Autism, The Pacific Northwest Coast First Peoples & The Shamanic Arts : An Interview with Johnny Moses

Autism, The Pacific Coast First Peoples & The Shamanic Arts: An Interview with Northwest Medicine Man, StoryTeller and Tribal Elder by A. Zanthe

Even amidst our current era of economic breakdown, with historical speedbumps abound and epic reminders of our precarious delicacy as a slick postmodern gas-guzzling civilization, I wager that there has never been a time when the wisedom of Indigenous peoples has never been needed so urgently by the-rest-of-us re-wired and removed-from-nature types. We need them for a plethora of reasons, many of them obvious to the casual observer. One of those reasons is an unprecedented neurological re-structuring of the body and psyche going on in the somatic consciousness of 1 child per 150 births by an outdated statistic, hedging of course on the conservative. When one Indigenous Medicine Man and Traditional Storyteller shares a prophetic voice from archaic tribal society with the world of modern autism, it is a humbling experience if there ever is one. Johnny Moses echoes later in this Interview the eloquent thoughts of a high-functioning autistic teenager.

Michael, then 15 years old, discusses his perception of being in the world as an autistic, what he defines as a whole soul in a broken body, as opposed to the commonest incarnation – a broken soul in a whole body In other words, his soul, and others similar to his, emphasizes cerebral over physical, aesthetics versus materialism, spiritual over corporeal.
- (William Stillman, Soul of Autism, pg 29)

Johnny Moses introduces us to “the teachings of dusk” or “the teachings of the evening time”. One is left wondering about the efficacy of the methods employed by modern autism therapists and researchers – and blown away by the penetrating words of a remarkable surviving First People’s oral tradition. Ask around the Northwest Indigenous scene about J. Moses and you’ll be sure to strike up a lot of good humor and conversation. As J. Moses asserts, “Our people looked up to people with these so-called ill-nesses and this act saved many lives. Instead of trying to cure ‘autism’ they, again, cured their hearts”. Invariably the lessons drawn from the old stories and songs so closely resemble the avant-garde of autistic self-advocates that it’s almost silly.

Considering that males are four to five times more likely to be autistic, the implication suggests a softening of aggression in this gender, inaugurating a world at peace. Toni’s foresight also evokes the Biblical Beatitude, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth,” further implying not evolution but revolution. And if studies conducted during a 20-year period by the German Pyschological Association, that reflect an increasingly less-sensitive, more-dangerous culture with each succeeding generation, are valid, the autism revolution is transpiring not a moment too soon. We are in the midst of a spiritual renaissance […]”

- (William Stillman, The Soul of Autism, pg 53)

J. Moses gives us a parallel insight to Stillman’s (and the innumerable others) about the meaning of the autism epidemic in relation to the shift of perspective and or institutional structure of a particular era: In the teachings of our people, they believe that the teachings of doing away with slavery came from people with autism. They were the first people [to free their slaves]. The Skagit tribes – Skagitah – were the first people to give up having slaves because of the illness [autism]. You know… illness has a history among our people. All our people know that the illness can be damaging, can be hurtful, but also know that the illness can save many lives. If the western autism establishment is a phenomenon emergent from a cultural contextualization of obscured memory, the American Indigenous has survived a piece of the autism mystery like a cautious wink from the past.

AZ: I’m talking to Johnny Moses – having only just asked him a question – about perspectives on autism, accordingly, from the northwest coast peoples.

JM: In the custom of our people. Before we do anything formal. Just like this, this is formal now. We always sing a song to show respect for our friends and relatives, such as our new friend here (nodding towards me). We have the same word for singing and crying: we call it: “see-eeehl”….. The songs are believed to be the seeds of knowledge of our people and some things that cannot be expressed sometimes in words are expressed through singing, through crying.

Through movement of the mind, body and spirit together. The singing is another form of the mind, body and soul coming together, and it comes out as a song. Same way with dancing. We have the same belief about dancing. Talking is one limited way of expressing oneself, through the belief of our people.

We’re going to sing a song now, just like we sang a song, a healing song for our brother. This is a very ancient song. This is a Skagitah song from the Skagit river. It was kept alive by Charlie Anderson. This song, as like I told you before, there were many of our leaders that had autism, who were dyslexic and etcetera.

This is one of those songs that comes from people that see in other ways, in ways that a person who is considered normal cannot see. Rather, its not that they cannot see but that they have been brainwashed. Their mind has been covered so much with negativity that they cannot see.

So the songs remove a lot of negative energy, you know, it stops us from [evil]. I asked my grandfather and my grandmother what they thought evil was. They gave me a definition of ‘evil’ that is not the Christian view. The Christian view is really quite different. My grandparents knew evil as “telling yourself that you cannot sing” or you “cannot express yourself” and so, you believe that, that you cannot express yourself. Even if you’re a tone deaf person, you have a song, even if no one hears it, that’s your song and that’s important.

The sounds that come out – that’s called feeling, that’s their feeling. The sounds that we make stay here upon the earth when we are gone. Like Bruce Miller used to say… I might not be here but my breath will be. That’s why songs can last for thousands of years and some songs actually carry – not just healing properties, but also illness. We look at autism as an ill-ness. But in our native culture it’s not the same way. So our native songs that have carried this ill-ness have survived to this day, have always been used in ceremony, in ritual, for prayer, for helping others.

AZ: So this song carries… [autism]?

JM: It was created by a person with autism. It was Adlai’s father’s grandmother’s originally. As I said - Our people looked at this ‘ill-ness’ which we call ‘autism’ today, looked at autism, dyslexia and… [other neurological differences].

AZ: Does this song have a name?

JM: It was called… autism [shaking with bemusement and laughter]. Its called The Blood of Mother Earth. The Blood of Mother Earth Healing Song. It’s a song that belongs to the public domain. We believe it belongs to everybody. You can sing it at any time.

OOOOOO OOOOOOAA AAAUUUUUUUUU OOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHH

Oooooo OOOOOOOOOO OOOOHHHHHH ooooooooooo OOOOOOOOOOOHHHH

Eeeiiiiiiiii Eiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii EE-EEiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii EEEEEEEEE’EEE’EEE’EEEE

EIIIIIIII EIEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIiiii OOO’OO’OOOOH AUH-AUH-AUH-AUH OOOOOOOOO OOOOO’OOOOO’OOOOOOOHH

AUAAAAAUHHHHHHHHHHHHH OAAAAAAH OOOOOOOOH AAAUUHHH

AAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUH AUH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUH AUH-AUH

Editorial: I listened through the recording of Johnny’s song several times over – and, although the songs did not carry the same high vibration which they did when performed live – with every listen I “felt” this song as like a change in temperature in my heart energy gate (or, more commonly, ‘chakra’ center). I reflected on what Johnny had said to me about singing and stories and other native art forms expressing the raw spontaneous power of emotionality, that these methods represented aspects of a superior form of communication.

This message has an immediate resonance with the autism scene, because so many of our numbers do not talk, at least not in the usual sense. The most spiritually in-tune of autistics realize that communication is possible on different sort-of circuits of linguistic syntax. But we’ll get to that when you dig in to my other writings on the subject, “Oly’s Autism Bomb” (parts 1 & 2) and “Bridging Heaven & Autism”. All of which are available in the original un-published version from myself.

AZ: grinning wildly in a silent applause -

JM: The Blood of Mother Earth Healing Song. The last person who sang this song was another relative of mine named Kenny Moses. He was Snoqualmie and Tuyalip, but the song originates from my father’s grandmother. This goes way back. The people looked at this illness we call autism – and called it the ‘teachings of dusk’ or ‘the teaching of the evening time’. These were teachings of the ancestors long ago, where the mind and the spirit weren’t working together. But sometimes the body. The body is not respected. Or the body does not want to be here.

It reacts, it acts out, what we call the ‘dis-ease’, or acts out the ‘gift’ according to native peoples. In the olden days it would be acted out through singing. But later on, as we began to categorize the ill-nesses, it was acted out by saying the word, or talking about their experience, as in psychotherapy. You will find that our people – spiritual leaders, story tellers, musicians – they were [revering] the people who carried ‘teachings of dust’. There is a problem with words. I always let the spirit know that I am not giving it power… I am just sharing information… that is not going to give power to a dis-ease. Although it makes me feel funny when I use the word dis-ease actually for anything.

Anything could be a dis-ease! Some people after they are married for so long … call their husband a dis-ease (or their wife)!

There is an mutual eruption of laughter meeting the noisy jubilant approval of the soul sister who is observing us in silence. It is a veritable triangle of dry cackling hilarity.

Editorial: Watch Out! Johnny Moses has a point. If ‘autism’ is an epidemic with no viral credentials to speak of, if autism is a single unifying and gigantic question point with no answers being produced by the western medical orthodoxy… What I mean is, If Autism Is a Disease, Then So Is Your Average American Nuclear Family. But the moment we run around suggesting the emergency need for a cure to their desperate condition of dysfunctionality, they call us absurd. Many of them easy fit the DSM-IV classification of HNPD, outdated, but nevertheless its still the law.

Oh, sufferers of Hetero-Normative-Personality Disorder, no one is going to come and take you to a far away compound and re-program you. Lets get one thing straight: there is an almost Foucaultian rule of thumb when it comes to the relationship between the ‘normative’ gene pool and the neurological mutant demographic. Nine times out of ten. The ‘normative’ people, when they make first contact with a psychic mutation or genetic deviancy of any kind, their narrow instinct is to eliminate, marginalize and sometimes [depending on your class status] to sterilize.

JM: Hell – it can be a dis-ease!. Or, a mother-in-law, or someone could be playing any role in your life and just piss you off! We think that the thing which is called ‘disease’ can manifest [like an entity] into a human being. So this person will have ‘autism’ or whatever, in the western point of view. It came from somebody. Not only the physical, but the mind body and spirit together, working together and causing this ‘autism’. The leaders. The people who were leaders and who were considered non-neurotypical pray, like everybody else. In the morning or late at night they’d start their day with prayer. And they’d end their day with [prayer]. But always in solitude.

One thing about autism is that this ill-nesses taught the people how to pray for themselves. Because their was a time in our world when people had forgotten to respect themselves, just like we see today. What we are seeing with ‘autism’ today is the same repeating results that happened in fact to our people over a thousand years ago. It became a dis-ease. The autism was a power. A power that did not require the use of ‘mind’, a power that was of spirit and of body. In their work that they did, in painting or drawing or creating music for someone, it was always like a private healing for the person that we’re praying for.

Editorial: It’s amazing how the spiritual worldview and belief system of the original Northwest First Peoples harmonizes so nicely with the observations of autism self-advocate William Stillman: “There are many autistics who are silently awaiting the opportunity to share their gifts with us. What kinds of gifts? The same gifts and talents that we all possess, but at higher degrees of vibration, particularly in relation to our senses. Isn’t that one way to define us all uniquely- human beings functioning at different levels of vibration? It’s the invisible equivalent of musical DNA. Consider that we may have not yet tapped unspoken wisdoms and truths unknown, not only from within ourselves, but from the inner sanctuary that dwells within the person with autism who lives in silence. And when you live in silence, you spend your time listening, processing, and very carefully observing – virtually a perpetual state of meditation. This is not so dissimilar from those of high-religious standing who intentionally undertake a vow of silence in order to attain a spiritual plane beyond what is typical.” (William Stillman, Soul of Autism, pg 40).

So we must ask ourselves. Why have autism self-advocates and indigenous wisedom-keepers referred to it as a “gift” like a seed requiring nurturing? Why also then are we to the western autism world officially proclaimed a spreading disease that needs to be normalized? Just like the initial meetings between the West and the Indigenous of North America resulted in polices of elimination, marginalization and sterilization against the latter, so does the oppressive hand of normalization compromise our right to exist as such. Being “cured” isn’t like being abused for being a Native however, it is more like being put on a strict diet regimen and then sent off to Christian “de-gay-ification camps”.

In many typical autism therapies, ABA for example, more emphasis and reward is located on a curve of normative behavior versus (perceptively) subnormal behavior than what is actually being learnt. I don’t know how many more times I am going to have to say it, but I’m not going to start counting to save my life: autistics are always, always sensitive enough to know that everybody in their life is out to change them to the core of their being. It a process that leftist intellectual Herbert Marcuse hinted at brilliantly in The Culture Industry. There is a subtle conflict in all human society, that is, that of the group mechanical mind and also that of the spontaneous free-thinking force of creativity, the latter of which can manifest in both individuals and groups.

Like I had said earlier, the petroglyphs. The paintings in these caves were created by people with autism and related illnesses. Only back then it was not known as ill-ness. It was known as ‘spirit power’. ‘Skillolitude’ and also the word ‘scielinne’ were used to describe [it]… Bruce Miller used the word ‘scielinne’ because he was a fully initiated spirit dancer. Bruce Miller, in fact, revived the practice of spirit dancing after over a hundred and thirty years of not being practiced on the Skokomish reservation. He brought it back in the 1970s but now the Skokomish people can fill a full up house with dancers. The spirit dancing tradition is revived. There is actually more spirit dancers than shakers. Autism was a benefit to him because it helped him to survive gruelling initiatory practices.. the hardships of the initiation are very [difficult]… you have to be in serious good shape to be initiated. Autism actually helped him to be strong physically and mentally – and withstand long periods fasting in the cold and such things.

He would be, for example, fasting for ten days alone in the cold. Threatened by hypothermia and so on and so forth. So that was the good thing of the ‘disease’ that had. When he finally accepted it he realized he needed to make friends with the ‘disease’ so that it would not destroy him. He learnt this lesson because he got diabetes. For some reason, the diabetes totally overtook his autism symptoms. When he went into the doctor he said it must’ve been misdiagnosis – but we all knew this was poppycock!

The diabetes had become his new spirit power. And he did another thing. He saved our people again. Our people never took diabetes seriously – our diet was so different - and a little sugar can be a real poison to a native person, as opposed to a european person who can eat way more sugar. There are some tribes who hadn’t ever had sugar before colonization. They simply weren’t used to breaking down sugar in the body. So. He said that this is replacing one illness with another.

He began using the positive things that he had learnt from being autistic and he used it to give him strength. He empowered himself by not becoming a slave to the disease. In the teachings of our people, they believe that the teachings of doing away with slavery came from people with autism. They were the first people [to free their slaves]. The skagit tribes – Skagitah – were the first people to give up having slaves because of the illness [autism]. You know… illness has a history among our people. All our people know that the illness can be damaging, can be hurtful, but also know that the illness can save many lives.

Editorial: Johnny Moses provides visionary insight into the autism issue. It’s a power, a potential, more than an illness. And even more interesting still – according to J. Moses, autism seems to have a special role in Northwest Indigenous tradition. Autistics are looked on as visionary providers of evolutionary perspective. According to J. Moses, they have often been Medicine Men, walkers between the worlds, flowering into unique substratas of tribal organization. Autism didn’t just erupt from an existential vacuum, but erupt instead because of a lack of self-respect and awareness on the part of societies tribal and postmodern. And when it erupts it is also called volcano, as in the Skagitah autism eruption, seeds which spend years taking in information as an alien observer, and then sprout up in large numbers from the earth, presenting a radical challenge to the social structure of the given not-self-respecting earthling population.

AZ: Certainly you are most famous for your profession as sort of urban-native storyteller. Is there a chance that you have recorded any stories about ‘autism’ as it has manifested in Northwest First Peoples – or written by autistics, perhaps?

JM: Of course, there are many! How long do you have to wait? We could take all day [laughter]! There’s a story created by an autistic person I’ve been enjoying recently. An autistic person who had extreme forms of [autism] and she has lived with it all of her life. And. She created this story about Lady Lousse.

Every time I say [anything] say ‘haboo’ [haboo!: from the background].

A Shlah Shleil Hee- Bestat
HABOO!
Long ago. There lived, Lady Louse.
HABOO!
AL TEE AL LEEEIIkh aw aw
She Lived in a reaaaaaaal big house
HABOO!
SKHE-SHQUEE SHQUEE SHKIEL SHUIE
She had no friends or relatives.
HABOO!
TEECH-KA’KAAAAAAAAAAH SHTEL QUEL
She had lots and lots of dirt (in her house)
HABOO!
UKH-WIL-BAHOOT,
She had everything all piled up: all this dirt!
Haboo!
Not only material things piled up…
But all her worries and thoughts, she says,
Are just so precious she’ll keep them
All to herself. So she’s got them all stored up
On top of each other in the house.
HABOO!
So she made sure she always had something to worry about!
She had to make little trails to walk through her house.
HABOO!
OKSHA KAKH KA SHEELSH
And wandering the trails was like blood passing
Through the veins.
HABOO!
One day she took the trail and swept her broom. And when
She got to the very middle of her house, she got lost.
HABOO!
And that is all. Just imagine getting lost in your own dirt.

JM: People created other Lady Lousse stories. One of my favorites happens to be The Sponge, again, created by a 12 year old girl with heavy autism.

Not too long ago there was this 12 year old girl..
her name was Lady Lousse But she was a Sponge.
HABOO!
One day: she went out into the middle of the ocean
HABOO!
And she became: Self-Absorbed!
HABOO!

JM: That was the end of poor Lady Lousse!

The three of us bust out laughing while Johnny continues to talk amid breaking out into childish snickers…

JM: Who else but a person with autism could create a story like that! The girl… the twelve year old girl… also had autism. She took an ancient story from thousands of years ago and re-created it for our day-and-age and now people tell it her way. Again. This power. Of transferring information from things that cannot be captured in our culture ins considered a gift. And people who have autism have a hard time imprisoning themselves in certain ways. There’s always got to be an escape. One escape can be the ancient stories, the singing, new songs that are being composed. Our people looked up to people with these so-called ill-nesses and this act saved many lives. Instead of trying to cure ‘autism’ they, again, cured their hearts. The love that they had for their people.

AZ: You say – the autistic people of the northwest coast had a hard time being imprisoned, in a sense, they also connected with the people who were kept as slaves in the culture.

JM: Yes. In the story of the Lady Lousse. The idea, metaphorically speaking, in the stories, it can receive multiple answers, because there are multiple questions. But an autistic person can think many different ways at once. She can help many, many people! She does not want to wait in line to help people. She doesn’t want to help only one person at a time! People who are autistic have no patience for that!

[mutual laughter]

Their not just helping one group. Who says that you have to wait your turn! People who are autistic give their answers the best way they can to everybody at the same time. It’s really from their heart, their soul, but it can only be vocalized if their not blocked up. One way of thinking about them is that they are way ahead of their time. The slavery of the Skagitah or the Skagit people – who conquered slavery through illness – that says a lot about a culture of people and it says a lot about autism right there. It was not through peace negotiations. It was not through potlatching.

It was through this ‘ill-ness’. Ill-ness was not always looked at as something bad. So, that’s one answer on the topic of slaves. My grandmother would say a person who would know more about slavery than anybody else would be a person who is a slave to themselves. If you know what it’s like to be your own slave, that’s the worst. Being by yourself is.. you had to be a very strong person to survive that. By surviving that you learn how to teach other people to free themselves.

Maybe you might still be finding ways how to free themselves, but it’s working. It might be a long process, bit by bit, but it works. It might not always be the cure-all for everybody, but it works for that person, for somebody. In the storytelling tradition among our people, storytelling is the art of the ancient stories of our ancestors from long ago. For a person who is a storyteller who tells stories from long ago in this day and age, this person has to be a person who can think in several different ways at a time. The past, present and future.

In our culture it has always been people who had these ill-nesses, who have been autistic or whatever, that were able to do that, that’s the way they were built. For someone to tell them that you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you eliminate groups of people. I believe you can help as many people as the great spirit can allow you to. Great spirit is not going to allow yourself to self-destruct, he’s going to show up when you make mistakes. Great spirit is always watching over. Or sending somebody to us to help us, so we don’t make mistakes that would be hurtful, not only to ourselves, but a whole generation of people. Because the decisions that we make now create the answers for the next generation you know. We’re building a foundation, your words and your way of thinking and your songs that you keep alive is the strong foundation for things that are going to keep your children and grandchildren, your spiritual descendents alive.

AZ: So. If I could move the topic to medicine. You’ve come from a lineage of thousands of years of practicing Medicine Men, Medicine People. Could you talk to me about you and most of the healing practitioners that I’ve interviewed have bee within one generation. Many people grow up Christian or secular but you’ve inherited it. If you could talk to me about your education in the Medicine Teachings.

JM: I could tell you some of it. If I told you the whole education we’d be here for days [mutual laughter!]. When I finally made up my mind… I had been of course through illness, I’m a survivor of cancer. But when I finally made a decision to follow the Medicine Path I also made a promise to help people. I promised to except all people, to never turn anybody away for lack of funds, unless the spirit turns you away of course. Very rarely I’ve turned people away and it was mainly because I thought there was another healer who might have been a little more educated and a little more sensitive to that particular illness, so I’d sent people away very rarely.

I’d send these people away. They’d get all of their answers from the spirit plane, and everything, but the healer would say “I’m going to send him back to Johnny to have open heart”… and that’s what you need to learn, so they’d always end up coming back. The old people would send people to me for this reason, it was like a curse on me. So, my training happened when I became ill. I was battling with cancer when I was very young, about nine years old. I got surgeries also around the age of nine, they cut out my lung, one of my lungs is gone.

The things I went through because it was a government hospital for the Native People we were always experimented on. Probably they didn’t need to cut opened my intestines and my stomach but they did! But, as a ward of the government, my poor grandparents had no say when their child became ill. In Canada a ward of the government had no say. At the age of nine I already knew, with all the ceremonies I was going through, all the training. It continued at the age of ten which was when I finally made a full commitment to practice the Shamanism of the Northwest Coast. Because I survived the cancer. I had one lung, half intestines and half my stomach – which is why I always joke around and say I’m half-Indian [laughter].

So, through survival, I wanted to have a life and to be able to see my grandparents. I love my grandparents very much. You see, they’re the ones who really saved me. Because they sent me off to die. The grandparents are the ones who really saved me from dying. I never died physically, but the mental and spiritual death is very much real. I believe that the ill-ness I went through was part of an initiatory process of become a Medicine Person. A person who goes through many illnesses, they might be called illnesses, but I have found that those illnesses are actually the manifest challenges of their journey to see, and suffering in the world is about learning about how other people suffer and survive.

The people who have been through the dying experience are the best healers. You really have to like people, at least long enough to see them get well. So they wont come back and visit you all the time [J. Moses bursts into momentary laughter]… No, the encouragement is to see them totally change their whole life and to help other people. At the age of ten I knew. I had visions and dreams about what would happen if I didn’t follow through. I had made a promise to God, The Great Spirit, that I would help other people, that I would do healing work.

So. The Creator kept me to my promise that I made. Because I wanted to live as a child. I wanted to be with my grandparents. I knew that I was going to have a life after the hospital. After going through that, I also went through the formal initiation of the medicine societies. Which are secret. I can’t tell you [about it] because it wouldn’t be secret anymore [laughter]! But they’re really no that secret. Some things remain secret because it’s so hard going through the initiation with all its suffering that by bringing it up sometimes it’s like you’re reliving it all. You relive your, you know. So I often did not tell people what I went through.

When I was suffering in the hospital half of my family were all shakers, Indian Shakers that lived in the country. Indian Shakers, that’s the new medicine. So I was dedicated to the Shake, the free spirit of the Shaker healing, for people who wanted to seek that way of healing. It was such a loving fellowship where you didn’t need any money to fellowship in that way. The difference with the Indian Shaker healings is that when they do a healing they never touch money. Because they believe that they are workers of God and all the healing comes down from the Heavens and we are just workers of God. They might accept money for gas, you know.

People usually tell them “this is gas money”, “this is not for the payment of the healing”, because they truly believe that God is the one who does the healing anyway. In the old medicine you have the help of the earth, the animal powers, the subtle powers of plants, rock powers, so you have lots and lots of help in the medicine way, but also demands a cost, a sacrifice. Some people needed to be supported doing the work. Shamans made their living, like doctors, Indian doctoring. When I became a Shaker as well as a Medicine Person that was a fine line. There was a fine line from a very early age – what kind of spirituality was I embracing?

Yes, I was practicing the ancient shamanic religion, but also the new medicine of the shaker way. I later found out that the Skagit people had no problem inter-mixing the two ways, if the Shaman’s song didn’t work, then they’d try out the Shaker bells. They had no problems because our culture is not a competing culture. The problem that people come to now is that they have to compete. So many things are lost. To re-affirm my belief in Shamanic Medicine I joined different medicine societies… to let my people know I was doing it for the people, because of the love in my heart to help people. When you are a healer, you have to follow the promise you made to that person, that you will help them, that you will be there for them, in prayer, in other ways. Every day, whether you see them or not, you keep on praying for that person until the prayer is done.

AZ: So Prayer is the primary modality used in the Pacific Northwest Coast Shamanic healings?

JM: Well, everything is prayer. Everything that you wish for, wish to see, and happens to happen. You say “how coincidental” but that was your power! Words have a power that you wouldn’t believe. Your thoughts have power. When you announce them to the world you make it concrete. If someone hears that prayer, whether it’s a bird… That bird might fly… hear the words that you spoke… and that bird will travel and tell the story by singing… and as they sing the people will think that they received it but it’s the bird that told them.

Or, the messenger could me a tree. You could be leaning against a tree and you could be thinking thoughts about wanting your friend to live. The tree will pass on your feelings to others. What makes the prayer work is very complex. But ultimately it is the love in your heart, you must not let anybody take that away from you, no matter how depressed or hurt you feel or how badly you’ve been abused or stabbed in the back, none of that is as important as the love in your heart. No matter how hard your life is – keep the love in your heart. Keep that love in your heart and it will help you. I know: I’ve experienced it myself.

I’ve experienced losing my son, losing a home, becoming homeless for five years and eating out of trashcans, I’ve experienced being a bum on the streets, but I always still did the healing work. I would see many people, they would take me to their house and drop me back off downtown Seattle after the session. There were many reasons I stayed on the street, self-pity and other woes. But I never let the love escape from my heart.