A WHISTLE AND A WORD TO THE WISE

Traditional Native Americans have considered birds their allies for at least ten thousand years. Birds bring many blessings and play many roles in the life of indigenous people. They are messengers, healers, communicators, guardians, life changers, teachers, meteorologists, musicians, storytellers, role models, and more. Few books have ever been published that even mention this fact, yet nothing could be more important to the Native people I interviewed for this book than their spiritual relationship with birds. While several writers have mentioned the significance of feathers in shamanistic rituals and powwows, the meaning attached to these feathers derives from a much deeper and older tradition, one that is harder to catalogue. That would be the living spiritual tradition surrounding the relationships that Native people today cultivate with living birds. It is a key to understanding Native culture.

I am not an ornithologist, and this is not primarily a study of birds but of people who love birds. It should require no great quantum shift in the paradigm of the reader’s mind to acknowledge that countless Native Americans have these beliefs and see birds as messengers, or oracles, to use a European term. Therefore, the fundamental basis of this study is anthropological, and I hope it will be a significant, if long overdue, contribution to this field. We could stop there and simply enjoy these amazing stories as figments of the primitive shamanic mind. John Burroughs, for example, loved birds and was a keen observer of their ways, but he consistently prevented himself, in the name of science, from attributing human intentions and thought processes to birds, and I respect him for that. He truly advanced the universal and objective understanding of these remarkable beings. Birds are rather different from us—their thought processes still a mystery, their emotions alien to ours in many respects. Nonetheless, I would like to ask the reader to put conventional science aside, to forgo the conceit of objectivity, and enter a realm where birds, whether inspired by departed human or divine spirits or their own compassion, are able to reach out to us and communicate with us—for a moment or for a lifetime.

Perhaps we can enter directly into the heart of shamanic experience itself where the barrier between man and beast is removed for a moment in the midst of ritual. I ask you to join me on the other side of anthropology, the wild side where there are no books or laboratories, only direct experience, as seen through the eyes of the numerous Native Americans (and their friends) I queried. I invite the reader to put aside learned skepticism and embrace innate faith instead, a faith that simply acknowledges the possibility that we might in fact still be able to enter into a shared space of divine communication and mutual prayer with birds and coexist as equals with our two-legged relations, as Native American teachings suggest.

Native American elders have taught me that “birds pray at dawn.” We can hear their fervent voices as they greet Grandfather Sun rising in the east. It is interesting that when a medicine man named Grandfather Turtle taught me to pray in Mi’kmaq he said that it was good to say, “I am standing here, now, Creator. I am Chipmunk!” (Neegeh, ga’ami, Geezoolgh! Neen Abachbahametch!) According to ornithologist Gisela Kaplan, bird vocalizations at dawn seem to say “I am here and I am a [starling, nightingale, or any other species].”^1 *1 That similarity, to me, is stunning.

Based on the field interviews I conducted with people within the Native community for this book, it is clear that a living, dynamic tradition still exists concerning our spiritual relationship with birds. A strong case can be made that successful interspecies communication still does occur between individual birds and individual humans, in this case Native American humans. Beyond this point of agreement stands the wild frontier of numinous mystery.

Is there an actual “language” that birds and Native Americans share at times in order to communicate? Can birds actually communicate telepathically with Native elders? Do they have anything to say? Can they guide us, warn us, teach us, tell us the future? Or are birds simply able to become vessels for a higher power or powers, or departed human spirits, and reach out to us as humans? Can local and cosmic deities cause birds to materialize before the faithful as they pray for help, in answer to their prayers? Can some humans develop the ability to consciously enter into the mind of a bird, inhabit its body, and actually observe things at a distance and send messages to loved ones and, if so, continue this practice after death? Don’t answer until you’ve read the stories that follow.

The interview material recorded here brings up these puzzling questions. It is doubtful that they can be answered using the scientific method. There are four epistemologies or pathways by which we determine our beliefs and values: science, philosophy, religion, and mythopoetics. The latter three may be more helpful in this case. Native American culture has a tradition of careful observation that is scientific in spirit, but it also has a philosophy that emphatically grants equality to all species, though expressed, perhaps, in different ways. It includes various forms of the Red Road, the Native American concept of the right path in life, and of spiritual teachings that embrace the quest for enlightenment (neoline in Lenape), the realization that we are all one, that we all (animals included) have a soul, a place on the hoop of life. A wealth of Native stories and songs reinforces these beliefs, carrying within them deeply buried clues of ancient secret teachings about birds that most have forgotten. If, in the manner of the ancient Greeks, Westerners could cease to be solely attached to the pathway we call science and return to philosophy, religion, and mythopoetics, using them in combination with science, we might find verdant acres of common ground with indigenous people and might even come to similar conclusions.

At its roots, Native bird spirituality is shamanistic; it has a distinct similarity to worldwide core shamanism, as understood by Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell, and this pathway to understanding is not rational. At its ancient and most powerful root, shamanism involves a return to the animal state and a rejection of much that is human. As Grandfather William Commanda explained to me, “You have to believe in the birds, believe with all your heart. Only then can they show you all they have to share, only then can they change your life.” He said these words in an emotional moment after being visited by twenty-five golden-colored doves who came to his window an hour earlier to announce my arrival with a special message.^*2

Shamans use trance, such as achieved in the shaking tent ceremony, the sun dance, the sweat lodge, the long fast, and in certain nightlong dances. These trance states help the shaman drop the barrier that has grown up between animals and humans in the last five thousand years. When it drops, the medicine person sees what birds see, hears their thoughts, feels as they feel, and understands their concerns. In this open state, according to the shaman’s solitary path, they see the past and the future and see what is going on at a distance and in the spirit world. They can even see glimpses of the Creator, “he who dreams us into being.” It is then that their words become unimaginably powerful, their thoughts become manifest the instant they think them. They are able to heal others by touch, by word, or by inner travel through spiritual dimensions. They can communicate with the overlighting spirit of an animal or bird and ask for its help. This is the belief that Native American ceremonialism holds. This is not to say that each of the persons I talked to tried to reach this state, but it’s not necessary that he or she does so. Native spiritual practice was clearly developed over millennia by powerful teachers who had experienced such a state many times—Sweet Medicine, Deganawida, Masa’au, Tecumseh, Seattle, Tamanend, White Buffalo Calf Woman, Sitting Bull, Neoline, Wovoka, Sequoia, to name a few—and the culture is imbued with this holistic type of understanding in which there are no brick walls or cage bars between species. Anyone deeply involved in such a culture will sooner or later stumble into some kind of heart connection or mind link with a living bird or animal.

Depsimana (also known as Katherine Cheshire) medicine helper of the last fully traditional elder of the Hopi, Dan Evehema,^*3 commented, “Birds do it all! They play many roles in Native American society, and the elders have entrusted their vast knowledge—about birds and other traditions—to certain young people, who must now carry this information onward into the digital age.”2 Elaine Henwood, Ph.D., was a friend and student of the charismatic elder Rolling Thunder for several years. As she recollects, he would look for and discuss signs and omens with her every day, and many of them were bird signs. The variety of the species and the intricate nature of the signs involved was, in Elaine’s words, “overwhelming to me sometimes.”

Henwood said that to Rolling Thunder everything that happened during the day was filled with meaning. He saw no firm barrier between the physical and spiritual worlds, or between what we call science and what the Native Americans call sacred knowledge, except that the Native view is more expansive and explains more of what we experience during our lives here on Earth.

U.S. law recognizes aspects of Native American spirituality as religion and has placed that religion under the protection of the Freedom of Religion acts.^†1 This brings up an interesting point. If birds are an essential part of Native American religion and in fact sacred to that faith, how do we leave unchallenged the destruction of bird habitats across the continent—not to mention the birds themselves—without protest?

If prayer, communication with the Divine in a ritualized format, constitutes the heart of a religion, and Native Americans pray to the Creator and other divine beings, believing as they pray that a bird may come and give them their answer, then isn’t it true that anything that harms that bird or causes it to change its course or even its behavior (as they generally communicate nonverbally) is an obstruction to religious freedom? Some Native Americans, as we shall see, believe that the primary function of birds within ritual practice is to either come as messengers in response to prayer, or to materialize before them for the same purpose. Shouldn’t there, at the very least, be areas created where no technological threats to birds would be found for miles around, areas where Native Americans can pursue religious fulfillment in safety? It sounds easy, but it is now harder than you would think.

Certain Cheyenne paintings show how prayers caused living birds to manifest as expressions of higher powers and cosmic forces invited into the ceremony. How can anyone believe such a thing? John the Baptist understood that the white dove that appeared over Jesus’s head as the two met at the Jordan River was a materialization of the Holy Spirit in bird form and was therefore the sign that Jesus was the Messiah, the leader of the Jewish people. It was John’s recognition of this bird sign that led many people in that time and place to almost immediately accept Jesus as a great teacher.^*4 The Sermon on the Mount that followed attracted a great multitude, and yet it was Jesus’s first great lecture. How did that happen? Because of the bird!

Today, the distance between bird and human, not to mention that between spirit and society, is widening. Nissequogue Raymundo Rodriguez says we have forgotten how to become birds and other animals. We have forgotten how to dance hawk, dance crane, dance mouse. He told of a man who would attach feathers to his hat and jacket and dance like a crane in front of actual cranes so that they would produce more eggs. He would bounce and weave and strut like a crane and must have gotten the steps right, because people claimed he could get his birds to lay more eggs than any others. “No animal or bird has a human totem. It’s we humans who look to them for our power,” he says, dramatically. “On the powwow circuit we have more and more social dances, but that’s so human. We used to dance birds and animals and become them. The first stage of shape-shifting is to dance the animal. You want a ‘power animal’? Go dance!”3

When one says bird, the first thing people think of is cage, but by caging a bird we deprive the world, and ourselves, of its healing and its messages. It is mainly wild birds that have the freedom to live, move, and have their being as messengers of spirit. Caged birds don’t behave the same way, and yet that is how modern humans prefer their birds, locked up. I heard a story of a smart parrot that broke a splinter off a piece of wood in its cage, then picked the padlock on the cage with the splinter and broke free. The padlock was placed there because he had broken all the previous clips, locks, and handles that had kept him confined in the past.4 The reader will find many similar stories in the section about parrots. Birds don’t love being locked up any more than you or I would. They were born with wings so that they could fly.

The problem modern people have with bird signs is that you can’t always turn them on and off like a radio. Sometimes one may go for months without seeing a bird sign. This can be frustrating, but it is probably a sign that everything is fine. One can’t pay a bird to deliver a message like a carnival card reader. They hold all the cards and have no need for money. Fasting, the making of offerings, and praying for a bird message from the Creator has worked well for shamanic healers for thousands of years, but few want to fast any more or wait for up to three days for an answer, and birds are getting scarce due to environmental hazards and loss of habitat.

TEK, or Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and TIK, or Traditional Indigenous Knowledge, are terms that have made inroads into the scientific community these last five years due to the pioneering work of Robin W. Kimmerer, Ph.D., and others.^*5 Traditional Bird Medicine (TBM) is an important part of that wisdom. Although not all the material in this book is scientific in every aspect, every aspect of it could prove useful from one or more academic perspectives sooner or later. The roots of sociology, theology, linguistics, musicology, and literature cannot be fully understood without understanding early human tendencies to mold society, song, and religious beliefs in accordance with bird behavior. There is a distinct possibility that Native American mound burials, for example, such as those at Fort Ancient in Ohio, were first built in imitation of birds. One woman swears that she observed a flock of blue jays create a mound burial out of leaves and sticks and other available debris to cover a fallen comrade lying on a public sidewalk. Debbie Bahune, my great aunt Helen’s granddaughter and former assistant, has seen a different kind of crow funeral: a large number of crows perched in the surrounding tree branches and circled around the corpse of one of their own, lying in the grass.5

TBM is not intended to be a complete system for making all life decisions. To depend on Bird Medicine for decision making is to place yourself at the whim of a little character with very little brains but lots of cranial air space. This is not wise. Few if any Native Americans rely exclusively on bird signs. There are dozens of other types of signs that can stand in the gap: weather, clouds, animals, dreams, plants, trees, casting of stones, casting of cowrie shells, children, planets, patterns on buckskin, images in water, voices, visions, and on and on. Great sachems, or chiefs, relied mainly on information their scouts gathered and then used their own logic, convictions, sense of right and wrong, or gut instincts to make decisions. Oracular methods are helpful when conventional information is unavailable. A human can ask for a bird sign, but even after the tobacco (or cornmeal) offering is properly made, it is something that comes at the most unexpected moments and is not under most people’s control. Bird messages are almost always “out of the blue,” like the birds themselves. I present this information to readers so that when the realization strikes them that they have just received an urgent message from a bird, they will be well informed and better able to interpret the message. These warnings and news bulletins come from a very different world than ours, but they could some day save our lives and steer our futures toward a better pathway, a closer walk with the Great Spirit, in harmony with this garden of earthly delights we have been given.