Communal and Personal Quests of the Northeastern Woodlands

Largely subordinated to priestly ritual in sedentary cultures of the Southeast, the shamanic quest remained central to more mobile peoples of the northeastern United States and adjacent regions of Canada. As early as 1612 the Jesuit Father Pierre Biard described the wild Montagnais and other Algonquian tribes of a newly discovered New France (Kenton, 1:23–24) as practicing a religion of "incantations, dances and sorcery" in which "medicine men . . . consult the evil Spirit regarding life and death and future events." Other Algonquian and especially Iroquoian peoples lived in settled communities and cultivated corn, beans, and squash; for the Iroquois League, Morgan recognized (199), hunting had become "a secondary, although a necessary means of subsistence." Yet even in their sturdy longhouse villages the restless mobility of a recent past lingered on, especially for more nearly nomadic males who prided themselves on dominion in war. Communal values were strong, as in all tribal societies, but many northeastern peoples, especially in the Algonquian hunting tradition, were nonetheless strongly individualistic: the traditional Ojibwa, Landes observes (1968, 14), "brooked no laws that clashed with his whims" and took joy "in sabotaging the social game."

Collective ceremonies played a major role here as elsewhere in North America. The Iroquois in particular mapped out a familiar trail amid the uncertainties of daily existence in an ancient cycle of calendrical rites renewed in the early nineteenth century by the Seneca prophet Ganeodiyo, or Handsome Lake. Among less complexly organized Algonquian tribes communal festivals were seldom so elaborate, but some, like the annual Big House of the Delaware (or Lenape), with its representation of the soul's journey along the Milky Way after death and its kindling of new fire symbolizing renewal of life, were highly developed (Speck 1931).

Both Iroquoian and Algonquian rituals prominently included public ceremonies by curing societies. The Iroquois Company of False Faces not only healed individually but "conducted a public exorcism of disease . . . and ill luck of all kinds" each spring and fall, shouting terrifying cries as they visited each house in grotesquely carved masks and frightened away disease spirits (A. Wallace 1970, 81–82). The Huron, who seem never to have practiced regular calendrical rites (which the kindred Iroquois may have adopted from southeastern tribes since the seventeenth century), devoted the winter Ononharoia, or "upsetting of the brain," to curing illness by communal enactment of dreams, and several societies performed public dances to heal disease (Trigger 1969, 96–99).

Such collective rites, bearing clear traces of ancient shamanic practices, continued to be performed by the Iroquois despite the initial opposition of Handsome Lake, into whose reformed religion they were eventually assimilated.

Among Algonquian peoples, who almost entirely lacked fixed agricultural ceremonies, communal ritual centered on the society the Ojibwa called the Midéwiwin, whose initiatory rites climaxed in shooting each candidate with the sacred shell that killed and revived him. Midé priests inscribed their myths in pictographic characters on birch bark scrolls (see Dewdney), and these, like the sacred formulas of the Cherokee, gave written sanction for ceremonies held to date back to the origin of the world.

Communal ritual, though much less developed than in the southern United States and Mesoamerica, thus played an important role in the Northeast, but both agricultural and curing rites may in fact have been recent developments. The supposedly ancient Algonquian Midéwiwin may have been a relatively late codification of ancient shamanic practices in response to European dislocations. Among many peoples, including Chippewa,^[2] Ottawa, and Fox, evidence suggests that until the eighteenth century, when the Midéwiwin emerged as a solidifying tribal tradition for Ojibwa groups dispersed by the European fur trade, "medicinal and magical practices were in the hands of shamans, individual practitioners" (Hickerson, 76–79). Iroquois medicine societies, too, give ritual form to "shamanistic behavior once free and innovative," as described in seventeenth-century accounts of the Huron before such societies regulated individual shamans (Fenton 1978, 318). The communal rituals recorded during the last three centuries by white observers may therefore have been in large part a defensive response to disruptions introduced by the whites themselves.

Major central Algonquian rites unmistakably suggest shamanistic affinities. The Delaware traced their Big House ceremony to dreams revealed to ancient tribal leaders (Speck 1931, 18), and recitation of dreams was central to it (85). Its leader, as observed by M. R. Harrington in Oklahoma (1921, 92), was not a hereditary custodian of tradition but a visionary "in communication with the supernatural world." The Midéwiwin, too, not only seems to have originated later than the guardian spirit quest among the Ojibwa (whose northern tribes seldom performed it), but retained important affinities with it. Hoffman (1891, 192) noted that its songs, far from being fixed, vary with the singer's inspiration,

[2] "Chippewa," a corruption of "Ojibwa" accepted by the Bureau of American Ethnology, is either a synonym for Ojibwa or more specifically designates southwestern Ojibwa tribes living in the United States.

and Densmore remarked (1910, 13) that exactness is not obligatory in a ritual whose details vary in different localities. The Midéwiwin, Landes suggests (1968, 42), was thus "an academy of shamans" whose prestige rested mainly on visions (79).

Even the relatively fixed agricultural rites of the Iroquois may have been originally dictated by dreams and could be altered by them (Tooker 1970, 33), and despite its sacrosanct "code," Handsome Lake's Gospel has no one canonical text but varies with each recitation (Deardorff, 101). But the mobility—and the impulse to transcend the socially given—of the shamanistic quest survived above all, among the Iroquois, in rites of the curing societies which Handsome Lake's reforms could not abolish. The grotesque masks of the Falseface Company were modeled on dreams, and like sacred clowns elsewhere, these performers delighted in saturnalian inversion of their culture's values. In this masquerade, Edmund Wilson remarked (238), young and old, male and female, inseparably mingle with "a certain sense of liberation."

In a ceremony observed by Wilson (290–307) on the Tonawanda Seneca reservation in June 1959, the questing impulse of shamanism manifests itself still more clearly. Members of the Little Water Company, keepers of a medicine able to revive the dying, sing together several times a year to keep up its strength. Suddenly the lights are switched off: "The room with its Corn Flakes had vanished: you were at once in a different world." A man and a woman are searching for the Little Water by which the animals have brought back to life the mythical Good Hunter known for kindness to them, and taught him a wonderful song in their language. The animals congregate, and in "the climax of the symphony" guide the questers to a mountaintop from which the marvelous song emanates: "at the top they find a great stalk of corn growing out of the barren rock, and from this stalk comes the song that has drawn them." Its bleeding root instantly heals, and the seekers learn from the animals to mix the miraculous medicine. "In each of the first two sequences, the songs all follow a pattern; but in the third, they begin on unexpected notes and follow unfamiliar courses. This is magic, a force beyond nature is tearing itself free," and with this climactic liberation "a paean is let loose: it fills the room with its volume. One finds oneself surrounded, almost stupefied."

The quest for the Little Water thus ritually enacts a people's continuing transcendence of its given condition through communal search for its deepest sources. The adepts of this ancient medicine society whose rites Wilson found flourishing in twentieth-century New York State "have mastered the principle of life, they can summon it by the ceremony itself. Through this, they surpass themselves" (310).

Wilson remarks (310) on the closeness of the Iroquois, even today, to

the animal world, and many forms of hunting magic, including bear ceremonials, have been widespread, as among the Ojibwa (Hallowell 1960, 159), throughout the Northeast. Transformation between human and animal was thought to have frequently taken place, at least in mythical times, as enacted in masked dances and curative rites of secret societies such as those, among the Iroquois, of the otter, buffalo, and bear. Healing as well as hunting might derive from identification of humans, through ritual propitiation, with beneficent animal powers; this too was a common form of the quest for transcendence.

French Jesuits repeatedly marvel at the credence given to dreams in New France. Father Brébeuf, in the Jesuit Relation of 1636 (Kenton, 1: 264–65), calls the dream the "oracle" and "principal God of the Hurons." Among both Huron and Iroquois, dreams were thought to express wishes of the soul, and attempts were made to carry out their commands to the letter, sometimes by curative ceremonies whose overt sexuality dismayed French visitors. In the Huron andacwander ceremony recorded by Father Lalemant in 1639 (Kenton, 1:388–89; cf. Trigger 1969, 118–19), a dying old man's dreams were fulfilled by public copulation of twelve girls and young men, with a thirteenth girl for himself. Dream spirits, often in animal form, were sometimes thought to transport the soul to distant lands, but even when the soul did not leave the body, dreams gave vent to its desires in accord "with the theme of freedom in the culture as a whole" (A. Wallace 1970, 74). Variation was continually introduced into communal ritual by individual dreams, introducing a "vibrant and creative" dimension into cultures such as the Huron (Trigger 1969, 118). Through the mediation of dream, ritual itself shared in the mobility of a soul forever being formed and transformed.

Father Le Jeune reports in the Jesuit Relation of 1639 (Kenton, 1:377–78) that the Indians of Canada distinguish several souls. "Some of them imagine a Paradise abounding in blueberries. . . . Others say that the souls do nothing but dance after their departure from this life; there are some who admit the transmigration of souls, as Pythagoras did"; but all believe it is immortal. Among some tribes the journey to the land of the dead became a dangerous quest across a roaring river bridged by a slender tree trunk (Blair, 1:377–78), past a giant strawberry and over a shaking log bridge (Kohl, 214–16), or through other perils. Spirit realms were potentially accessible not only to souls of the dead but, on rare occasions, to a daring few of the living, whose mythical quests bear eloquent witness to continuation among recently migratory peoples of the search for knowledge and power through personal communication with the unknowable beyond.

"Tales of the recovery of a beloved person from the land of the dead are common in North American mythology," and however much they vary in detail, "they are one and the same story," Gayton contended (1935, 263). In a Huron legend recounted by Brébeuf in 1636 (Kenton, 1: 258–60), three months after her death a man seized his reluctant sister's soul in the underworld and corked it into a pumpkin, placing her brains in another. Returning home, he retrieved her body from the cemetery and had almost revived it when a curious onlooker broke the prohibition against raising his eyes: "At that moment the soul escaped, and there remained to him only the corpse in his arms." In a tale of the Micmac of the Gaspé Peninsula and New Brunswick, recorded by Father Le Clercq in 1691 (208–13), a giant gives a father his son's soul to carry home from the land of the dead in a little bag; but a curious woman opens it, "and the soul escaped immediately and returned whence it had come."

Countless such legends, many strikingly similar to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, have been recorded in much of North America, indicating the high importance attributed to personal communication with the spirit world. Nor were such journeys possible only in a mythical past. "Many of our tribe have been there and returned," Kohl's Ojibwa informants told him (220–25), citing a living hunter who had overcome great obstacles in returning from the dead to care for his children; nearly a century later Hallowell (1955, 151–71) found that visits to the spirit world by the dead or dying still played a major part in the life of the Berens River Saulteaux, a hunting people of Ojibwa derivation living east of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba.

These tales perpetuate ancient shamanistic beliefs and possibly even seances aimed at reviving a dead person: according to Hultkrantz (1957, 240), "the Orpheus tradition may in its core be regarded as the text to a shamanistic act." In contrast to ritualistic agrarian ideologies, "its basic tone is individualistic, not collectivistic; it is founded on a shaman's ecstatic experiences, not upon the more sober therapeutic methods of a medicine society" (263), and it has been kept alive in North America—more perhaps than anywhere else—by the widespread guardian-spirit quest whose fundamental assumptions closely resemble its own.

The land of the dead in "Orpheus" myths is generally located near the setting sun. It is "a happy land" in a tradition created, Hultkrantz suggests (1957, 92–93), by peoples with a harmonious view of life and little terror of death. At least equally prominent in North American myth and ritual is a spiritual realm connected with the sky, and this realm, like the other (which is sometimes the same), may be the goal of a quest by the living.

The Onondaga and Seneca, two of the five (or six) Iroquois nations, believe they sprang from the ground (Morgan, 6–7), but such origin myths are as rare in the Northeast as they are common in the Southwest. The Huron "have recourse to the Sky in almost all their necessities," Brébeuf wrote in 1636 (Kenton, 1 :261), and among Algonquian peoples the Great Spirit and his delegates lived in the sky, and stories were told, Copway wrote in the mid-nineteenth century (152), "of some of these high born personages coming to earth to dwell among the people; also of men going up and becoming inhabitants of the skies." The Montagnais-Naskapi of Labrador believe, Speck writes (1935, 50), that souls are transformed into stars until they become reincarnated in babies.

The living, too, have access to this realm, and one main purpose of certain Algonquian rituals was to raise participants' souls to the heavens. Each day's performance of the twelve-day Delaware Big House "lifts the worship a stage higher in the series of twelve successive sky levels until on the final day it reaches the Great Spirit himself" (Speck 1931, 61). And the Ojibwa Midéwiwin incorporated "eight successive grades of curing—the first four called Earth grades and the second four called Sky grades—the 'power' rising with the grade," that is, with closeness to its source in the heavens (Landes 1968, 52).

Most Iroquoian peoples, Brébeuf wrote of the Huron (Kenton, 1: 250), trace their origin to the fall of a woman from the skies. In one version (251–52), Aatensic threw herself after a heavenly tree whose felling her sick husband dreamed could cure him. Turtle then bade other aquatic animals dive down, bring up soil, and put it on her shell, so that Aatensic dropped gently on an Island; her daughter thereafter brought forth two boys, one of whom killed the other. In later Iroquois legends the twins, "Good Mind" and "Evil Mind" in Parker's version, contend for influence in the human world, but the story is basically the same.^[3] Its major elements—the fall of a human progenitor from the skies, the creation of land from the waters by an "earth diver," and the exploits of heavenly twins—are widely paralleled in myths from different regions of North America.

Along the "path of souls," or Milky Way, the soul returns after death to its home, the transcendent sphere from which it has been partly cut off during life. Among the Iroquois, "a beautiful custom prevailed in ancient times, of capturing a bird, and freeing it over the grave on the

[3] For Iroquois versions see, e.g., Hewitt 1903 and 1928; Parker, "A Seneca Cosmological Myth" (1923), in Tooker 1979, 35–47; and Fenton 1962. On the "earth-diver" myth see Dundes 1962.

evening of the burial, to bear away the spirit to its heavenly rest"; on the invisible road to the sky, Morgan reports (174–76), "the soul ascended in its heavenly flight until it reached its celestial habitation."

Like its terrestrial counterpart this heavenly home could in exceptional cases be visited by the living (at least by mythical heroes) as well as the dead. A Seneca myth told to Parker (132–35) by Edward Corn-planter, a descendant of Handsome Lake's brother, gives clearer expression to the soul's quest for its celestial home than we have found in other Native American stories outside the Southwest. In old times, the youngest of three brothers suggested that they travel to the edge of the earth, where sky touches sea. Watching the sun slip under the rim of the sky, the two younger brothers ran under in time but the oldest was crushed, "and his spirit shot past the other two" (like Homer's Elpenor), meeting them on the far side where "everything is different." The father of the Sky people purified them by skinning them and washing their organs, and his son Haweníio sent them back to their country by the path of the sun. "The brothers did not care for the earth now, but wished themselves back in the upper world"; they were later struck by lightning, and killed.

In this myth of a realm beneath the western rim of the sky, the two seemingly distinct afterworlds of North American Indian myth are found to be one; at the liminal horizon earth and sky meet. This is the celestial (or subterranean) realm to which shamans, pre-eminently of the living, have been thought to have access from time immemorial, and even religious leaders who repudiated traditional shamans claimed a heavenly source for their revelations. Thus the Delaware Prophet of 1762–63 dreamed of receiving a divine message from the heavenly "Master of Life" (A. Wallace 1970, 117). Handsome Lake in 1799 envisioned a sky journey to the afterworld where he was told the moral plan of the cosmos on which his reformed religion was based (243). And the Shawnee Prophet, transformed into Tenskwatawa, "the Open Door" for his people's salvation, was borne to a spirit world and saw past and future in a paradise of abundant game and fertile fields where spirits of virtuous Shawnees could flourish (Edmunds, 33). However much Christian doctrine may have influenced these visions, their core appears to be the indigenous quest for spiritual transcendence variously expressed in medicinal rites, initiation ceremonies, and origin myths of Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples throughout the northeastern woodlands.

Various classes of traditional shaman coexisted among northeastern peoples, some obtaining power through visions, others by purchase. Among the Minnesota Ojibwa, Hoffman (1891, 156–58) distinguished not only the Midé priest but the wabeno, a visionary healer and fire-handler often associated with evil spirits, and the ecstatic jessakkid "seer

and prophet" commonly called a jongleur; similar distinctions have been made for various Algonquian groups.^[4] All except the Midé priests practice alone and appear to embody traditions of individual shamanism older than the Midéwiwin, which by communally sanctioning personal vision guided the questing impulse into more predictable channels.

Early French accounts make it clear that individual ecstatic practices as well as collective ceremonies were a widespread means of curing disease and probing the future. When a Huron is sick, Father Sagard reports (200–01), the medicine man manipulates hot stones and chews hot coals ("the deed of an unchained devil") and rubs, blows, or spits on the patient; both medicine man and sick person "make grimaces and utter incantations and throw themselves into contortions" until "the sick man appears quite mad, with eyes flashing and frightful to see, . . . throwing about everything that comes in his way, with a din and damage and outrageous behaviour that have no equal."

A few years later, in the Jesuit Relations of 1633 and 1634 (Kenton, 1:114–15), Father Le Jeune described how a Montagnais sorcerer treated both a sick child and himself. In ministering to the child he "howled immoderately" while whirling his tambourine, then blew on the patient's body, "as I conjectured, for I could not see what he was doing" in the surrounding darkness. And in treating himself he "acted like a madman," with truly Siberian frenzies, "singing, crying, and howling, making his drum rattle with all his might; while the others howled as loudly as he." After hissing like a snake, hurling the drum to the ground, and running round the fire, "he went out of the cabin, continuing to howl and bellow" in a display, the Jesuit missionary asserted, of "foolishness, nonsense, absurdity, noise and din."

Both the Franciscan Sagard and the Jesuit Le Jeune are among those who noted the use of sweat baths to induce ecstasy by Iroquoian and Algonquian tribes. Le Jeune's description of 1634 (Kenton, 1: 115; cf. Sagard, 197–98, and Raudot in Kinietz, 365) is especially reminiscent of Herodotus's account of Scythian vapor baths two thousand years before. "They plant some sticks in the ground, making a sort of low tent," and after heating it with red-hot stones, "slip entirely naked into these sweat boxes," where they sing, cry, groan, and make speeches while the "sorcerer" beats his drum and prophesies; nor could the skeptical remonstrances of the "black robes" diminish belief in their "oracle."

[4] See Landes 1938, 133, and Jenness, 60. Hoffman (1896, 138–61) distinguishes three classes of Menomini shaman: "jugglers," wábeno, and "dreamers." Generally in the Northeast, Ritzenthaler and Ritzenthaler write (101), "there were two types of shamans, whose concerns were primarily those of healing, and a third, whose art seemed to lean toward the darker side"; the first two (who sometimes coincided) were the conjurer or "juggler" and the sucking doctor, and the third was the wábeno .

Such descriptions confirm that curing and prophecy in northeastern North America required supernormal powers attained through ecstatic trance. Whether this condition implies departure of the shaman to distant realms in quest of power, or of errant souls, is less clear from our sources, in which frenzies of "sorcerers" tend to be considered diabolic possession. But the frequency of quests to the underworld or the skies in "Orpheus" tales and other myths suggests that the shaman's spirit was indeed thought to journey to transcendent worlds in search of a dead or dying person's soul, and similar beliefs persisted among some Algonquian peoples into the twentieth century. "If an Indian dies and a good medicine man starts after him quickly enough he may be brought back," Hallowell's Ojibwa informant claimed (1955, 174–75); thus one shaman restored a dead girl to life by following her to the Land of the Dead and catching her soul "just in time."

The soul's journey to distant places is most evident in the "shaking tent" seance of Algonquian "jugglers" attested since the earliest European observers. "In all their encampments," Champlain (159) wrote of his Algonquian and Huron allies, describing his journey of 1609 from the Saint Lawrence to the lake that now bears his name, one of their "soothsayers" builds a cabin and

places himself inside, so as not to be seen at all, when he seizes and shakes one of the posts of his cabin, muttering some words between his teeth, by which he says he invokes the devil, who appears to him in the form of a stone. . . . They frequently told me that the shaking of the cabin, which I saw, proceeded from the devil, who made it move, and not the man inside, although I could see the contrary. . . . These rogues counterfeit also their voice . . . and speak in a language unknown to the other savages.

To the pious Champlain, such "impostors," as he called medicine men in general (96), were defrauding benighted peoples who "do not recognize any divinity, or worship any God and believe in anything whatever, but live like brute beasts" (321).^[5]

Le Jeune in 1634 (Kenton, 1:106–07) tells how a Montagnais juggler howled like a French puppeteer and "fell into so violent an ecstasy, that I thought he would break everything to pieces," speaking several languages while others urged the spirits to enter. Some imagined he "had been carried away, without knowing where or how. Others said that his body was lying on the ground, and that his soul was up above the tent." Finally, "the Savages believing that the Genii or Kichikouai had entered, the sorcerer consulted them," and to his questions the spirits, "or rather

[5] Parkman, who also described the "magic lodge" rite (1983, 1: 254 and 398), believed two and a half centuries after Champlain that the Indian conjurer's remedies "were to the last degree preposterous, ridiculous, or revolting" (1:362).

the juggler who counterfeited them," gave answer. "I could have said as much myself," the skeptical (and possibly envious) Jesuit remarks of his savage rival's oracular pronouncements.

The Algonquian "shaking tent" or "spirit lodge" has remained essentially the same in the centuries since Le Jeune. (In one common variation, the shaman is tightly bound at the beginning of his performance and frees himself, like his Eskimo counterpart, by the end.)^[6] Among the Saulteaux of the Berens River, Manitoba, a shaman seeks supernatural revelation during the puberty fast (Hallowell 1971, 19), and soul abduction is the "characteristic modus operandi " of the conjurer (59), who occasionally engages a rival's guardian spirits in "a dramatic struggle to the death" while the audience watches the tent shaken by spirits thumping within it, sometimes with fatal results to one of the antagonists (62–63). His other main functions are prophecy and location of lost articles through his spirit companion, the turtle (66–68). The Algonquian conjurer is no mere charlatan, Hallowell stresses (73–83), but an explorer of the liminal zone between the given condition of human beings and the world of undetermined potentialities—the world of the spirit—to which they likewise belong.

Among the relatively settled Iroquoian peoples we find only traces of individual vision quests, by shamans or others. "Time was when it was necessary to fast thirty entire days, in a Cabin apart," Brébeuf wrote of the Huron in 1636 (Kenton, 1:274); but those times were vanishing when the French arrived, and a modern scholar can only infer that Huron shamans probably obtained power through visions (Tooker 1964, 97; cf. Trigger 1969, 65). Among Iroquois of the Five Nations, the vision quest seems once to have been more prominent. At puberty some boys withdrew to the woods under supervision of an elder, fasted, abstained from sexual activity, and mortified the flesh (A. Wallace 1970, 37–38); dreams at such times "were apt to be regarded as visitations from supernatural spirits who might grant orenda, or magical power, to the dreamer, and who would maintain a special sort of guardianship over him" through a charm or talisman associated with the dream.

Among Algonquian peoples the individual quest seems to have been nearly universal, at least for boys; we find it among the Delaware, for example (M. Harrington 1913, 214–15; cf. 1921, 61–80), and above all among the Ojibwa, who retained many of their indigenous practices after eastern Algonquian tribes had been exterminated or displaced. An

[6] Densmore 1932a, 45–46; 1932b, 104–05. Hultkrantz (1981, 79) considers such seances "forms of a jugglering complex" ranging from northern Asia and the Americas to Southeast Asia.

Ojibwa father, the Jesuit Dablon reported around 1670 (Kinietz, 326–27), made his son fast until he saw a vision of "Sun, or Thunder, or something else"; more recent descriptions have richly elaborated on this early account.

Girls too, Jenness writes of the Ojibwa of Parry Island, Ontario (1935, 50), fasted under their mothers' supervision. But a girl's quest coincided with first menstruation, thought (as in many tribal societies) to bring pollution; therefore, unlike a boy's "hopeful striving for broader horizons," her puberty ceremony "is a conscientious withdrawal of her malignant self" (Landes 1938, 5). The quest was more central for boys than girls, Barnouw suggests (20), because "a man's activities—hunting and warfare, etc.—involved unpredictable elements in which magical support was essential for success." Women might be more open to spontaneous visions, but mastery of spirits through the disciplined quest was an overwhelmingly male prerogative.

An Ojibwa boy driven out to fast in a lonely spot (Landes 1968, 8–11) might lie naked on the ground or make himself a huge "nest" in a tree as he fasted for as many as ten days. "When he swooned, the Ojibwa said he was being carried to the sphere of the manitos," or spirits. A successful visionary kept his dream secret and continued fasting in later years; over time he would come to resemble his guardian spirit—moose, bear, or other—and at night "would leave his human shape on his bed to stalk the country" in its shape. A shaman might eventually identify himself with the manito, even at the price of madness or death.

As the "nest" suggests, a connection with the sky is characteristic of Ojibwa visions. Thus the Christian convert George Copway, a friend of Longfellow and Parkman, tells how his visionary spirit made a lofty pine, "reaching towards the heavens," heave as he sang, and told the youth, "I am from the rising sun" (Zolla, 238–39). A decade or two later, one of Kohl's Ojibwa informants recalled (204–07) climbing a tall tree after his mother's death and being escorted through the air above high mountain tops and out into the sunshine, where the Sun revealed earth, sky, and his own image, and gave him protecting spirits.

An old Ojibwa told Kohl (232–42) how his grandfather took him as a boy into the forest and made him a bed high up in a pine. His first attempt to fast failed, and the next spring, determined not to return "till my right dream had come to me," he again bedded himself in a pine and after days of deprivation fell into a dream in which he followed a spirit through the air to a mountaintop. There four men disclosed the earth and the "glorious sight" of the sky, and bade him choose his destination: "I will go up," he replied. Four white-haired men revealed the gifts of God; from then on he was "a perfect man." Similarly (375–76), a great

chief, "the Little Pine," followed a visionary path "higher and higher into heaven," and was told he would be a mighty hero: "And the dream was really fulfilled."

Few early European accounts of vision quests survive, no doubt largely because of their individual nature (since observers largely thought of religion in terms of communal rites) and because visions were normally kept secret until old age or death (Jenness, 50). But on the basis of later evidence, quests appear to have been nearly universal; a shaman was not set apart by his unique call, as in Siberia, but by intensification of a visionary experience common in some degree to every member of the community, especially among the mobile and "highly individualistic society" (Landes 1938, 119) of the Ojibwa and other Algonquian hunting peoples. The first (and principal) quest normally took place in early adolescence, and others could be occasioned by any personal crisis; they were individual rites of passage substituting for the collective ceremonies of more settled peoples.

Individuality and unpredictability were characteristic also of visions themselves, which despite recurrence of common motifs were by no means as standardized as the drug-induced hallucinations of tropical South America. The outcome of the quest could not be known in advance, and the possibility of failure ratified its inherent uncertainty. Years of preparation were required, and though "complete failures were very rare" (Densmore 1932a, 71), repeated and increasingly rigorous fasts might be necessary before a vision came; it was far from automatic. Ojibwa men who never attained visions were disdained by fellow tribesmen, and on the modern reservation, where suicide is endemic to some Ojibwa communities, this once-exceptional failure may seem to characterize a whole society from which the vision quest "molding a child's sense of identity" has vanished, leaving nothing in its place (Shkilnyk, 86–88). For the guardian spirit quest is "no passive relationship," Landes observes (1968, 9), but requires lifelong self-discipline, and in the solitary individual's uncertain endeavor to surpass his given condition lies a heroism all the more extraordinary, Kohl remarks (228), in that "every Indian, without exception," displays it. Small wonder that in the absence of that potentially transformative hope for a future differing from the present, life might cease to have meaning.