In my book Mysteries of Canada: Volume II, I described an ancient necromantic rite traditionally practiced by the Innu, Cree, Ojibwa, and other First Nations across Canada, in which a medicine man attempts to contact both human and inhuman spirits for the purpose of acquiring hidden or occult knowledge. In preparation for this ritual, a tall sturdy cylindrical tent is erected either outside or within a larger dwelling. The tent’s frame typically consists of a number of stout poles driven into the ground in a circular formation, bound together by circular hoops. Once completed, the entire structure, save for a small area at the top, is covered with skins, blankets, bark, or heavy cloth.

Although the finer details of the Shaking Tent ritual vary from nation to nation, the procedure typically unfolds as follows. After sunset, the shaman elected to preside over the ceremony crawls into the tent, usually bearing a calumet, or tobacco pipe, and a rattle or drum. Once inside, the medicine man sings and makes noise with his instrument, inviting any spirits present in the area to join him inside the tent. After some time, the tent shakes with impossible violence, as if pummeled by powerful gusts of wind rushing in through the opening in its top and swirling throughout its interior. This agitation is supposed to be occasioned by the arrival of the spirits.

After the shaking dies away, the medicine man invites members of the assemblage outside the tent to ask the spirits any questions they might have, such as the fate of sick loved ones, or the whereabouts of enemies, game, or travelling friends. The standard payment for this service is traditionally a small piece of tobacco, which the supplicant often tosses into the tent through the opening in the top. Once the fee is paid, the medicine man relays the question to the spirits in a language which none of the onlookers understand. He receives equally incomprehensible reply, uttered in an unearthly voice which often emanates from the top of the tent. The medicine man then translates the answer for the benefit of the supplicant before asking other members of the congregation to field their own questions. Eerily, the spirits’ replies and predictions are almost always later found to be true.

Nicole’s Shaking Tent Experience

During my research into the mystery of the Shaking Tent, I was unable to find any accounts of the ritual taking place in the recent past, and assumed that the practice had probably died out sometime in the 20th Century. Shortly after the publication of my piece, however, several of my readers informed me that the rite was still performed from time to time on Indian reserves and reservations across Canada and the United States. One of these readers was my friend, Bexx Korol, who put me in touch with her own friend, a fascinating lady from Oshawa, Ontario, named Nicole, who participated in a Shaking Tent ceremony years ago. Nicole is of Ojibwa heritage, and was adopted by another family at infancy. She attended the Shaking Tent ceremony in the hope that she might learn the location of her birth mother. Nicole agreed to give me permission to publish excerpts of my video chat with her on the condition that she approve the final draft. When the video was finished, she objected to my use of the words ‘necromancy’ and ‘ritual’ in connection with the Shaking Tent ceremony, asserting that those words unfairly place the ceremony in the camp of witchcraft and black magic, and so I’ve decided to publish a summary of her testimony instead.

Nicole was adopted at birth, and grew up without knowing the identity of her biological parents. In about 1995, when she was about 22 years old, she and a group of fellow adoptees attended a Shaking Tent ceremony in the basement of the Anishnawbe Health building in Toronto, Ontario, hoping that the ceremony might give them some insight into the location of their birth parents.

The tent used in the ceremony she attended was a 5 or 6-foot-tall structure composed of a stick frame and a bark and cedar branch covering, with a diameter wide enough for a man to sit inside comfortably. At the beginning of the ceremony, after all the participants had given the medicine man their gift of tobacco, the lights were turned off, pitching the basement into total darkness. Nicole recalls it being so dark that she was unable to see her hand in front of her face. The medicine man began to sing and beat his drum. Soon the tent began to shake, as evidenced by the rustling of the branches that covered it, heralding the arrival of the spirits. At one point during the ceremony, Nicole heard a wolf howling. “It was pretty intense,” she said.

One by one, each of the attendees asked the medicine man to relay their question to the spirits inside the tent. After a period of what Nicole estimated to be about five minutes, the spirits delivered a reply, which the medicine man translated for the adoptees. When the time came for Nicole to field her own question, she asked the spirits to tell her the location of her birth mother. The spirits replied that her mother was at Mount McKay, a flat-topped mountain which stands along the banks of the Kaministiquia River south of Thunder Bay, Ontario, near the western shores of Lake Superior.

Several days after the ceremony, Nicole called the band office of the Fort William First Nation, an Ojibwa community which lies at the base of Mount McKay, and told the secretary about her Shaking Tent experience, asking her if she knew anyone in the community who had given her daughter up for adoption 22 years earlier. Consulting her adoption papers, she gave the secretary as much identificatory information as she could, but to no avail; the woman did not know anyone in the band who matched the description of Nicole’s mother. Disappointed, Nicole left her contact information with the secretary and hung up the phone.

A few months later, Nicole received a phone call at her work. The woman on the other line was her biological mother. Overwhelmed by emotion, Nicole, with her boss’s permission, took the rest of the day off work and spent the afternoon chatting with her mother. During their conversation, she learned that, although her mother did not live on the Fort William Reserve, she had attended a powwow there on the exact day on which Nicole had participated in the Shaking Tent ceremony.

Nicole has told me that she objects to the words ‘necromancy’ and ‘ritual’ being used in association with the Shaking Tent ceremony. “The word necromancy,” she wrote, “is often considered to be black magic, witchcraft, sorcery. There are those who do practice these things, we as aboriginal people do not. Our people call our communication even in a traditional smudge a ceremony. Shaking Tent, other ceremonies our people have participated in like powwows are not rituals nor necromantic practices. For example, a powwow is a celebration of giving thanks to the Creator. It’s a connection to the Creator. Our ceremonies are all positive. For everyone’s good. Like a Shaking Tent, when done is a powerful connection with the Creator. It is not black magic or witchcraft. It’s talking and giving thanks to our Creator, your Creator, everyone’s Creator of all things on Turtle Island.”

Spirit Lights in the Shaking Tent

Many white fur traders, travellers, and missionaries of centuries past who witnessed the Shaking Tent ceremony and wrote about it in their letters and memoirs described seeing strange lights flickering around or near the top of the tent while the séance was in session. One such frontiersman was George Nelson, a fur trader who headed a succession of Hudson’s Bay Company posts around Lake Winnipeg and Lac la Ronge in the early 1800s.

In various letters to his father, written throughout the spring and summer of 1823, he described the mysterious lights he witnessed during Cree Shaking Tent ceremonies. In one of these letters, he described seeing “a vast number of small lights resting on the hoops that hold the poles together” during one of the rituals. In that same letter, he described the alleged experience of a Metis teenager, who is said to have crawled into a Shaking Tent in the middle of a ceremony and paid for his curiosity. “There was a dreadful fluttering within,” Nelson wrote, “but especially about his head, his hair flying about his face as if in a tempest and frequent appearances of small lights before his eyes [whichever] way he turned.” Nelson attempted the same bold maneuver during a Shaking Tent ceremony held outside his post at La Ronge and described his astonishing experience in another letter. “At midnight,” he wrote, “the Conjuror addressed me and asked if I wished to see any of [the Spirits]. I accepted the offer and thrust my head underneath, and being upon my back I looked up and near the top observed a light as of a Star in a Cloudy night about 1 ½ in. long and 1 broad; tho’ dim, yet perfectly distinct… A little after one [a.m.] one of my men looked in, with several [Indians], and saw several small lights about as large as the Thumb nail. A few minutes before 2 [a.m.], they gave another shaking to the frame and made their exit.”

Another description of the mysterious lights often seen during Shaking Tent ceremonies appears in the 1846 book, The Journal of the Bishop of Montreal During a Visit to the Church Missionary Society’s North-West America Mission, written by Anglican Bishop George J. Mountain. In his journal, Bishop Mountain outlined the ritual as it was explained to him by two former Cree medicine men who had long since been baptized into the Church of England. “During the process going on in the conjuring lodge,” he wrote, “without boldly looking up, [the conjuror] catches glimpses, in the same plane with the topmost hoop of the lodge, of a number of objects like tiny stars.”

A similar picture is evoked by a depiction of the ceremony which appears in German travel writer Johan Georg Kohl’s 1859 travel memoir, Kitchi-gami: Wanderings Round Lake Superior. Back in 1855, Kohl met a French-Canadian voyageur on the southern shores of Lake Superior who claimed to have interrogated an Ojibwa ex-shaman on his deathbed. Knowing that the dying man had long since converted to Christianity, and would not dare tell a lie so near to his impending appointment with his Maker, he hoped to extract from him the secrets of the Shaking Tent. The elder assured him that the ritual was genuine, and that spirits truly entered the tent during the ceremony. “I heard their voices,” he said. “The top of the lodge was full of them, and before me the sky and wide lands lay expanded.”

I asked Nicole if she witnessed anything similar during the Shaking Tent ceremony she attended. This is what she told me: “Yeah, yeah. They were actually outside the tent, and I saw lights going in front of me. So, I guess people would call them ‘orbs’. A speck of light… and it wasn’t like dust. You could not see in front of your face downstairs. You cannot see. You can’t see your hand, you can’t see a shadow. Nothing… So, we could not see anything, but I certainly saw things that [flew] in front [of me]. It was quite… there’s nothing else to kind of describe that, really.”

Spirit Orbs

The term ‘orb’, or ‘spirit orbs’, as they are often called, may be familiar to viewers who enjoy watching documentaries and TV shows on paranormal phenomena. Most publically broadcasted programs represent ‘spirit orbs’ as small globes of white, gray, or blue light which are not typically visible to the naked eye, but which appear on digital and film photographs and video recordings taken at supposedly haunted locations. Some paranormal investigators believe these anomalies to be visual manifestations of souls of the deceased, bound to our early plane. Others have made convincing cases that they are nothing more than particles of dust or tiny insects interposed between the camera lens and the object on which the camera is focused, apparently surrounded by a halo of light on account of technological limitations, or perhaps optical illusions produced by interactions between light sources and camera lenses.

Whatever the nature of these photographic and videographic anomalies, the popular conception of the spirit orb appears to be related to a truly baffling phenomenon for which no rational explanations readily present themselves. Every once in a while, visitors to supposedly haunted locations, witnesses of out-of-body experiences, those present at the deathbeds of their loved ones, and participants in necromantic rituals like the Shaking Tent ceremony report seeing small floating balls of light which do not appear to derive from any external light sources. The behavior of these lights and the circumstances in which they appear have led some to suspect that they are disembodied souls manifest in a form perceptible to the human eye.

One interesting description of what is perhaps best described as a ‘spirit light’ appeared in the February 1953 issue of the magazine Fate, in an article written by Karee F. Fugitt of Le Grande, Oregon. “Thirteen years ago,” Fugitt began, “I witnessed an occurrence so fantastic, so puzzling, that it has haunted me ever since. If I alone had seen that eerie phenomenon, I might have doubted my own eyes and attributed it to a hallucination, but two of my sisters saw it with me.

“The incident took place at about 4:00 p.m. as my mother lay dying. She called to us during one of her intervals of consciousness and said it was growing dark. One of my sisters turned on the light, a single bulb almost directly over my mother’s bed, and when she had quieted again we turned it off and intended going out to let her rest.

“As the bulb went dark, three small balls of light appeared in the room. They were colored like bubbles, and they hovered over mother for a few seconds, then vanished through the open window. These little lights made a very faint sound, like the pop of a bubble bursting. Except for a grasp from my second sister, we all stood frozen and speechless, awed by what we had seen.”

Fugitt went on to explain that neither she nor any of her family members were spiritualists, and that no one in the room at that time had expected to see anything unusual.

Another Fate article echoing the concept of spirit lights appeared in the August 1961 issue of that publication. The author, Mr. Camille Bissonnette of Montebello, California, was a French-Canadian by birth, whose father, Pierre, spent his entire life farming near the small rural community of St. Pierre Baptist in Megantic County, Quebec. Pierre never received any formal education, and remained illiterate all his life.

When he was about twenty years old, Pierre went to help a neighbouring farmer with his harvesting. During this operation, he worked side by side with a drifter whom the farmer had hired. After each long day of work, Pierre and the drifter retired to the farmer’s barn and bunked down in the hayloft.

One especially warm night, Pierre heard the drifter arise from the hay, climb down the ladder, and head outside. When he failed to return after some time, Pierre became worried and went to look for him.

“It was a starry night,” he told his son. “Having looked around, here and there, I finally saw a dark form lying flat on the ground. I advanced cautiously. It was the drifter. He seemed asleep but when I bent over him I noticed that if his breathing was regular it was hardly audible. I did not get alarmed as some people sleep that lightly. As I was staying still, above him, undecided what I should do, waking him up or going back to the loft alone, I saw a tiny light, a kind of firefly light, hovering over his head, then coming down on his forehead into which it seemed to disappear.

“At that moment, the drifter opened his eyes and saw me. I explained the cause of my presence by his side but when I mentioned the firefly which had waked him up, he jumped on his feet and gripped my shoulder.

“‘Please, Pierre, promise me that you will never reveal to [anyone] what you saw to-night. Most of all never talk about what you called a firefly.’

“‘Why?’ I asked.

“‘Because nobody will believe you. They’ll think you’re crazy.’

“‘I cannot understand,’ I said.

“‘I cannot explain, Pierre, the words will be too deep for you. You would think I am insane. I am only a passer-by in this country. I came from a very long distance, in fact, from all around the world, where I have seen and learnt of strange things. What you have witnessed to-night is one of them. Before I leave for other parts, if ever I lay down again under the stars and if you happened to see me, please do not touch me and do not talk to me. Rest assured that I will not be dead.’

“I could not get an explanation at all out of this strange man who left two days later and I never saw him again.”

Considering the testimonies of Nicole Barker, Karee Fugitt, and historical witnesses of the Shaking Tent ceremony, it is tempting to suppose that the firefly Pierre saw on that warm summer night was the drifter’s soul floating outside his body, affording the temporary labourer some sort of out-of-body experience.

Are disembodied human souls really visible to the naked eye, appearing to us as tiny lights, mysterious bubbles, or floating orbs? Have you ever seen a spirit orb? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Sources

• Correspondence between Nicole Barker and Hammerson Peters, May 13, 2022

• The Journal of the Bishop of Montreal During a Visit to the Church Missionary Society’s North-West America Mission (1846), by Bishop George J. Mountain

• Kitchi-gami: Wanderings Round Lake Superior (1859), by Johan Georg Kohl

• “The Little Lights,” by Karee F. Fuvgit in the February 1953 issue of Fate

• “The Orders of the Dreamed: George Nelson on Cree and Northern Ojibwa Religion and Myth, 1823 (1988), by Jennifer S.H. Brown and Robert Brightman

• “The Firefly,” by Camille Bissonnette in the August 1961 issue of Fate

Source: https://mysteriesofcanada.com/canada/mysterious-orbs-appear-during-native-american-ceremony/

Mason’s observation could be applied more broadly to the spiritual beliefs held by all Canadian First Nations prior to their introduction to Christianity. There are about as many native Canadian religions as there are First Nations, each with its own collection of deities, legends, rituals, and superstitions. The Blackfoot of the western prairies, for example, had their Sun Dances- brutal ceremonies revolving around pain, sacrifice, and physical endurance. The Ojibwa of the Great Lakes had nuanced beliefs regarding the consumption of human flesh, considering the practice justifiable in times of war and horribly dangerous in times of famine. And the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands had their carved cedar masks representing the various spiritual entities that populate their mythology, wearing them in their dances and shamanic ceremonies. 

In spite of their fundamental differences, many of Canada’s pre-Columbian religions share a number of curious similarities. Be it a raven, a coyote, a hare, or some legendary ancestor, the mythology of nearly every Canadian indigenous group includes the escapades of a Trickster figure, perhaps due to a shared belief that laughter, like smoking and fasting, facilitates communion with the divine. Certain legendary monsters- including hairy giants, massive thunder-making eagles, and huge horned water serpents- feature in native folklore across the country, from the misty jungles of the Pacific to the sunny forests of the Atlantic to the barren tundra of the Arctic. And nearly every Canadian Indian tribe had its shamans, or medicine men, to whom band members turned for healing and advice.

One of the strangest and most widely-held rituals shared by Canadian First Nations involves a structure called a “Shaking Tent”. This ceremonial dwelling consists of a pole frame and a skin covering, similar to the teepee of the prairies and the northern forests, and can be either conical or cylindrical in shape. From the woods of British Columbia to the rocky highlands of Labrador, native medicine men conducted séances in these Shaking Tents, hoping to commune with spirits for the purpose of clairvoyance. During this ritual, the shaman elected to preside over the ceremony fell into a trance, the tent began to shake as if buffeted by unearthly winds, and weird lights flickered in the structure’s upper aperture, where the medicine man’s spirit-body was said to be in counsel with spirits he summoned.

While on the war path with his Algonquin allies, Champlain witnessed a Shaking Tent ceremony in which an Algonquin “Pilotois”, or medicine man, attempted to ascertain the size of the Iroquois war party his tribesmen would soon engage in battle.

“One of these [Pilotois] builds a cabin,” Champlain wrote, “surrounds it with small pieces of wood, and covers it with his robe: after it is built, he 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… This Pilotois lies prostrate on the ground, motionless, only speaking with the devil: on a sudden, he rises to his feet, talking, and tormenting himself in such a manner that, although naked, he is all of a perspiration.”

Although Champlain’s Algonquin friends told him that the tent’s movement was the work of spirits, the explorer claimed that he had witnessed the shaman grab one of the tent poles and shake the structure himself.

“They told me also that I should see fire come out from the top,” Champlain continued, “which I did not see at all. These rogues counterfeit also their voice, so that it is heavy and clear, and speak in a language unknown to the other savages… the savages think that the devil is speaking…”

Following the ceremony, Champlain and his companions continued up the Richelieu River to what is now Lake Champlain and proceeded south to the site of what would become either Fort Ticonderoga or Crown Point, New York, where they encountered a much larger Iroquois war party. During the battle that ensued, Champlain and one of his French companions shot two Iroquois war chiefs to death with their arquebuses- long matchlock firearms with which these Iroquois were probably unacquainted. Disheartened by the sudden and spectacular deaths of their leaders, the Iroquois broke off the attack and retreated into the woods.

Towards nightfall,” Le Jeune wrote, “two or three young men erected a tent in the middle of our Cabin; they stuck six poles deep into the ground in the form of a circle, and to hold them in place they fastened to the tops of these poles a large ring, which completely encircled them; this done, they enclosed this Edifice with [Blankets], leaving the top of the tent open; it is all that a tall man can to do reach the top of this round tower, capable of holding 5 or 6 men standing upright.”

Once the Shaking Tent was erected, the natives extinguished all the fires in their wigwam and threw the embers outside so as to not frighten the spirits that were to enter the tent. After sealing the entrance, the band’s shaman began to moan and rock the tent. “Then,” wrote Le Jeune, “becoming animated little by little, he commenced to whistle in a hollow tone, and as if it came from afar; then to talk as if in a bottle; to cry like the owls of these countries, which it seems to me have stronger voices than those of France; then to howl and sing, constantly varying the tones; ending by these syllables, ho ho, hi hi, guigui, nioue, and other similar sounds, disguising his voice so that it seemed to me I heard those puppets which the showmen exhibit in France.”

As the ceremony progressed, the tent began to shake with increasing violence until Le Jeune was sure that the structure would disintegrate. “I was astonished at a man having so much strength,” wrote the Jesuit of the medicine man, whom he credited with the shaking, “for, after he had once begun to shake [the tent], he did not stop until the consultation was over, which lasted about three hours”.

Of course, since all light had been extinguished from the tent at the beginning of the ritual, Le Jeune could not be certain of the shaman’s actions. The natives who also took part in the ceremony assured him that their medicine man was lying on the ground throughout the whole ordeal, his soul having left his body to commune with the newly-arrived spirit visitors at the top of the tent. “Look up!” they urged him. The Frenchman did, and sure enough he saw fiery sparks issuing from tent opening.

When the voice of the shaman announced that the spirits had indeed arrived, the natives in the tent began asking the entities questions about the weather and the location of big game. Each of their inquiries was answered by a s de detrange voice, which Le Jeune accredited to the shaman.

Father Paul Le Jeune wrote on the subject of the Shaking Tent again three years later, in his 1637 Relations. In this discourse, he admitted that he now doubted that the phenomenon was simply the product of shamanic trickery, and had come to suspect that it might constitute the work of demons.

The Jesuit’s change of heart was attributable in part to the obstinacy with which natives defended the legitimacy of their ritual, and in part to his own experiences in the camp of the Montagnais. Members of his congregation “protested… that it was not the Sorcerer who moved this edifice,” Le Jeune wrote, “but a strong wind which suddenly and violently rushed in. And, as proof of this, they told me that the Tent is sometimes so firm that a man can hardly move it, ‘Yet thou wilt see it, if thou pleasest to be present there, shake and bend from one side to the other, with such violence and for so long a time, that thou wilt be compelled to confess that there is no human strength that could cause this movement’.

“While passing the winter with the Savages,” the missionary continued, “I saw them perform this devilry; I saw strong young men sweat in erecting this Tent; I saw it shake, not with the violence they say it does, but forcibly enough, and for so long a time that I was surprised that a man had strength enough to endure such exertion…

“Furthermore, those whom I have just named, and others, have stoutly asserted to me that the top of this Tent, seven feet high or thereabout, is sometimes bent even to the ground, so powerfully is it agitated. Also, that the arms and legs of the Sorcerer, who was stretched upon the ground, were sometimes seen to emerge at the bottom of the Tent, while the top was shaking violently. They say that the Demon or the wind which enters this little house rushes in with such force, and so disturbs the sorcerer, making him think he is going to fall into an abyss, the earth appearing to open under him, that he emerges in terror from his Tent, which goes on shaking for some time after he has left it.”

Le Jeune went on to describe a tale, told to him by a young Indian, which contended that a medicine man who performed the ritual the previous autumn levitated to the top of the tent during the ceremony. This extraordinary event was purportedly witnessed by curious onlookers who lifted the tent’s covering and peered inside while the procedure was underway. The medicine man “was heard to fall down,” Le Jeune wrote, “uttering a plaintive cry like a man who feels the shock of a fall. Having emerged from these enchantments, he said that he did not know where he had been or what had taken place.

At the outbreak of this conflict, Alexander Henry was trading at Fort Michilimackinac, an old French fur trading fort located at the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. The local Ojibwa, who had secretly decided to participate in Pontiac’s Rebellion, concocted a brilliant plan to capture the fort by surprise. First, they lured most of the British soldiers outside the fort by inviting them to watch a lacrosse game that they held in an adjacent field on the pretext of celebrating King George III’s birthday. While the soldiers were distracted by the Indian athletics, a handful of Ojibwa women inconspicuously made their way towards the fort’s open gates, concealing bundles of knives and tomahawks beneath blankets that they wore around their shoulders. When the women were in place, one of the athletes lobbed the lacrosse ball over the fort’s walls, prompting the entire Ojibwa team to stampede through the fort’s gate. As they entered the fort, the warriors seized the weapons that their women had smuggled inside and proceeded to slaughter or capture every Englishman they found therein. Henry survived the massacre by hiding in the attic of a French-Canadian fur trader’s house. He was discovered several days later by Ojibwa warriors and made prisoner.

Henry spent the better part of 1763 living among the Ojibwa, spared from the more harrowing experiences suffered by his fellow prisoners, many of whom were murdered and cannibalized, due to his adoption by an Ojibwa chief whom he had befriended prior to the massacre. In early 1764, Henry escaped from his captors and travelled with a trio of French-Canadian voyageurs to the fur trading post at Sault Ste. Marie. There, he fell in with another band of Ojibwa who had just received a summons from British military commander Sir William Johnson. The general, desirous of bringing an end to Pontiac’s Rebellion, had invited the representatives of all the Great Lakes tribes to attend a great peace conference on the shores of the Niagara River. In order to determine whether or not they ought to attend this council, the Ojibwa attempted to commune with a deity they called the ‘Great Turtle’. And thus, a hundred and thirty years after father Le Jeune’s adventure, Alexander Henry bore witness to the phenomenon of the Shaking Tent.

“For invoking and consulting the Great Turtle,” Henry wrote, “the first thing to be done was the building of a large house or wigwam, within which was placed a species of tent for the use of the priest and reception of the spirit. The tent was formed of moose-skins, hung over a framework of wood. Five poles, or rather pillars, of five different species of timber, about ten feet in height and eight inches in diameter were set in a circle of about four feet in diameter. The holes made to receive them were about two feet deep; and the pillars being set, the holes were filled up again, with the earth which had been dug out. At top the pillars were bound together by a circular hoop, or girder. Over the whole of this edifice were spread the moose-skins, covering it at top and round the sides, and made fast with thongs of the same; except that on one side a part was left unfastened, to admit the entrance of the priest.”

At nightfall, while the whole band stood by in anticipation, the medicine man chosen to preside over the ceremony emerged half-naked from his wigwam. The shaman walked over to the tent and crawled through the entrance. “His head was scarcely within side when the edifice,” wrote Henry, “massy as it has been described, began to shake; and the skins were no sooner let fall than the sounds of numerous voices were heard beneath them, some yelling, some barking as dogs, some howling like wolves; and in this horrible concert were mingled screams and sobs, as of despair, anguish, and the sharpest pain. Articulate speech was also uttered, as if from human lips; but in a tongue unknown to the audience. After some time these confused and frightful noises were succeeded by a perfect silence; and now a voice not heard before seemed to manifest the arrival of a new character in the tent. This was a low and feeble voice, resembling the cry of a young puppy. The sound was no sooner distinguished, than all the Indians clapped their hands for joy, exclaiming that this was the Chief Spirit, the Turtle, the spirit that never lied. Other voices which they had discriminated from time to time they had previously hissed, as recognizing them to belong to evil and lying spirits, which deceive mankind.”

Throughout the half hour that followed, a variety of songs issued from the tent, each of them sung by a different voice. Finally, once the last song died out, the medicine man called out from inside the tent that the Great Turtle was ready to answer any questions the Indians might have for him.

The band’s chief asked whether the English planned to attack them, and whether there were many English troops assembled at Fort Niagara, the site of the scheduled rendezvous. “These questions having been put by the priest,” Henry wrote, “the tent instantly shook; and for some seconds after it continued to rock so violently that I expected to see it levelled with the ground. All this was a prelude, as I supposed, to the answers to be given; but a terrific cry announced, with sufficient intelligibility, the departure of the Turtle.”

All of a sudden, the tent fell silent. The Ojibwa spectators waited with bated breath for the spirit’s reply. About fifteen minutes later, the tent shook again, and the tremulous voice of the Great Turtle began babbling in a language which none of the onlookers could understand. Once the spirit had delivered its incompressible report, the medicine man, who apparently understood every word, informed those assembled that the Great Turtle had flown across Lake Huron and over the easterly forest to Fort Niagara, where he found few Englishmen. He proceeded down the length of Lake Ontario and further down the St. Lawrence River to Montreal, where he found a huge fleet of ships filled with British soldiers.

The chief then asked the Great Turtle whether Sir William Johnson would receive them as friends. “Sir William Johnson,” the medicine man replied, interpreting the words of the spirit, “will fill their canoes with presents; with blankets, kettles, guns, gunpowder and shot, and large barrels of rum such as the stoutest of the Indians will not be able to lift; and every man will return in safety to his family.” At this, the assemblage cheered, and many warriors declared their intention to attend the meeting at Fort Niagara.

The natives proceeded to ask the spirit questions about distant friends and the fate of sick family members. Henry himself, despite his skepticism, presented the Great Turtle with the customary gift of tobacco before asking whether he would ever see his native country again. The spirit replied that he would. Indeed, Henry would go on to survive Pontiac’s rebellion and make three voyages to his native England.

By the time the two great Canadian fur trading associations amalgamated in 1821 under the umbrella of the HBC, their industry had expanded into the heart of the Canadian interior. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, most of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s southerly trading posts were connected by a great trans-continental trail stretching from York Factory- the HBC’s New World headquarters on Hudson Bay- and Fort William- the North West Company’s field headquarters on Lake Superior- across the Canadian prairies and over the Canadian Rockies to the Columbia River and the Pacific Coast beyond. Twice a year, a fur brigade called the Columbia Express followed this trail west, bearing trade goods, letters, equipment, and provisions for the forts of the interior. Another brigade, called the York Factory Express, made similar biannual journeys east over the same trail, carrying furs for the European market.

Undoubtedly, the most vivid picture of this trans-continental fur route was that painted, both literally and literarily, by a 19th Century Irish-Canadian artist named Paul Kane. While on his Grand Tour of Europe- an essential element of any serious 19th Century painter’s education- 34-year-old Kane met George Catlin, an American artist who had spent the past decade travelling up and down the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, painting portraits of the Native Americans he met along the way. Many of the subjects of Catlin’s paintings had only recently been introduced to Euro-American society, and practiced ancient ways of life which Catlin suspected were fast-disappearing.

Kane was deeply impressed by Catlin and his work, and adopted his philosophy that it was the artist’s duty to illustrate these dying cultures for the sake of posterity. Inspired by the American artist, Kane decided to undertake a similar project in Canada. From 1846 to 1848, he explored the Canadian West by way of the trans-continental fur trail, sketching the scenes and characters he encountered along the way. He participated in Metis buffalo hunts on the Canadian prairies, crossed the continental divide twice on snowshoe, shot the rapids of the Columbia River, and canoed the Salish Sea with the natives of Vancouver Island, becoming a sideline witness to several historic battles and massacres along the way.

Following his epic journey across the continent and back, Kane was commissioned to render over a hundred and twenty of the field sketches he produced into oil paintings. In 1859, he included some of his masterpieces in his book ‘Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America’, a travel memoir based on his adventures in the Canadian wilds.

Of all of Kane’s many colourful experiences on the Canadian frontier, perhaps the strangest took place near the end of his return journey, when the Cree and Saulteaux Indians with whom the artist travelled performed the ritual of the Shaking Tent.

Kane described the event in his memoirs, recording that it took place on the night of July 24th, 1848, while he and his travelling companions were waiting out a storm on the shores of Lake Winnipeg.

“In the evening,” he wrote, “our Indians constructed a jonglerie, or medicine lodge, the main object of which was to procure a fair wind for next day. For this purpose they first drive ten or twelve poles, nine or ten feet long, into the ground, enclosing a circular area of about three feet in diameter, with a boat sail open at the top. The medicine-man, one of whom is generally found in every brigade, gets inside and commences shaking the poles violently, rattling his medicinal rattle, and singing hoarse incantations to the Great Spirit for a fair wind. Being unable to sleep on account of the discordant noises, I wrapped a blanket round me, and went out into the woods… and lay down amongst those on the outside of the medicine lodge, to witness the proceedings. I had no sooner done so than the incantations at once ceased, and the performer exclaimed that a white man was present. How he ascertained this fact I am at a loss to surmise, as it was pitch dark at the time, and he was enclosed in the narrow tent, without any apparent opening through which he could espy me, even had it been light enough to distinguish one person from another…

“After about two hours’ shaking and singing, the medicine-man cried out that he saw five boats with the sails set running before the wind, which communication was greeted by the whole party with their usual grunt of satisfaction and assent.

“After this, many questions were asked him by the Indians, some inquiring after the health of their families at home, whom they had not seen for many months. Upon putting the question, the inquirer threw a small piece of tobacco over the covering of the tent, upon which the medicine-man agitated the tent, and shook his rattle violently, and then replied that he saw one family enjoying themselves over a fat sturgeon, another engaged in some pleasing employment, &c. &c. I then put a question to him myself, accompanying it with a double portion of tobacco, for which I got a double portion of noise.” Kane asked about the fate of the souvenirs he had acquired throughout the course of his journey- artifacts like the trophy head of a buffalo bull he had shot, a bears’ claw necklace given to him by an Assiniboine chief, and a Flathead Indian skull he had stolen from a burial ground- which he had been obliged to entrust to a coureur. “The medicine man told me,” Kane wrote, “that he saw the party with my baggage encamped on a sandy point, which we had ourselves passed two days before.

“However singular the coincidence may appear, it is a fact, that on the next day we had a fair wind, for which the medicine-man of course took all the credit; and it is no less true, that the canoes with my baggage were on the sandy point on the day stated, for I inquired particularly of them when they came up to us.”

One of Kane’s companions on the last leg of his journey was an old Hudson’s Bay Company trader and Napoleonic War veteran named Major Donald McKenzie. The old engage, as HBC employees were sometimes called, had seen many strange things in the camps of the Indians throughout the course of his long service for the Company. He had attended many a Shaking Tent ceremony, and had heard some disturbing tales about the ritual from the French-Canadian voyageurs with whom he rubbed shoulders.

“The Major,” Kane wrote, “who, with many other intelligent persons, is a firm believer in [the Indians’] medicine, told me that a Canadian once had the temerity to peep under the covering which enclosed the jonglerie, but that he got such a fright that he never fairly recovered from it, nor could he ever be prevailed upon to tell what it was that had so appalled him.”

On the way to the Valley, Bishop Mountain came across the skeletal frames of old derelict Shaking Tents, which he described as being “formed of young saplings, or single branches stripped of the leaves and twigs, the whole encircled at intervals by bands or hoops of the same material, and covered with dressed kins, of considerable height; but only of a size to admit one man…”

During his stay in the Red River Valley, Bishop Mountain wrote three letters to the Church Mission Society in which he described the route to the region, the spiritual state of the Valley’s inhabitants, and the headway made by Anglican missionaries in their efforts to draw local natives into the fold of the Church of England. These letters were later compiled and published in London, England, under the title The Journal of the Bishop of Montreal During a Visit to the Church Missionary Society’s North-West America Mission.

 Although Bishop Mountain never had the opportunity of personally witnessing the Shaking Tent ceremony during his sojourn, he was informed of its particulars by two former Cree medicine men who had since converted to Anglicanism. In his third letter to the Church Mission Society, Mountain wrote that, according to his informants, the shamans who perform the ritual lie prostrate at the bottom of the tent with “their hands and feet tied by hard knots, which they contrive, by some trick, to disengage. While they are lying in the tent, it becomes violently agitated, the top swinging rapidly backward and forward in the view of the spectators on the outside, who also hear a variety of ‘strange sounds and voices, unlike the voice of man’”. With the help of the “aerial visitants” to whom these voices are attributed, the shaman is able to “learn news respecting persons and affairs at a great distance”, and to inflict “disease and death upon persons some hundred miles off, whether his own enemies or those of his neighbours who have recourse to his magical skill”. Although the medicine man will never dare to look directly at the roof of the tent during the ceremony, he can sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, glimpse tiny starlike orbs of light floating near the tent’s uppermost hoop.

In his book, Kohl explained the ritual of the Shaking Tent as it was described to him by a French-Canadian voyageur who had lived among the Ojibwa, and who was married to an Ojibwa woman. “The lodge which their jossakids, or prophets, or, as the Canadians term them, ‘jongleurs,’ erect for their incantations,” Kohl wrote, “is composed of stout posts, connected with basket-work, and covered with birch bark. It is tall and narrow, and resembles a chimney. It is very firmly built, and two men, even if exerting their utmost strength, would be unable to move, shake, or bend it. It is so narrow that a man who crawls in has but scanty space to move about in it.”

“Thirty years ago,” Kohl’s informant claimed, “I was present at the incantation and performance of a jossakid in one of these lodges. I saw the man creep into the hut, which was about ten feet high, after swallowing a mysterious potion made from a root. He immediately began singing and beating a drum in his basket-work chimney. The entire case began gradually trembling and shaking, and oscillating slowly amid great noise. The more the necromancer sang and drummed, the more violent the oscillations of the long case became. It bent back and forwards, up and down, like the mast of a vessel caught in a storm and tossed on the waves. I could not understand how these movements could be produced by a man inside, as we could not have caused them from the exterior.

“The drum ceased, and the jossakid yelled that ‘the spirits were coming over him.’ We then heard through the noise, and cracking, and oscillations of the hut, two voices speaking inside, one above, the other below. The lower one asked questions, which the upper one answered.

“Both voices seemed entirely different, and I believed I could explain them by very clever ventriloquism Some spiritualists among us, however, explained it through modern spiritualism…”

Roughly thirty years after the incident, not long before Kohl’s trip to Lake Superior, the voyageur found the jossakid on his deathbed. In his old age, the medicine man had renounced the pagan rites of his ancestors and resolved to die a Christian. Hoping to take advantage of this singular situation, Kohl’s informant asked the old Indian how he had managed to make the tent shake and produce the unearthly voices on that strange night thirty years prior. “Now is the time to confess all truthfully,” he said. “Tell me, then, how and through what means thou didst decieve us?”

“I know it,” the old Indian replied. “I have become a Christian, I am old, I am sick, I cannot live much longer, and I can do no other than speak the truth. Believe me, I did not decieve you at that time. I did not move the lodge. It was shaken by the power of the spirits. Nor did I speak with a double tongue. I only repeated to you what the spirits told me. I heard their voices. The top of the lodge was full of them, and before me the sky and wide lands lay expanded. I could see a great distance around me, and believeed I could recognize the most distant objects.”

“The old dying jossakid said this with such an expression of simple truth and firm conviction,” the voyageur told Kohl, “that it seemed, to me, at least, that he did not consider himself a deceiver, and believed in the efficacy of his magic arts and the reality of his visions.”

Although the Hudson’s Bay Company nominally held sway over Rupert’s Land- a territory named after its first benefactor, Prince Rupert of the Rhine- the prairies, badlands, and sandhills between the North Saskatchewan River and the American border were, in reality, dominated by two rival Indian alliances: the Blackfoot Confederacy and the Iron Confederacy.

The Blackfoot, whom several 19th Century writers designated the most warlike tribe on the northern half of the continent, were composed of four nations united by blood ties and a common language: the Siksika, the Blood, the Northern Peigan, and the Southern Piegan. The Iron Confederacy, on the other hand, was an alliance composed of the unrelated Plains Cree, Assiniboine, Saulteaux, and Stoney- long-time trading partners of the Hudson’s Bay Company who served as middlemen in the fur trade.

Macdonald knew that the Dominion of Canada had neither the men nor the resources to tame Rupert’s Land by force, as the U.S. Army was attempting to do in the American West. If it hoped to put an end to the roving, thievery, and violence that characterized life on the Canadian plains and produce in them an environment hospitable to the construction of a railroad, it would need to foster law and order on the plains in a firm yet tactful manner, through the use of a mounted police force.

Ever conscious of his meagre budget, Prime Minister Macdonald delayed the formation of such a police force throughout his entire first term. In early 1870, he began receiving disturbing reports from Hudson’s Bay Company officers and his own federal agents that American traders were beginning to establish heavily-fortified trading posts on Canadian soil, in the region through which he hoped to build his railroad. Having taken advantage of a loophole in American law, these businessmen were selling rotgut whisky to the Canadian Indians in exchange for buffalo robes, rapidly depressing the once-powerful Blackfoot and Iron Confederacies into nations of starvelings and alcoholics. Macdonald realized that he would need to act quickly to establish Canadian sovereignty in the region if he hoped to keep it from being annexed by the land-hungry United States, which was constantly expanding its frontiers in accordance with the concept of Manifest Destiny. Still, he prolonged the inevitable.

In 1873, after learning of the whisky-fuelled Cypress Hills Massacre, Macdonald knew that he could delay no longer. With the help of Canadian Parliament, he approved the formation of a 300-man force of mounted policemen that year. After a winter of relentless drilling, this force, styled the North-West Mounted Police, made a gruelling trek from Manitoba across the Canadian prairies to what is now southwest Alberta. From Fort Macleod, their first permanent headquarters on the banks of the Oldman River, these Mounties brought a peaceful end to the whisky trade, engratiated themselves with the local Blackfoot, and successfully established law and order on the Canadian plains.

Among the first officers of the North-West Mounted Police was an Englishman named Cecil Edward Denny. Born into a family of old aristocratic stock, Denny had immigrated to the United States at the age of 19 in search of adventure. He relocated to Canada in 1874, joined the North-West Mounted Police as a constable, and quickly climbed the rungs of the para-martial ladder until he obtained the rank of Sub-Inspector. He participated in the Long March west across the prairies, assisted in the establishment of Fort Macleod, and oversaw the construction of what would become Fort Calgary. In 1877, he attended the Treaty 7 negotiations at Blackfoot Crossing, and played a key role in settling the various Blackfoot nations onto reserves in the aftermath of that conference.

In his writings, Denny reported having several extraordinary experiences during his years on the Canadian plains, claiming to have seen the ghostly apparition of a Cree village whose inhabitants were massacred by the Blackfoot long ago, and to have witnessed many inexplicable feats performed by Blackfoot medicine men.

One of the strangest of Denny’s experiences took place on a moonlit night in the summer of 1879, on the banks of the Red Deer River in what is now central Alberta. That evening, the Mountie pitched his tent near a Blackfoot Indian camp and decided to pay a visit to the band’s medicine man. Accompanied by his interpreter, Billy Gladstone- an American carpenter who had worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, American whisky traders, and the North-West Mounted Police- Denny walked along the riverbank to the medicine man’s teepee, which was pitched a short distance from the main camp. He described what happened next in his article Blackfoot Magic, which was published posthumously in the September 1944 issue of the magazine The Beaver, writing the following: “We entered the lodge, which had only a small fire burning in the centre. The medicine man was sitting wrapped in his buffalo robe at the head of the teepee, smoking one of their long medicine pipes. He paid no attention to us whatever. I therefore sat down near him, lighting my own pipe and, placing a present of two plugs of tobacco near him, proceeded to smoke quietly, without a sign of recognition being made by the Indian.

“Everything was very still in the lodge, while outside in the main camp drums could be heard beating in different parts, wherever dances were being held. We had sat this way for quite a time, when I was startled by the sound of a bell ringing above me, over the top of the lodge. I could see nothing, and the Indian made no move. Presently the teepee itself began to rock, even lifting off the ground a foot or more behind me. When it is remembered that a large Indian tent consists of dozens of long poles crossed at the top, wide apart at the bottom, and covered with buffalo hides, it will seem that it is nearly impossible to lift one side, for no wind can blow them over.

“The rocking motion ceased after a while, and I went outside the lodge to see if anyone had been playing tricks; but not a human being was in sight near us, the moon was clear, and you could see a long distance. On returning and resuming my seat after a short interval, the tent again began to rock, and so violently that it would sometimes lift several feet on one side, so that you could plainly see outside. My interpreter was thoroughly frightened by this time, and I was not much better, but the Indian never stirred. However we had seen enough and left, returning to our camp thoroughly mystified.”

In 1881, the first ties of the great trans-continental railroad envisioned by Sir John A. Macdonald were laid at the town of Bonfield, Ontario. Four years later, the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway was hammered home at Craigellachie, British Columbia, ushering in a new era of settlement in Western Canada. Following the subsequent influx of homesteaders into the so-called ‘Last Best West’, the Canadian government banned many traditional First Nations ceremonies, from the Sun Dance of the Blackfoot to the Potlatch of the Coast Salish, in an effort to assimilate the country’s indigenous peoples into the Euro-Canadian culture that was sweeping across the continent, rapidly displacing that of their ancestors.

Despite the best efforts of the Canadian government, the Shaking Tent ceremony continued to be practiced on the fringes of settler society, in the wilder reaches of the Canadian frontier, well into the 20th Century. In July 1929, for example, this necromantic rite was performed by an Ojibwa shaman near the Whitesands First Nations Reserve just northwest of Ontario’s Lake Nipigon. A.G. Black, the manager of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s proximate trading post, Nipigon House, described the event in an article for the December 1934 issue of the magazine The Beaver, entitled ‘Shaking the Wigwam’.

That day, Black and his fellow traders set up camp near the Whitesands Reserve and unpacked their wares. They had timed their visit so that it coincided with that of the band’s Indian agent, knowing that the local Ojibwa would be eager to spend their newly-delivered treaty money on ammunition, groceries, calico, and other HBC goods.

After a busy day of trading, the traders decided to pay a visit to the band’s medicine man, a shriveled old shaman named August, and see if he would perform the old Shaking Tent ceremony for them. In lieu of the traditional payment of tobacco, the traders presented the conjuror with $15, equivalent to about $220 Canadian ($160 USD) today. The fee was sufficient, and the band members, at August’s request, eagerly set about collecting the requisite materials for the ancient ritual.

“Before dusk,” Black wrote, “two Indian lads went to the bush to get the necessary willow poles, which were driven fast into the ground and fastened with two willow hoops, one in the centre and the other tapering the poles at the top. The poles were tested by nearly all present, and were found immovable. A can of shot was tired to the top of the poles, and the birch bark was then fastened on to the outside to complete the construction.

“As it darkened and the moon came up, the Indians squatted in a circle around the wigwam at a distance of four or six feet from it. A small opening was made in the wigwam for the Indian to crawl in, and closed immediately on his entrance. The wigwam commenced to shake as soon as the Indian disappeared, and the can of shot began to rattle.”

The old medicine man broke into eerie tune which sent shivers through the onlookers. Immediately, as if prompted by the music, the structure began to shake. The shaking and singing continued for nearly half an hour, when suddenly, a strange voice was heard at the top of the wigwam. The medicine man replied to the unintelligible utterance, his voice sounding from the base of the tent. “The voices,” Black wrote, “were decidedly different.”

After conversing with the strange voice for some time, August told the native onlookers that they were welcome to ask any questions they pleased. The old medicine man was subsequently bombarded with all sorts of queries, most of them pertaining to fishing and trapping, which he answered one by one, always first consulting with the strange voice.

“When the natives’ questions become fewer,” Black wrote, “August said he would be glad to answer any questions asked by the white onlookers. At the suggestions of the others, I asked ‘May we hold the wigwam while it is shaking?’ A rapid talk by August commenced in the wigwam and I could feel an unpleasantness among the Indians about me. Although I could not understand their language at the time, I sensed something was wrong, and I was told that August had said that if the white people interfered with the motion of the wigwam he would make such a big wind it would blow people and houses into the lake.” In order to avoid trouble with the medicine man, Black recanted his question.

August then announced that he would summon the spirit of a bear into the structure, and fight it. “The fight began,” Black wrote, “and this is where I received my greatest surprise. The Indians seated around yelled to August ‘an-ahuck’ (get stronger). The top of the wigwam bent until it nearly touched the ground during the fight.” Eventually, the shaman killed the spirit bear, and repeated a similar performance with the spirit of a lynx.

At dawn, the shaking stopped, and August emerged from the structure. The medicine man’s face was covered with beads of sweat, which seemed to Black more accordant with the sort of perspiration one would exude as a result of being enclosed in a birch bark wigwam all night long than the product of several hours of intense physical exertion. “The bark was immediately removed from the wigwam,” he wrote, “and we examined the poles and were surprised to find them as solid as they had been at first.”

Black finished his article by stating, “I have been informed, although I have not witnessed it, that August can make a teepee shake by merely throwing his hat into it. I hope some day to see him to this!”

Stanley Krippner discusses the common features that he has observed in his studies of shamans around the world. He describes their rituals in terms of drumming, dancing, sensory deprivation, drugs, diet, and dreaming. He notes that shamans often invoke the “trickster” archetype, but that this should not be taken to imply that they are necessarily fraudulent. Shamans receive that designation from their community; and they work in the service of that community. A self-appointed healer, therefore, is not a shaman. However, all shamans are healers.

Stanley Krippner, PhD, professor of psychology at Saybrook University, is a Fellow in five APA divisions, and past-president of two divisions (30 and 32). Formerly, he was director of the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Laboratory, in Brooklyn NY. He is co-author of Demystifying Shamans and Their World, The Voice of Rolling Thunder: A Medicine Man’s Wisdom for Walking the Red Road, Dream Telepathy, Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them, The Mythic Path, and Haunted by Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans, and co-editor of Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential or Human Illusion, Healing Tales, Healing Stories, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, Advances in Parapsychological Research and many other books. He is a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and has published cross-cultural studies on spiritual content in dreams.

Published on Sep 1, 2016