Mad Bear

I just finished reading a book called "Mad Bear - Spirit, Heailng, and the Sacred in the Life of a Native American Medicine Man" by Doug Boyd. This book has really resonated with me, I'm not entirely sure why, but for some reason reading it has given me a number of significant "aha!" moments. Just last week I was asking the "Master of the Universe" to send me a teacher... I had no idea it would be in the form of this old book, and yet that's exactly what has happened.

Mad Bear was a member of the Bear Clan of the Tuscarora Nation of the Six-Nation Iroquois Confederacy of the United States and Canada. A Native American rights-activist, he was also a medicine man and a leader with great power and influence both among his own people and cross culturally.

This is how Doug Boyd describes him: "Mad Bear did not at all match my image of him. I had never seen anyone quite like him before, yet it seemed very reasonable to me that there should be such a person. His name suited him, or perhaps it was the other way around. Big and round, with short black hair, he was wearing a Hawaiian-print shirt and a wide grin which clamped a tipped cigar between big teeth." Mad Bear is a highly sophisticated, articulate, and skilled Medicine Man who has traveled widely and lived and studied with Druids, Vikings, Tibetans, Hindu yogis, and various aboriginal peoples in Asia and Africa. He has been the catalyst for many healings."

The first story in the book is the legend of "False Face." That story made a huge impact on me, so I thought I'd share it here at shirleytwofeathers. The internet version of the story is a little different than the one posted here, and I think this one is better. I didn't want to muck it up with all this preliminary stuff, so I'm posting it separately. Interested in reading it? Here's a direct link to The Story of False Face as told by Mad Bear