Pritchard - Bird medicine: the sacred power of bird shamanism

BIRD
MEDICINE

Evan Pritchard has put together a wonderful book showing how we mammals have learned and still learn from birds. History, history, history! And future possibilities.

PETE SEEGER, AMERICAN FOLKSINGER

Bird Medicine is wise, informative, folksy, and eminently readable. The narratives are clear and detailed, and Mr. Pritchard, noted scholar and author on Native American cultures, has the credibility to present them, being both a traditional insider and an accredited Western scholar. Even more important, this volume fills a major gap in our knowledge of the natural myths of the Americas. I can see this book becoming required reading for secondary schools all over the country.

E. H. RICK JAROW, PH.D., PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES
AT VASSAR COLLEGE, FORMER MELLON FELLOW
IN THE HUMANITIES AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, AND
AUTHOR OF IN SEARCH OF THE SACRED
AND CREATING THE WORK YOU LOVE

Bird Medicine is a beautifully blended culmination of the sacred and the scientific. With content ranging from the ornithological to the philosophical, from the historical to the heartwarming and humorous, Bird Medicine delivers a satisfying array that entertains as much as it enlightens.

AMY KROUT-HORN, AUTHOR OF MY FATHERS BLOOD
AND COAUTHOR OF TRANSCENDENCE

Birds have many practical and transformative things to say to us if we will only listen. Evan Pritchard has fashioned a masterwork of insight and inspiration distilling the wisdom of these winged spiritual teachers as interpreted by Native Americans in stories and rituals.

FREDERIC AND MARY ANN BRUSSAT, COAUTHORS OF
SPIRITUAL LITERACY: READING THE SACRED IN EVERYDAY LIFE
AND PUBLISHERS OF SPIRITUALITY & PRACTICE

Eagles, ravens, hawks, owls, crows, and other birds have always played a crucial role in Native American shamanism. In this remarkable book Evan Pritchard demonstrates why these spiritual traditions consider birds to be sacred, giving numerous historical accounts, personal stories, and traditional legends that illustrate the special place that birds have in the hearts and minds of tribal men and women. Pritchard is a master storyteller; each of his vignettes is a source of wonder and fascination. Bird Medicine is a book that his readers will find impossible to forget.

STANLEY KRIPPNER, PH.D., PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY
AT SAYBROOK UNIVERSITY AND COAUTHOR OF
PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY AND THE VOICE OF ROLLING THUNDER

Evan Pritchard has an instinct for bringing the spirit of the Original Peoples into his scholarship, its fresh breath of wisdom still intact. This book combines bird lore with Native American shamanism in a truly unique way. I celebrate the latest release of a very original thinker.

STEPHEN LARSEN, PH.D., AUTHOR OF THE SHAMANS DOORWAY
AND COAUTHOR OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL: A FIRE IN THE MIND

In Bird Medicine, Evan Pritchard has surpassed his previous books. Not only is his book enjoyable and informative, it is also quite scholarly. Though he is, in his own words, not an ornithologist, he teaches us a great deal about the habits and patterns of many familiar birds.

ELSPETH ODBERT, CERTIFIED SHAMANIC PRACTITIONER AND
AUTHOR OF OUT OF THE FOREST AND GYLANTRAS LEGACY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank deeply everyone who has helped bring this book into being, starting from around New Years 2010. It was at that time I got the call from a concerned environmental leader asking me on behalf of Native elders to help birds in their struggle to be free from the little-known but disastrous effects of recent technology. This book is one of the by-products of that conversation. I would also like to thank Jon Graham at Inner Traditions for asking to publish this book and to matchmakers Alex and Allyson Grey and Stephen and Robin Larsen for nudging me to say yes. I especially thank all the amazing elders from all over North America who have taken time from their duties to help me with this project. I hope they find it was worthwhile. A special welalin (thank you) goes to my big sister, Lynn Pritchard, for being the wind beneath my wings when it comes to birds. I could not have written this without her and the teachings of Grandfather Turtle. I also thank our mother for teaching us to respect birds as our equals, and perhaps our betters. I also thank those that passed on into the spirit world, continuing their help on this book undaunted by the mere detail that we call death: Patrick Pritchard, William Commanda, Shoshana Rothaizer, Blessing Bird, Oannes Pritzker, Roland Mewer, Shirley Tanner, Carol Bruchac, Jake Swamp, and Sagamore Mike, not to mention earlier teachers now gone but somehow present: Twylah Nitsch, Archie Cheechoo, Joseph Campbell, William Mewer, Helen Perley, and others.

My aunt Helen Perleys influence was monumental. How lucky I was to have contact with her and share in her knowledge at such an early age. She was the first one to say to me, Im a Mikmaq, and that makes you one too. Theres nothing you can do about it! You might as well enjoy it! And I did! I appreciate now the invitation she had just given me, a welcome into a disappearing world that she was struggling mightily to preserve, in all its varying levels of authenticity. She always thoroughly enjoyed herself throughout all her cultural battles to preserve Maines Native history; by the time I was hanging around, she had become an icon of all that was right and good about Maine. Her ability as a septuagenarian, and later an octogenarian (and even later a nonagenarian) to translate Bird Medicine effectively to the reporters and photographers that followed around this Mikmaq woman of the Miramichi has been one of the major inspirations for this book. The experience of watching her communicate with and heal birds when I was fifteen is one I will always cherish. It has taken me forty years to find a way to thank her. This book is that thank you.

I would like to thank Jan Henriksen for giving us permission to use his snowy egret photo, proving my sisters tall tale to be true; David Pritchard for helping me clean my birdcage; Jeanie Levitan of Inner Traditions for her literary vision; Jessica Wimett for her bluebird optimism; Peri Ann Swan for hatching such an uplifting cover design; Whitney North Seymour, the distinguished white eagle of avian jurisprudence; Gabriel Seymour for her work on behalf of Native and avian civil rights; Dina Jaeger, the patron saint of all Native American bird activists; Dr. Joseph Bruchac for immediately confirming the scientific and ethnological value of this proposed work, based on his forty years of groundbreaking experience in this field; unsung genius Alan Wells for his amazing photos, whose love of birds speaks louder than words; Moonfire Studios for their tireless work slaving away at graphic design, helping to bring Alan Wellss photos to this edition; award-winning photographer John DeSanto for getting a crow council to pose for him; the Audubon Society of Rockland County, New York; Drs. Dennis Hastings and Margery Coffey for their important Omaha insights about crows; Dr. Michael Gillen for editing the manuscript in its early stages; Becky Spear for capturing the seagulls of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, on film; and the wild Quaker parrots of Edgewater, New Jersey, for giving new meaning to the words live free or die. As there are so many others to thank for their timely and strenuous efforts to benefit all creatures great and small, I will present the rest of the names alphabetically. If I forgot one or two, you know who you are.