few times a year. Still, it didn’t stop people from going after him.
An Odd Mad Bear Story
In the late 1970s, when Mike was just getting to know Mad Bear, he heard an odd story from one of their mutual friends. The friend and Mad Bear had just stepped out of the latter’s cabin on an early November twilight when they looked up into a tree at something odd and terrifying.
A grisly thing roosted like a balloon in the high, frail branches, so raw and biological that it could have been an internal organ. It looked “like a liver,” said the man who saw it. It was twitching and making strange sounds: gurgling, coughing, hissing, like it was trying to breathe or even speak without a mouth.
“Uh-oh,” said Mad Bear. “I know right away what I got to do.” He ran into his cabin and commenced a mighty rite. He didn’t let his friend even watch or listen. The process for Mad Bear was a long one; it took about half an hour.
When he came back out, he walked right up to that tree, still decked with its biomorphic bauble, and started talking to it in Tuscarora. The friend reported that words in a ghastly, hissing voice came back to Mad Bear from somewhere inthe same language. When he was done with his inquisition, Mad Bear dismissed the thing with a backhanded, open-palmed gesture like a karate slash: “Get out of here, and go back to who sent you.”
The man reported that the strange organ rose higher in the branches of the tree as if it were losing gravity by the second. A breeze caught it, and it drifted out of the branches and soared off like a weary helium balloon. He could see the thing dangling its tubes and veins till it drifted over a hill.
Before long there was a reaction. Some Canadian Mohawk suffered such a plague of accidents and illnesses that they were sure Mad Bear had witched them back. They started calling him, writing him, and pestering him to take his medicine off them. “I can’t do anything about this,” Mad Bear told them. “It’s what you sent after me. I just turned it around.”
Next they tried to bribe him, even promising to deliver an envelope full of money to his mailbox every week. “Why are you wasting my time?” Mad Bear said. “When you start things, you better be able to stop them.”
At about this time Mad Bear started getting a reputation as a man of power, and this incident may even have been the start of it. Those Mohawks weren’t quiet. They told everyone who they thought was after them. To this day, some people still think of Mad Bear as a witch.
Michael suspects that the curse had started with some Canadian Mohawks, possibly acquaintances of the healer Daisy Thomas. They’d gotten it in for Mad Bear because of some political dispute, wangled some medicine out of Daisy, and launched an attack, most likely without her knowledge. “They had to be beginners,” says Michael. All of them learned a lesson. One may have lost his life. For quite a time, envelopes full of bills kept appearing in Mad Bear’s mailbox, even though he said he didn’t want them.
THE DUST DEVIL OF BOUGHTON HILL
The Celtic people of Europe associated the wind swirls and dust devils we see now and then with the passage of the Good People, the Fair Folk, and other names applied to the fairies. To them, their own Little People were powerful but not inherently negative.
Among many Native Americans, particularly of the Southwest, these curious natural wind forms were dreaded,
