SPIRITUAL AND CEREMONIAL PRACTITIONERS, SOUTHEAST

Spiritual and Ceremonial Practitioners, Southeast

Whether one uses the term medicine man, shaman, healer, conjurer, or priest—all have been rejected, both by scholars and practitioners themselves—the Southeast presents a dizzying variety of traditional spiritual specialists. To take but one culture, some labels in the Cherokee culture are adawehi (“one who goes about freely,” magician, conjurer, counselor, wiseman), kuniakati (wound doctor; lit.: “he follows the arrow”), uku (priest; lit.: “owl”), nunnehi (Little People, fairies, immortals, and those who communed with them—for example, Beloved Woman Nancy Ward [Nanyehi, Ghigau, or Tsitunagiski, ca. 1738–1824]), dinadanu(n)wiski (conjurer, healer, curer), and (a)tskili (witch, owl, shape-shifter, sorcerer). All healers ascribe their powers and any success they may have to a gift from the Creator. There were also some highly specialized practitioners, such as eagle-feather gatherers (Cherokee) and bone pickers (Choctaw Buzzard Cult).

The most powerful practitioner in the prehistoric Native world was a Southeastern woman. Big Jar (Ko-ke-lus), queen of the Calusa Indians in Spanish Florida, was reputed to know the secrets of the ages. She was summoned by the Natchez Indians to cure unfamiliar diseases introduced by the French, died at the age of 110, and is buried in a mound built for her palace on the Tennessee River, near Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.

Until the American Indian Freedom of Religion Act became law in 1979, the practice of Native religion and ceremonies was illegal in the United States. Traditional healers and seers were trained secretly, often under the guise of learning card tricks. Apprenticeship could last seven years or more, and enormous feats of memory were required. Today many practitioners are dying without having trained a follower.

Chief Billy, a Seminole healer, was employed as a consultant by the pharmaceutical industry because of his vast range of knowledge concerning herbal drugs. However, by the time his pharmacological virtuosity was tapped in the mid-1990s, the majority of the plants known to him were no longer to be found growing anywhere.

Southeastern tribes are credited with having introduced tobacco (a Cherokee monopoly, used extensively as an antiseptic until the last century), goldenseal (which grows best in the Blue Ridge Mountains), ginseng (traded to the Chinese since the Han dynasty), and echinacea (the term is thought to derive from the Cherokee language). Southeastern tribes also understood the concepts of hygiene and holistic, diagnostic, and preventive medicine.

Herbs were not named or classified as in Western science, nor were they thought to have only one beneficial principle or to operate on just one part of the body. Most uses were regulatory, systemic, and restorative. Herbs were divided into men’s and women’s medicine. Confusingly to modern people, the same name might be used for a dozen different species; only an herb walk with the practitioner will sort them out. For instance, in Cherokee, tsoliyusti can refer to mullein or any tobacco-like plant.

The difference between a spiritual healer (shaman) and herbal healer (often “root doctor”) lies in their respective tool chests. The former invoke spiritual forces and helpers to defeat the spiritual and material causes of disease, often traveling to the upper or lower world and suffering a symbolic death. Varieties depend on the different spirit guides, helpers, powers, experience, training and divining abilities. For instance, there might be a spirit healer with spider medicine. All are trained as the sole successor of a master healer and are usually chosen early in life. Herbalists drew on their knowledge of plants, prescribed in the form of smudges, teas, tinctures, topicals, and powders, and often chewed, applied with spittle, blown through a tube, or otherwise applied in a hands-on fashion. Significantly, their knowledge is proprietary and hereditary, often commanding handsome fees.

Dhyani Ywahoo (Etowah Band Cherokee) claims to be the twenty-seventh of her lineage to practice her particular philosophy of spiritual wellness. According to her book, she was instructed by her grandfather, Eonah Fisher, who received the teachings from his father-in-law, Eli Ywahoo. Vernon Cooper, a Lumbee “faith doctor” alive in 1995, is a good example of the combination of the two types of practice with Bible Belt Christianity. Many traditionalists became ministers of the Gospel, whether out of sincerity or subterfuge. For instance, Black Fox (Enola) of Wolftown, North Carolina, became a Methodist minister in 1848.

Conventionally, a diagnosis is first performed, the traditional fee being one dressed deerskin. Later this was commuted to a blanket. Most scrupulous practitioners operate on the basis of permission. If they do not have spiritual permission to heal, or the treatment is not within their scope of activities, the deerskin is returned. A diagnosis may take several days. The traditional answer to repeated queries is “I have taken it to the spirit lodge.” The religious basis of all Native medicine is thus apparent. Moreover, treatments work in the original (sacred) Native language only, though some would say they work best that way.

Every nation, tribe, clan, band, and family maintained its own specific remedies. In this respect, Southeastern Indian society was egalitarian and nonspecialist. The woman was usually the guardian of a family’s nostrums. Every individual knew the virtues of a handful of herbs for self-medication. Nearly everyone carried a medicine pouch with at least some tobacco, a protector stone or fetish, and a snakebite cure. The occupation of healer was rarely pursued as one’s sole livelihood but rather combined with being a farmer, hunter, and warrior.

Nicolas Chiviliu Tacaxoy, the Tzutujil Mayan shaman described in Prechtel’s Secrets of the Talking Jaguar (1998), ran many businesses in his hometown of Santiago Atitlan in Guatemala, becoming a principal chief and one of its richest citizens. Typical of his profession, he was said to have been a high liver, not particularly saintly or even honest, and with many enemies.

A certain degree of showmanship or magic went with the turf. To keep a parrot, even among northern Indians, was a medicine man’s privilege, equivalent to hanging out a shingle. In prehistoric villages, the shaman’s lodge was often on the edge of town; he was regarded as irascible and antisocial. Sequoyah was disliked. Yet the practitioner’s standing in the eyes of the village could rise very high. In many tribes, the roles of priest and king were united. One of the time-honored duties was purifying young men for the warpath and conferring military decorations upon their return. European soldiers had standing orders to shoot the “medicine men” and “witch doctors” first, the effect proving most demoralizing.

Shamanism is international, and there appears to be a silent code of recognition and cooperation among its practitioners. You might have a convention of shamans from Africa, South America, and Siberia, and they would all understand each other. Mooney notes conjurers’ exchange of secrets, mercenary interests, and competitive tensions. When Cherokee medicine men learned that the Potawatomi had lost their lands and possessions, they set out from the Tennessee mountains to bring herbs, formulas, and ceremonial objects. By the same token, Indians in the Southeast were open to revivalists from other tribes. The Plains Ghost Dance religion popularized among the Cheyenne and Sioux by Wovoka, a Paiute, can be traced to Cherokee antecedents in the age of Dragging Canoe and White Path. Native religion was thus ecumenical and synthesizing.

The range of an old-time Cherokee shaman was large. In 1887, Mooney’s principal informant, Swimmer (Ayunini, d. 1899), had a 240-page book of old prayers, songs, and prescriptions covering the following subjects: herb gathering songs, medicine preparation songs, divination, worms, chills, rheumatism, frostbites, snakebites, black and yellow bile, childbirth, wounds, bad dreams, witchery, love charms, fishing charms, and hunting charms (for which he charged patients $5 apiece), as well as prayers to make corn grow, to frighten away storms, to drive off witches, to destroy life, to help warriors, to know one’s place of death, for long life, for safety among strangers, and for acquiring influence in council and success in the ballplay.

A Muskogee medicine man from modern-day Oklahoma, Marcellus Williams (Bear Heart), was able to produce snow for a Colorado ski resort and cause choking fits from a distance in those with evil intentions. Rolling Thunder (John Pope, Cherokee, 1916–1996), a brakeman for the Southern Pacific Railroad during most of his life, cured a woman of multiple sclerosis; acted as spiritual advisor to pop singer Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead rock band, and Muhammad Ali; and caused it to rain on several Western Indian reservations. Jamake Highwater (probably Cherokee, foster name Jay Marks, ca. 1932–2001) was a prolific artist, crossing many boundaries, from poetry and philosophy to dance, music, and film.

Paul Russell (Two White Feathers, Tihanama-Potawatomi-Shawnee-Cherokee, b. Saginaw, Michigan, 1938), an elder of the Thunderbird Clan of the Tihanama people of middle Tennessee and southern Florida, is a spiritual healer, herbalist, principal chief (since 1990), storyteller and teacher, ceremony chief, conjurer, traditional grass and straight dancer, keeper of seer traditions, amateur astronomer and geophysicist, painter, leather worker, jeweler, mechanical engineer, computer programmer, third-level Midéwiwin Lodge priest, flute and drum maker, songwriter, singer, composer, recording artist, stone carver, potter, mask and mandela maker, knife maker and gunsmith, bow and arrow maker, and woodworker/carpenter. His wife, Penny Russell (Ojibwa-Seminole, b. Isabella Indian Reservation, 1939), is a Bear Clan mother, women’s spiritual workshop leader, weaver, jeweler, beadwork artist, dreamcatcher maker, and dream consultant.

Space forbids describing divination processes among seer-healers or the paraphernalia used by them. However, one might mention crystals, cowry shell beads (which came from the Pacific), stargazing, snake handling, rattles (of gourd for men, tortoiseshell for women), drums (always one-sided for a shaman), mad stones, medicine sticks, protector stones, spirit brushes, tobacco, and greenstone pipes. Clients today are most interested in knowing about love matters, dream interpretation, and where they will die, most indigenous people being convinced that the time and place of their death is fixed and unalterable.

Donald Panther-Yates