Bastine Michael - Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Approximate Positions of Todays Cities

1. Niagara Falls
2. Rochester
3. Syracuse
4. Oneida
5. Saratoga Springs
6. Canadaigua
7. Auburn
8. Buffalo
9. Albany
10. Ithaca
11. Jamestown
12. Salamanca
13. Elmira
14. Binghamton

INTRODUCTION

The Iroquois Supernatural

Reaching Beyond the Sacred

The Native Americans known collectively as the Iroquois have had an impact on world destiny out of all proportion to their numbers and territory. They have been deeply admired for their leaders as well as for their national character, their League of Six Nations, and their simple moxie, but they have had a hold on so many far-flung imaginations that isnt easy to explain. People all over the world who have no particular interest in anything Native American have found themselves strangely haunted by these industrious, adventurous, mystical Iroquois. What could be the source of it?

The Iroquois are unmistakably and for all time native North Americans, but they might be unique even among their native New York neighbors. Something drew these five, then six nationsthe Cayuga, the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Seneca, and latecomers the Tuscarorainto a single distinctive unit, this outfit we call the Confederacy, the League of Six Nations.

Enough books have been written about the character and history of the Iroquois. This book is devoted to the supernatural traditions of these first historic New Yorkers, from as far back as we can trace them, to the present day.

Figuring out what to include in this book has been tricky. Where do you draw the line between miracle and magic? Between religion and spirituality? Between the sacred and the merely spooky? This book doesnt try to choose. How could anyone?

All religions are at heart supernatural. Throughout history most societies have had both a mainstream supernaturalism and others that are looked upon with more suspicion. The out supernaturalism is often that of a less advantaged group within the major society. What the mainstream culture calls sacred is its supernaturalism; terms like witchcraft are applied to the others. Someones ceiling is anothers floor, and one cultures God is anothers Devil. To someone from Mars, what could be the objective difference?

Although all Iroquois supernatural belief may seem superstitious or magical to some observers, Iroquois society itself makes its own distinctions between the sacred and the spooky. Still, one often overlaps the other.

Dhyani Ywahoo, Mad Bear, the Dalai Lama, and Michael Bastine in Dharamsala, India, in 1980

This book is not about the sacred traditions of the Iroquois. It is a profile of the supernaturalism external to the religious material recognized as truly sacred. This is a book largely about the out stuff: witches, curses, supernatural beings, powerful places, and ghosts. It includes things on the spiritual side: healings, power people, visions, and prophetic dreams. Some of the material is historic, archaeological, and anthropological. Much of it is as alive and current as a paranormal report.

Algonquin coauthor Michael Bastine and I have written this book from the belief that one of the worlds great spiritual traditions is that of the Iroquois, and that its been under the radar for too long. A broader familiarity with Iroquois traditions would help world spiritualityand hence the world.

We also believe that the world might develop more sympathy for Iroquois causes if it knew the Iroquois better.

The partnership between us is an equitable one. I did most of the book research and keyboarded the words. The voice of the narrative is mine. Michael, a highly respected elder, trained with many people mentioned in this book. Vast stretches of its wordsand most of the wisdomare his.

MASON WINFIELD

AND

MICHAEL BASTINE

The Longhouse Folk

You must forgive me, therefore, for not always distinctively calling the creeds of the past superstition and the creeds of the present day religion.

JOHN RUSKIN,
THE QUEEN OF THE AIR

THE IROQUOIS

In 1609 on the west bank of the lake named for him, French explorer Samuel de Champlain had the white worlds first encounter with the Iroquoissymbolically, a violent one. Two hundred Native American strangers had cheerfully attacked a much larger party of Algonquin, among whom Champlain stood. They were bold, confident, and well-formed men, Champlain reported, and he made an impression himself. At the first blast of his gun, three attackers fell dead, including two chiefs. The rest scattered at their first experience of firearms.

When Champlain asked the name of these scrappersalmost certainly Mohawksthe Algonquin called them a word that sounded like Iroquois, which meant something like real snakes. It was an indignant term, but it held respect. Another possible derivation for the word Iroquois, pointed out by archaeologist Dean Snow, is Hilokoa, a pidgin Basque/Algonquin name meaning, the killer people. Then, as now, they were admired as warriors.

The Iroquois called themselves Haudenosaunee, People of the Long House. They were a union of five, later six, nations who held most of New York state at the time the Europeans arrived.

The Iroquois were hunters, farmers, and warriors. They lived in small, semipermanent villages across most of what is now upstate New York. Their influence ranged far beyond. Their greatest arts were things they could carry with them: their songmaking, their storytelling, their language and their use of it. It was in the last capacity that the Six Nations folk so impressed the white world. The best of them were the greatest orators any European had ever seen.

The Iroquois were never numerous. Sir William Johnson estimated in 1763 that there might have been ten thousand of them. Two centuries later, Edmund Wilson figured that there were about double that number of mostly Iroquois people. In the 1995 New York census, 62,651 folks chose to call themselves Iroquois, which is still only about 0.3 percent of the states population.

Because of their political unity and prospects of empire building, the Iroquois were nicknamed the Red Romans. They may have been on their way to controlling a continent at the time the Europeans landed. Power brokers in all the colonial wars, the Iroquois helped shape the North America we see today. Their League of Six Nations has often been considered the model for todays United States, and thus of democratic unions all over the world. Its no stretch to suggest that the Iroquois were the most influential Native American political body that has ever been.

ORIGINS

The origins of the Iroquois are still debated. Until recently most historians envisioned the ancient Northeast along the model of Dark Ages Europe: a borderless, nationless land mass in which culturally distinct bodies of peopletribespushed each other around or ate territory whole. The Seneca scholar Arthur C. Parker (18811955) thought this way at the start of the twentieth century, envisioning the boundaries of Iroquois NationsOneida, Cayugamoving across the map of prehistoric New York like cloud shadows along a ridge on a gusty day.