Grandmother's Wisdom

Drum horse

My interest in women as healers and mystics goes back to my childhood. I well remember the late fall mornings I spent at my grandmother’s place on the prairie of Saskatchewan. She was an Ojibwe, and her two-room home was built from hewn jack pine logs chinked with mud. The roof consisted of round poles covered with moss and mud. Outside there were tall grasses and wild berries everywhere, and I would accompany her into the woods to gather the special fruits, flowers, twigs, and roots she needed to make her strange and mysterious healing concoctions.

As we followed the narrow trails that only my grandmother knew, she pointed out each edible plant: chokecherries, cranberries, gooseberries, blackberries, raspberries, violets, mints, chickweed, and all kinds of mushrooms. As we sat on boulders by the side of a stream, she told me stories handed down by her people—tales about Old Lady Nokomis, the owner of herbs, and her grandson Nanabush the shape-shifter, who changed at will from a tree trunk to an entire willow tree, then into a beaver, a deer, or a fluffy white cloud; stories about witches called “bear-walkers” who traveled about at night inside glowing balls of light.

My grandmother—whose name was also Nokomis—was raised and practiced as an herbalist and a midwife among Anglo-Canadians as well as with Ojibwe and Cree peoples. Her first husband, like herself, was a member of the group of healing shamans known in English as the Great Medicine Lodge, or in Ojibwe as the Midewiwin, meaning “mystic drum doings.” She bore him five children before he died; then to support herself she traveled around the provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba visiting schools, churches, and community centers and teaching herbal healing, storytelling, and massage to anyone who was interested.

For “selling” her traditional knowledge, and for healing whites as well as natives, her relatives disapproved of her. My cousins called her a witch and ran whenever they caught sight of her long braid dangling over her basket, which overflowed with peculiar roots and leaves.

Even though she often dressed in black—she wore a long-sleeved blouse, ankle-length skirt, and black shawl with purple fringe—I knew she was neither a witch nor a sorcerer. Her medicine was good, not evil.

But now I’ve come to think perhaps she was a witch—in beaded moccasins. After all, women healers long ago were known as “witches,” a word that came from Old English witan, which meant “to know” or “to be wise.” Like my grandmother, witches were the wise women who had a special knack for revealing life’s mysterious truths. I still remember her explaining that our thoughts and emotions overlap and intermingle, and that this mixing of head and heart connects us to future events hidden in the dark womb of time.

My grandmother was a nonconformist, and as her second husband she chose a Scots-Irish traveling salesman whose life she had saved after a moose-hunting accident. By treating his wound she earned not only his gratitude but also his deep affection, and together they had six children.

My mother was the youngest of them, and she had no interest in learning traditional ways. She left for college and afterward married my Irish-American father. A short time later I was born.

Despite my mother’s attempt to distance herself from her heritage, I loved to spend summers with my grandmother. She greeted my curiosity about the spirit world with respect and encouraged my questions. And she asked me about my dreams.

(continue with Dream Prophecy)