Witch doctor. Medicine man. Devil’s disciple. Shaman. They’re all pejorative descriptors glowing with hidden meaning that suggest black magic, sorcery, insanity and irrelevance in the civilized Christian world.
Yet, in the primitive world that greeted European explorers to our shores some six centuries ago — folks like Columbus, Cortez, Pizarro, Cabot, Raleigh and Champlain to name some — Native healers and spiritual leaders were the wise men, often selected at a young age when they displayed signs of extraordinary intellect. These child prodigies of sorts were identified and quickly taken under the wing of old shamans, who taught the deep tales, songs and lessons, and the “old-ways” secrets of plant medicine, ceremonial landscape, the sky, the waters, the people and the spirit world.
Upon being introduced to such men, the European explorers and missionaries, who were sometimes burdened with fellow travelers who were very sick, slipping toward death and desperate for help, were often astonished when they were “miraculously” cured by some decoction of roots, bark, seeds, berries and who knows what else. They’d watch these medicine men, clad in full-feathered regalia, dance and sing and chant and hiss and blow tobacco smoke toward the ill man during formal ceremony, and most often cure them.
Such accounts show up in the early annals of the Caribbean and Central and South American jungles and mountains, and they are retold clear across the North American Manifest Destiny paths travelled by the likes of Lewis and Clark without a doctor. Yet, once the land was occupied and settled by the interlopers, their leaders quickly eliminated the wise men who had saved them, executing many by fire and fury to clear the way for evangelical Christian cleansing. With these wise old shamans went their indigenous knowledge, their songs and their deep-history tales of the land they called home dating back at least to the Ice Age.
The Northeast, New England and our Pioneer Valley is just such a place. Here, sadly, the deep Native American history has been virtually erased by rapid diaspora following King Philip’s War nearly 350 years ago. With the people who called the Pioneer Valley home went their knowledge of the land and the deep-time stories thereof.
Sure, we can probe the “history,” geology and archaeology of our place. But all that’s left of the old ways and deep-time stories of our indigenous past is worn, faded and barely discernable, presented largely in Christianized versions molded to western interpretation and templates. That includes the tales told by late 19th- and early 20th-century Native American chroniclers, such as Penobscot Joseph Nicolar — “The Life and Traditions of the Red Man (1893)” — and Iroquoian Arthur C. Parker — “Seneca Myths and Folk Tales.” The fact is that these tales, told by men who still spoke their Native tongue, are about all we have left here in the Northeast, where books like the popular “Algonquin Legends of New England,” by Charles Godfrey Leland are suspect at best. Still, though, you do get bits and pieces, hints and clues, which is better than nothing for anyone interested.
There are other circuitous routes to cultural data about our indigenous Algonquian people who left so long ago. The route I have found most reliable is the study of West Coast and Prairie Native American culture, which was available for case studies into the 20th century. Anthropologists and linguists such as Jaime de Angulo and Catharine McClellan, and poets like Gary Snyder, open windows into these Native American cultures. Brian Swann also has recorded many ancient tales in his trilogy of books on Native American literature. Swann’s literature is translation of oral history recorded in the Native tongue by antiquated tape recorders many years ago and still archived at the Smithsonian Institute. The goal was to capture the language before it disappeared, and also the stories.
Swann’s anthologies and the work of de Angulo, McClellan and Snyder provide many insights and address iconographies from Western cultures that are often valid here as well. No question, turtles, bears, birds of prey and snakes were creatures of high spirit and symbolism here and there before European colonization. Surely, the role and function of Prairie and Western medicine men and midwives shared many similarities with what would have been found in a Pocumtuck village circa 1600. However, by the time the recordings were taken, Native American leaders were reluctant to give a full accounting of their prayers, songs and midwifery practices due to the active campaign to separate them from the culture through mandatory assimilation programs.
Believe it or not, even studies of South and Central American indigenous cultures can bear fruit relative to similar and sometimes nearly exact spiritual practices and beliefs found here in New England and the Northeast. I recently read Jeremy Narby’s “The Cosmic Serpent,” which I found helpful, having long ago read the likes of Tobias Schneebaum, Pierre Clastres and Mark J. Plotkin, all of whom lived with primitive Stone Age tribes in South or Central America.
The beliefs and cosmologies of these people and North American indigenous people seem to follow similar paths. And why not, if they do indeed all come from the same bolt of cloth — that is, people who arrived here up to 50,000 years ago by way of the Ice Age Bering Strait land bridge connecting Asia to Alaska. At least some of the New World people arrived here by that route and migrated to all points of the compass. So why would they not share spiritual and cosmic beliefs, and many of the same stars, galaxies and animal symbols?
These peopling-of-the-New-World topics bring us to an appropriate transition to my paleontologist friend Richard Michael Gramly, a scholar who introduced me to some of my aforementioned anthropological sources and paid me an overnight visit Thursday. These days, the man’s preoccupation is in the novel concept of human hunters’ predation of extinct mastodons and wooly mammoths. His current focus fits snugly into the Bering Strait hypothesis, especially with his recent find of paired caribou antlers at a 13,000-year-old mastodon kill-site south of Lake Ontario in upper New York State.
First, he thought his personal rare excavation of 17 caribou antler fragments at the site in 1982 was coincidental, that is, unrelated to the mastodon remains. But wait a minute. That’s changed. During recent inspection of additional materials collected by archaeologists at the same site two or three years later, lo, he discovered another antler, this one intact, completing a matching pair of Y-stick antlers, a ubiquitous symbol of fertility in the ancient Old World.
Given that traces of human remains were found nearby, Gramly concluded at first that the paired, Y-stick antlers had been part of a headdress in a shaman’s burial outfit. Now, after consulting experts, he has come up with another possibility. Perhaps, he says, these antlers were part of a ritualistic shrine, with antlers stuck upright into the ground along the outer edge of a circular stone fire pit. Such shrines have been uncovered in the Old World. So, why not here? Remember: the word shaman originated in Siberia, which is connected to that old Bering Strait land bridge.
So, that’s all for now, concluding with an enticing little tease. Stay tuned.