Big Medicine from Six Nations by Ted C. Williams

Author:Ted C. Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815654230
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2017-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

Freeman Sowden

I was at the Six Nation Reservation in Canada, learning to do a ten-day feast for families of dead people, and the teacher was named Harry Henhawk. He had only one arm. At some point he told me a story. We were discussing how any particular cure was ever first discovered. I suggested that maybe the law that says that the more dire the illness or the situation, the faster the Medicine worked—that maybe the desperation or the urgency to do something in a person of compassion put out vibrations that called in the needed Medicine.

“Yeah! Yeah!” Harry interjected, “I think you’re right. I know a man that did just that. Freeman Sowden. He’s Cayuga.

“I happen to go with him to see the horse show at the Paris fair [Paris, Ontario]. While we were there, a white man came up to him and asked him if he was Freeman Sowden. The man had been to Freeman’s house, and his wife had told him that he was at the fair with a one-armed man, so that’s how he found us.

“The man begged Freeman to come with him and see something. He took us to his automobile, and inside was a small girl with a sack over her head. He took the sack off, and when he did, I thought I had never seen a more terrible sight. The girl’s face was a mass of scabs and pus.

“The man said that he had taken his daughter to great doctors all over the world, and none had been able to cure her, not even find out what was wrong with her.

“Freeman looked the girl over for quite some time, but he didn’t say anything. Then he just stood there like he was watching something way out past the parking lot. He had his eyes shut. After a while he told the man that he thought he might help the girl, but that the girl would have to live at Freeman’s house for at least two weeks, maybe longer.

“The man didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to tell people who would ask about his daughter that she was living with some Indians. But what could he do? So he finally said he guessed it would be alright.”

Harry Henhawk shook his head. Maybe we all can call a Medicine. Did Freeman have something more than we do? More compassion?

I told him about the great shrinking of a huge tumor at Monawaki by the injection of human tears. Were they special tears? Were they from someone of great compassion? How do you gather them? If you see someone crying, do you say, “Wait, let me get a bucket and catch your tears?” Uncle Charley cried a lot while praying for people, and he certainly had compassion, or there wouldn’t be any tears to gather.

But there was more to the story about Freeman Sowden curing the scabby girl. Whatever the Medicine was that came to Freeman, it worked, and the girl became completely cured in two weeks.

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