Fort St. James Shaman: straddling the twilight plan

Incantations thick with the rhythm of the Carrier tongue, evoking ages past and worlds unseen, penetrate the silence of a crisp and sunny morning. I stand in my Fort Saint James kitchen, buzzed-out on espresso, barely able to believe the events unfolding on the front verandah…

My neighbor is a traditional Carrier healer. He'd just brought me a freshly shot blue grouse this refreshingly cold morning. Briefly pondering the gastronomic possibilities, before settling on Andalusian partridge, I was plucking the remaining feathers from its plump and soon-to-be savory breast, then vigorously rubbing it down with a sherry-pepper mixture.

Suddenly my Epicurean reverie was interrupted the phone. An extremely agitated woman from up the road was looking for my neighbor. Her 29-year-old daughter had had a stroke the night before.

For weeks the daughter had been fraternizing with people from a remote community renowned for its high incidence of ’practitioners of the dark arts’…sorcerers! Her mother was worried that one of these fellows had enchanted her daughter, causing the stroke. She was calling upon my neighbor to dispel the evil wrought on her daughter’s poor head.

Ten minutes later, mother and daughter arrived. The daughter’s facial muscles had slackened and she fidgeted, giving the impression of painful embarrassment. Respecting all people involved, and the cultural practice, I stayed inside, drinking espresso and preparing the bird, while a millennia-old shamanic ceremony took place on my verandah.

Curiosity prevailed; I peeked out of the window. I saw the backs of heads, hands painting pictures in the air, and loose tobacco blowing in the wind.

A while later, all three came in. We shared some words, then mother and daughter left for the hospital. I found this strange at first, but in retrospect maybe it's just our penchant for trying both alternative and conventional medical treatments.

A couple of days passed. I learned that the stroke was actually Bell’s Palsy. Bell’s Palsy involves paralysis of a facial nerve, usually affecting one side of the face. Most of the afflicted recover after a few weeks. Sure enough, a few weeks later, the young woman had fully recovered.

Whether the enchantment caused the Bell's Palsy remains uncertain; but at least she recovered.

The shaman straddles a twilight plain between this millenium and another. As diviner, healer, sorcerer, and sage, the shaman stands as intermediary between this world and the spirit world. The term shaman is adapted from the Tungus (an indigenous Siberian language) term 'saman', which translates as 'wise person' (Eliade 1964). ’Shaman’ is the accepted term among western researchers and lay-people describing many types of traditional spiritual practitioners.

Early ethnologists viewed the shaman with intrigue, respect and disdain (Narby 2000). Some even went as far as to diagnose the shaman as “neurotic, epileptic, psychotic, hysterical, or schizophrenic” (Lewis 1971). Others simply dismissed the shaman as mentally deranged (Devereux 1956).

In western culture, insanity is viewed as a frightening impairment. The afflicted are condemned to a life at the periphery of society, heavily medicated, incarcerated, and shunned. Similarly, the shaman occupies the periphery in traditional societies, is often feared and in several Amazonian groups, spends a lot of time under the influence of psychoactive tobacco and an hallucinogenic concoction called ayahuasca (Harner 1973). The important difference is that in western societies, the insane are dismissed, whereas in many indigenous societies they are given the important task of spiritual intermediary. The disdain some early ethnologists felt towards shamans can be considered a reflection of their attitudes towards mental illness and indigenous spirituality.

Does the shaman have a role to play in this fast-paced, high-tech information age?

I answer with an emphatic: “Yes!” Indigenous cultures are disappearing at an alarming rate. One factor responsible for this is the level of cultural aggression associated with colonialism. In Canada’s north, many early colonists were missionaries with a mandate for souls. Indigenous spirituality stood in diametric opposition to the Christianity of that time. In the early days, priests and nuns wagged fingers of hellfire and brimstone in the direction of aboriginal peoples. Due to the residential school experience, some community members even repress cultural knowledge that may be associated with ’witchcraft’; be it sweat-lodges, traditional healing, or plant use. The shaman represents a storehouse of repressed traditional perspective, which can serve not only as cultural affirmation, but as a scion from which a new tree of life can spring from the dying branches of antiquity.

(Keith James Williams lives in Ft. St. James. He is a member of the writer's group.)

References:

Devereux, G. 1956. Normal and Abnormal: The Key Problem of Psychiatric Anthropology. In: Some uses of Anthropology: Theoretical and Applied, The Anthropology Society of Washington, Washington, D.C.

Eliade, M. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Arkana, New York.

Harner, M.(ed.).1973. Hallucinogens and Shamanism. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Lewis, I.M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion: An anthropological study of spirit possession and shamanism. Penguin Books: London.

Narby, J. 2000. The Cosmic Serpent. Tarcher/ Putnam: New York.

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